Generation Forged by War Still Remembers

WASHINGTON —  Stephen Cluskey Cromwell, a 20-year-old pharmacist’s mate, was a corpsman on the main deck of the battleship Missouri. It was about 2 p.m. on April 11, 1945, in the early days of the battle of Okinawa, when a Japanese kamikaze plane smashed into the deck above him and the upper half of the pilot’s body landed 30 feet from Cromwell’s post.

Unnerved, the corpsman turned to the captain and asked what to do about the body. Preserve it, he was told, for a Christian burial at sea, with Taps. Even in the frenzy of a battle that would claim 12,000 American and 100,000 Japanese lives, the young sailor came to understand, the dignity of human life should be preserved.

Now, nearly 60 years later, Dr. Stephen Cromwell, of Rockville, Md., is one of 800,000 people expected in Washington on Saturday for the dedication of the long-awaited National World War II Memorial.

They are the survivors or surrogates for the 16 million Americans who served in the war, the 400,000 who died and the millions of civilians who worked in factories, served as air-raid wardens and grew victory gardens at home.

They will come to collect the public thanks of a nation they fundamentally refashioned -- the last hurrah for a generation that defeated tyranny and then created a superpower.

They are also coming to deposit their stories of war and sacrifice, to explain their war to a country in which most citizens have no memory of it, and little understanding of why it stands apart -- in both the scale of the suffering and the example of what unparalleled unity could produce.

“This was the most seminal event of the 20th century,” said Martha Putney, a retired historian who was one of the first African American women commissioned as an officer in the Army. “It changed a lot of things.”

Not least, the role of women in American society. When she went in, Putney was assigned to do “the Army’s paperwork” at Ft. Des Moines, Iowa. When the war ended, she became one of 8 million veterans who used the GI Bill to go to college, fundamentally altering their lives and the nation’s view of higher education.

Putney earned a doctorate in history at Bowie State University in Maryland, where she went on to teach for 25 years. Cromwell used the GI Bill to go to medical school.

As they record their stories, the details remain remarkably sharp, though most veterans are in their 70s and 80s now, many with hearing aids or canes.

For Dorothy Davis, a nurse from Rockville, Md., who tended the wounded at the Battle of the Bulge where nearly 20,000 Americans died, it was the “terrible cold snow” and the sawhorses that turned stretchers into operating tables.

For Arthur Rittenburg, of Piermont, N.Y., it was the primitive radio equipment at Iwo Jima, and the Navajo Code Talkers who transmitted messages in a language the enemy could not decipher.

And for Virginia resident Robert Tomkinson, raised in Clinton, S.C., wounded soon after D-day and again during the Battle of the Bulge and returned to action both times, it was glimpsing a cathedral spire outside Cologne as a German machine gun nest opened up and “knowing” he would survive, he said.

Such raw memories will be on display this weekend as Washington readies for a four-day Memorial Day weekend “Tribute to a Generation.”

The Library of Congress will collect stories for its oral history project. The Smithsonian Institution will provide lectures on some of the unexpected contributions of Americans in World War II -- among them the Japanese Americans who served as intelligence agents, and the Tuskegee Airmen, black aviators who flew combat missions.

The stories are, in microcosm, the stories of what the United States had been, and what it would become.

But not everyone with a story to tell will make it to Washington this weekend. Some who planned to attend but died in recent weeks will be represented by their families. Others will watch from afar, and remember. Harold Weintraub, of Evanston, Ill., is one of those.

Weintraub enlisted in the Army one month before Pearl Harbor in 1941 with dreams of flying. When he washed out of pilot training at Randolph Field in Texas, he wrote his parents that he might join the Canadian Air Force, which conveniently maintained a recruiting office at a hotel in San Antonio.

Back in South Haven, Mich., his parents “had a fit.” Immigrants from Romania, they wanted their son in an American uniform.

So Weintraub trained as a navigator. He was assigned to the 100th Bomb Group, which flew B-17s from England. On his 10th mission, his plane was hit and the crew bailed out over northern Italy. Weintraub ended up in an Italian POW camp, bunking with a group of British officers.

“They were the type of English officer you see in the motion pictures,” Weintraub said from his home in the northern Chicago suburb. “Many of them were well over 6 feet tall, graduates of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, many from wealthy families.”

They were also adept at trading their food parcels from home for fruits and vegetables from the Italians.

But when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was overthrown in 1943, the Germans “put us on box cars to ship us up to Germany.” There, Weintraub’s dog tags, which included the letter “H” for Hebrew because he was Jewish, would pose a special danger. He and John Williams, the co-pilot of his crew, decided to try to escape.

“Somebody had pliers or cutters that he loaned us and we cut the barbed wire from the freight car,” Weintraub recalled.

They jumped, evading the notice of German guards atop each car. Lying quietly in the rain until they could no longer hear the train, the two took shelter under a tree and spent “a wet and miserable night.”

The next day, a boy gave them water and brought a group of adult resistance fighters, who hid the airmen. As the Allied offensive pressed north from Anzio, however, German troops flooded into the area where Weintraub and the co-pilot were being hidden and they were caught.

“When I was recaptured, the Germans got a little rough,” he recalled. Though he never gave more than name, rank and serial number, “they beat me up a little. I was in civilian clothes, from the partisans, because my uniform had been all ripped up. The only thing on me to show who I was was my dog tags.”

When the Germans saw the “H” on Weintraub’s tags -- the Army then regularly stamped a man’s religion on his tags -- they said, “We could shoot you for being a spy.” A guard with a pistol hit him. Weintraub said he asked, “Is this how you treat an American POW?”

The German replied, “You’re not a POW, you’re a Jew.”

Weintraub spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft 3, later portrayed in the Steve McQueen film, “The Great Escape.” Finally, he was liberated by Americans.

“We ran up to the tanks,” he said. “The guys opened the doors and waved to us. Later on they brought us some food, but told us not to eat too much. We were so hungry. Empty stomachs can’t take that much food.”

He had married just before he went overseas. When his plane went down, his wife, Bess, working at Montgomery Ward, got a telegram saying that Harold was missing in action. Later came another telegram, saying he was a prisoner of war.

“I always had faith,” she recalled, 60 years later. “Harold told me before he left that he would be back. He promised.”

After the war, Weintraub got his college degree on the GI Bill, served in the Korean War and then became a personnel officer for the U.S. Customs Service.

But he will not be in Washington for the dedication of the memorial to his generation. Bess has lost her vision.

“It’s difficult for me to get away,” he said.