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.
First Lieutenant John Koehne, Pilot
Pilot John Koehne’s B-17 lost an engine, caught fire from anti-aircraft flak, and crashed in the Lower Alps. His plane was one of 480 bombers on an ultra-secret mission to Breslau to bomb Germany’s largest ballbearing factory. He lost an engine so had to drop out of formation. He dropped his bomb load, and while fighting off seven German fighters, the plane went out of control into a spin. Ordering the crew to bail out, he was harnessing the parachute under his seat when he saw flames shooting from the rear of the plane. All men having cleared the plane, Koehne jumped, landing amazingly uninjured in a field in Austria. Two women with pitchforks watched from the next field as he ran toward a haystack to hide as a carful of German soldiers drove by. The women stopped them, pointing toward Koehne. As he was being arrested, the women approached, shaking a fist angrily. “Why you Americans from New York bombing us?” they cried. Following several days of questioning (he gave only his name, rank and serial number), he was joined by some of his crew for transport by box car to Stalag Luft 1, north of Berlin.
American officers did not suffer the horrors of the holocaust camps, and the scarcity of food was relieved when CARE packages began to arrive with meat, cheese, chocolate, crackers and cigarettes. “Those of us who didn’t smoke traded our cigarettes for a shortwave radio which carried BBC news. We circulated daily bulletins, dubbed PowWow, throughout the camp to keep us informed of the progress of the war, which was very different from the German reports.”
In spring of 1945, the atmosphere in the camp began to change as the Germans prepared to evacuate.” We were fearful when we found out we would be liberated by the Russians instead of the British. We didn’t know what to expect.”