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	Home Books Events Reader Stories Writing Workshops Bio Contact Links © 2008 Teresa Funke			Reader Stories Virginia Lee Cox, Colorado Category: Poem "Looking Back on It (WWII)" Times were tough back then When most of our guys were gone. Just old men and young boys were here So we gals put the overalls on. There was work to be done, so we did it. It was just as simple as could be. In dealing with worry – we hid it, Hoping that no one could see. Worry was inevitable. We knew it was always there For our sons, and brothers, And husbands and others. The best way to stop it Was to melt it into prayer. We could not condone self pity. We knew we had to be strong In mind and body: And we must stay alert, Or we would not last very long. We all tried to encourage each other. We had to keep our spirits high. We joked and laughed but were always aware That some of our guys would die. Most of us were waiting wives, Working and praying as we waited. The motto and mantra of our lives For us was strongly stated. Paste a smile on your face! Don’t let the world see you cry! Keep that smile in place! And keep your powder dry! In the old wild west the dry powder In the guns they used found its places. But the powder we strove to keep dry Was the powder we wore on our faces. top of page Jack Duncan dryfrog@npgcable.com Category: Military Service     I was either about to graduate - or maybe I was waiting to ship out - from the Motor Torpedo Boats Squadrons Training Center in Melville, R.I. when for reasons long forgotten, I decided to go visit my ex-brother-in-law down in Brooklyn. This was in 1943. He was in the twilight years of a long career in professional baseball. You may have heard of Frenchy Bordagaray.     Frenchy was playing for the Dodgers in a home game at Ebbets Field and one of the skippers of a new PT boat said I could ride down with them to the Brooklyn Navy yard as they headed for the South Pacific.     As the boat was in the East River approaching Brooklyn, someone told me to take the wheel. Could a teenaged torpedoman third class resist? Did I feel proud driving that "80-feet of fighting fury" with all the girls lined up on the banks waving at the crew lined up at the rail?     But I had to steer around all the flotsam and jetsam in the water so I couldn't look at the girls - I'd been snookered!     We docked and I went over to Ebbets Field to meet Frenchy, who escorted me into the club house and then let me watch the game from the dugout. In the stands right above the dugout was a guy to whom Frenchy introduced me. He was the "Big Gun." Babe Ruth himself!     So, when I returned to Melville by train, do you think the guys believed me? top of page Jack Duncan dryfrog@npgcable.com Category: Military Service     This is a tale from Stirling Island in what is now Papua New Guinea. Food was scarce and monotonous as our little, green "plywood" warships (overgrown speedboats) tied up to the trees in the inlet. We were to rest there, rearm and refuel before going out to beard the Japanese in their own lairs. The trees provided cover from the constant air raids.     We were all in danger of contracting scurvy with the shortage of nourishing food, so the cook decided to build us a stew. We had a couple of .22 rifles, and cockatoos lived in the trees we were hiding under. "Parrot stew" it would be then, so a couple of us begin "harvesting" the birds. We added withered veggies begged from a nearby seaplane tender and we kids had a feast. The beautiful birds filled our empty bellies and we got a respite from "corned willy," "meat and vegetable stew ration" and a horrible-tasting substitute for Vienna sausage.     Later, our diet became largely coconut. Ripe coconut; green coconut; overripe coconuts. We didn't know that shark was delicious and even octopus tastes great. We thought most of the ocean's denizens were poisonous! The Navy always provided canned grapefruit juice we were forced to drink to prevent scurvy. If they could get that vile stuff to us, why didn't we get better food?     To this day, I eat no grapefruit or coconut. Now, I haven't tried parrot stew of late. top of page Carolyn Conarroe Longmont, CO c.conarroe@comcast.net Category: Working Women     Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is near the small town of New Carlisle, Ohio, where I lived. In the summer of 1944, when I was between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked in Materiel Headquarters on Patterson Field. I was a typist and there were letters and reports to be sent to Supply Depots around the country. These documents had multiple carbon copies and the fewer the errors the fewer carbons to correct. I learned quickly.     Supply Depots, which reported to Headquarters, kept inventories of equipment and supplies vital to the Air Force, from plane repair parts, items of clothing for the airmen, and equipment for fighting the war, down to nuts and bolts. Patterson Field had a record of every item in the inventory and our office managed records and correspondence about those records. It was a routine job but necessary for the war effort and I was pleased to be able to have the job.     