Tom Brokaw recounts in his superb book, The Greatest Generation, a story his mother told him of the day Gordon Larsen came into the post office where she worked. Larsen was usually a genial and popular member of their community, but that day he had stopped in to complain about the rowdiness of the teenagers on Halloween the night before.
Brokaw’s mother was surprised at his tone and asked him in good humor, “Oh Gordon, what were you doing when you were 17?”
Gordon had looked at her squarely in the eye and replied, “I was landing at Guadalcanal.” He then turned and left the post office.
How many men and women, who walk among us, now in their eighties and nineties, can say “I was at Normandy” or “I was in the first wave at Iwo Jima”? Brokaw’s book has helped us to recognize the valor and sacrifice of these veterans of a war unlike any previous war or any since.
It was a generation united by a common purpose and also by common values – duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself.
In this issue we salute all of these valiant warriors with the abbreviated recollection of a few.
Michael Banik, Machinist Mate (MM2c), US Navy
As soon as Michael Banik, now a resident of Magnolia Glen in Raleigh, graduated from Tilden Technical School in Chicago IL, he followed President Roosevelt’s call to volunteer for WWII. Joining the Navy, he trained as a Machinist Mate (MM2c) in North Dakota, and then traveled to Washington State where his ship, the USS New Mexico, and it’s crew departed to join the WWII war efforts. It was a historic ship, noteworthy as the first ship of any nation to be electronically propelled. It was commissioned in 1914 and retrofitted specifically for WW II.
“We sailed as an escort to transport the troops to the Fijis, then patrolled the southwest Pacific before returning to harbor to prepare for the campaign against the Japanese in the Aleutians,” Banik says during an interview in his Raleigh home at Magnolia Glen. “The President wanted to use our battleship to get the Japs out of Alaska so we did.” They blockaded Attu, then joined in the massive bombardment of Kiska that forced its evacuation a week later.
Next came the assault on the Gilbert Islands and then “We bombarded Tinian and Saipan”. During the invasion of Luzon, they fought under a sky full of would-be suicide planes, one of which took a kamikaze hit on the bridge which killed 29 members of the crew and British Lieutenant General Herbert Lumsden, Winston Churchill’s personal military representative to General MacArthur.
The war’s end brought an unexpected reunion with his brother whom he had not seen since joining the Navy. “It was wonderful. We were eating ice cream on his cargo ship when we got the news the war had ended.” Michael Banik and his three brothers all served in the military during WW II and all came home. Today at 88 years of age, he recently enjoyed the Honors Flight to Washington DC and a visit to the WW II memorial.