Dick Gerhardt has a sword his great grandfather carried in the Civil War, but he knows nothing about his ancestor’s service, and the sword can’t talk. State and national archives might help him piece together some of the picture—the regiment, the battles, the dates—but much would be missing. Did his great grandfather volunteer to preserve the Union? Was he looking for adventure and a way off the farm in Indiana? Did he write to his family? Did he, years later, sit in the evenings by some hearth, the sheathed sword across his old legs, and let the story unfold? Did he come home whole, or did he leave a part of himself—body or spirit—on some campaign trail?
Gerhardt knows none of these things, because no one in the family wrote anything down, and there is no oral history. Still, it took him 40 years to decide to write about his own service in World War II. He wrote not because he did anything he considered heroic, but to create some record in case one of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren might some day wonder about the family’s connection to the most terrible war of the 20th century. He did it so some future descendant wouldn’t be left as he was, holding an artifact that had no story attached.
Marcus Heim kept his secrets for nearly 50 years, until he was invited to a local school to talk about D-Day. Maybe enough time had passed. Maybe the sight of all those young faces reminded him of an earlier generation that had once been innocent, too. Or maybe it was simply because someone finally asked him.
He told the youngsters about his first 24 hours of combat, about the German infantrymen trying to kill him, about fumbling bazooka rounds into the back of the launcher as German panzers—guns belching fire and steel—raced toward him and the gunner, about the boys who would never come home.
Jack Bradley, who helped raise the flag on Mount Suribachi, never told his family that he had earned the Navy Cross on Iwo Jima for his courage in treating wounded Marines under fire. It was up to his son to follow the paper trail, to record the stories of the men in the most famous photograph of World War II.
Tell Us
A respected military historian examines the reticence of World War II veterans in the hope that more will tell their stories before it’s too late. Here, Arthur Forcier, Hawaii’s State Commander of the Disabled American Veterans, salutes the national ensign during ceremonies commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
By Ed Ruggero