Two airmen who had returned from their deployment were assigned to our office while waiting for discharge papers from the service. Eventually one of them asked me for a date. Of course I said I would have to ask my mother. Somehow that date was never worked out. Before long they were out of the service and headed for home and I was back in high school. top of page Carolyn Conarroe Longmont, CO c.conarroe@comcast.net Category: Home Front     A group of ladies in my church in New Carlisle, Ohio, provided a meal every so often to crews of young airmen who landed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base during World War II. The call would come to report to the base with meals for a crew and my aunt and the committee would swing into action. Ham loaf was the customary meat and that recipe is legendary. The crews seemed to be there short term and soon a new crew needed the home cooked meal, and the ham loaf, from the church ladies.     Recently, a friend was telling us about his service in WWII as a bombardier. I mentioned Dayton and my work experience at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.     Our friend said he had spent time there. His last assignment before his plane and crew left for England had been to Wright-Patterson to pick up a secret weapon, the Norden bombsight. After two weeks training, they moved on to their assigned base in England. And a new crew came in.     The precision bombsight turned a bombing mission into targeted bombing, not a near-miss on a factory site. The new weapon was to be protected and in case of a crash landing the bombsight, above all, was to be destroyed and not be allowed to get into enemy hands.     I don't know if the women of the church knew what the crews were up to but they did know they were preparing a taste of home for some of the war's heroes. My friend's crew might have been one of their groups of heroes. top of page Victoria Fort Collins, CO Category: Military Service     Dad turned 18 in 1942. He volunteered for the U.S. Air Force and learned to fly B-17 bombers. On his 19th birthday he landed in Africa on his way to Italy to fly combat missions over Germany.     At first, combat pilots were required to fly 25 missions. The probability of surviving 25 missions was less than 50% because the planes had to dodge so much anti-aircraft fire. On their way back to base after completing their 25th mission, they cheered. Then they were told the limit had been raised to 35 missions.     On their 34th mission they were shot down in Austria. An 88mm shell exploded close to the cockpit and pieces of the shell went into Dad's legs. Everyone bailed out of the fiery wreckage. As the pilot, Dad steadied the plane while the others jumped. Dad managed to pull his rip cord just before he blacked out from pain. He landed in a field. He was immediately captured because the field was part of a farm worked by prisoners of war and surrounded by Nazi guards. While on crutches he was sent to a different camp. On the way there the train carrying him was bombed by his own buddies who thought it was a Nazi supply train. Everyone had to get out of the train and into a ditch.     Dad spent a little over 60 days as a POW before being liberated by Patton's army. He had lost more than thirty pounds. His telegram to his parents—who didn't know if he was alive or dead—said: COMING HOME FOR STRAWBERRY PIE. top of page Kate Fort Collins, CO Category: Being a Child During WWII     A home-front memory I have is going to visit my cousin at Horseneck Beach, Westport, Massachusetts, during the war, when I was seven. While my mother visited with her mother, my thirty-year-old cousin took me out on the beach. It was a cold, windy day and we were looking for sand dollars and anything thing else we could find. I remember there were lots of things washed up as no one was clearing the beach at that time of year. There were also tire tracks running parallel to the water. Blackberry Point, about a mile away, was a military installation. While we walked, a jeep came by on patrol. They were going up and down the beach several times a day looking for evidence of saboteurs landing on the beach after swimming from submarines. top of page Debby Fort Collins, CO Category: Holocaust     The first time I remember hearing anything about WWII was when I was five years old and was grasping the concept of relatives and extended families. I'd just learned that even grandparents had parents. "Where are my great-grandparents?" I asked my mother.     "Hitler got them," she said simply.     That's how I first learned who Hitler was, along with the word "genocide" and the concept of "evil." My mother's simplicity was so final it frightened me.     My mother was also five years old in her clearest memory of WWII. When the news of Hitler's death came in over the radio she was bouncing a ball outside her apartment building in the New Jersey town where her Jewish immigrant parents had sought refuge two decades earlier from the pograms in Poland. "Hooray!" she squealed, "Hitler's dead!" She threw the ball up in the air.     In her memory, her father catches the ball and stands above her, short but imposing, with a solemn look that puzzles her. "Aren't you happy?"     "We must never celebrate the death of another human being," he explains. "We can be glad that suffering may lessen, but we must never be happy because a person dies."     "Not even Hitler?" By then, when contact with the Polish Bermans had been cut off for years, the American Bermans assumed the worst.     "Not even Hitler."     My mother passed on this story to me—and repeated it often in my childhood—as an illustration of what kind of man her father was, and more importantly of what it meant to live by your Jewish values. If the phrase "Hitler got them" summarizes the effect of the war on my extended Jewish family, the phrase "Not even Hitler" encapsulates the legacy of Jewish humanism that we were supposed to carry on in the U.S. top of page Linda Fort Collins, CO Category: Working Women     I phone my eighty-eight-year-old mother most weekends and journal her memories for my family and my writing.     Recently she said, "I saw a news program about some women taken up in airplanes they'd worked on during World War II. I didn't know those women were called 'Rosie the Riveter.'"     Her memories began to surface and she told me the "rest of the story."     My father enlisted in the army when I was about four. He left us in Chicago and trained at Fort Knox. Even though my twenty-three-year-old mother had little education and no work experience she decided to help in the war effort. She left me with my grandfather and rode a bus to Douglas Aircraft every day for about eight months.     In one job she washed motor parts before they were assembled. Eventually, she trained to be a riveter.     Training taught her to handle metal, riveters, drills and welders. To demonstrate her abilities, she was required to choose and complete a project. She fashioned a ring for my father out of propeller metal.     Once trained, she and a partner helped assemble war planes—B29 and B24 bombers. First, she worked as the riveter from the outside while the other woman worked on the inside capping the rivet end. Occasionally, she traded places. She and her partner tapped a code on the plane's metal side to communicate what needed to be done.     At the end of her story, she exclaimed, "I guess I was a 'Rosie the Riveter.'" top of page Colonel Clyde Myers Fort Collins, CO Category: Military Service     I volunteered in 1941 at the age of 23 for duty for one year, but after Pearl Harbor all military personnel were committed indefinitely. My first assignment was in combat intelligence, but later I was transferred to the signal corp in Fort Monmouth, N.J. After graduating as a second lieutenant, I was assigned to a "Signal Pigeon Company" that was responsible for training homing pigeons to fly messages. Our "Signal Pigeon Company" travelled by ship from California to Calcutta, India, a trip through the South Pacific to avoid Japanese submarines. From Calcutta, our company moved to Burma where our pigeons were used to fly messages pertaining to the war against Japan. The pigeons were carried to the front lines then released with messages to fly back to their lofts at our encampment. Upon departing from Burma, we left many of the pigeons with missionaries who used them to carry messages. In certain areas, it was their only form of communication. When I returned to the United States, I left the service and worked for Swift and Company, a hatchery in Sedalia, Missouri. I was shortly recalled to active duty. After serving several more years, I was separated from the service to work for Sears, Roebuck and Company, only to be recalled again in the early 1950s. By the time I retired from the service, I had spent 29 years on active duty and had been promoted to a colonel. top of page				Send me your WWII stories! Please help me capture the stories of WWII before it's too late. In 250 words or less, tell me a story or anecdote or memory from the WWII era. It can be your own story or a story you've heard told about a friend or relative. Write it as best you can, but don't fret about grammar or punctuation. This is not a writing contest, it's a chance to share precious memories. Please use appropriate language. Children will be reading. If your story goes longer than 250 words, consider breaking it into two accounts. Please email me the story with the following information: Your First Name: Your Last Name (optional): Your City: Your E-mail Address (optional if you want readers to contact you): The Category for Your Story: You can choose between any of the categories mentioned below. If your story does not fit in any of these categories, please choose "Other." Hearing About Pearl Harbor Military Service (Yours or a Loved One's) Volunteer Work Working Women Home-Front Memories (rationing, war bond drives, Victory Gardens, blackouts, etc.) Wartime Entertainment Being a Child During WWII Holocaust When the War Ended Thoughts on This Generation Other