The boys from New Jersey 9781412025928, 1412025923

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TOM KINDRE

93 The Boys =» From New Jerse \

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The Boys From New Jersey Tom Kindre

TRAFFORD PUBLISHING Victoria, BC, Canada

CO.

© Copyright 2004 Tom Kindre. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author. Printed in Victoria, Canada

Note for Librarians: a cataloguing record for this book that includes Dewey Classification and US Library of Congress numbers is available from the National Library of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can

be obtained from the National Library’s online database at: www.nlc-bne.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN 1-4120-2592-3

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Dedicated

to the memory of the

236 Rutgers men

who gave their lives in World War II. Their stories, unlike ours,

will never be told

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not have been possible without the commitment of the hundreds of men and women

who, late in life, took the time and mus-

tered the courage to tell their wartime stories. Many of those stories had been locked away and were only fully revealed to the tellers with the telling. For some the exercise proved cathartic, and for most it has added a new dimension to their lives, giving families and the historical record a treasure

that would otherwise have been lost. I am also deeply indebted to Sandra Stewart Holyoak, Director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, and her assistant, Shaun Illingworth, for their devoted help with photos, suggestions and fact checking; Professor John Whiteclay Chambers II of the Rutgers History Department, who championed the Oral Archives Project from its beginning; Kurt Piehler, the Project’s founding director, who got things up and running; Thomas Frusciano, Rutgers University Archivist, for his never-failing advice and counsel; Rutgers University, which granted permission to use the material in book form; the dozens of Rutgers student interns who participated in the interviewing process and my wife Marie, whose tireless proofreading and helpful insights made the task lighter.

AUTHOR/EDITOR’S NOTE This work is based on the interview transcripts on the web site (oralhistory.rutgers.edu) of the Rutgers Oral History Archives at the time of publication, and I alone am responsible for the choices that resulted in this compilation (List of interviewees P 323). In working with the transcript excerpts, I have edited out repetitive phrases, the stammerings and backtrackings that often accompany our spoken speech, and have in some cases shifted material from one point to another to make a more cohesive narrative, but I have added nothing, so there

are no words here that were not spoken by the storytellers themselves.

COVER

AND BACK

PHOTO

CREDITS

COVER designs by Shaun Illingworth.

Cover: John Berglund; Charles Mickett,Jr.; Mor-

ton Burke; Peter Sarriaocco; William Godfrey; Russell Cloer; John Archibald; Crandon Clark; Jerome Selinger; Vincent Kramer; Irving Pape; Edwin Kolodziej; Charles Getty; Nathan Shoehalter; Ogden Bacon; George Claflen; Franklin Kneller; Livy Goodman; Frank Gimpel. Back cover: Robert Owen; James Essig; Ephraim Robinson; Livy Goodman. Photo pages: Ephraim Robinson; Robert Owen; George Claflen; William Wells; Frank Gimpel; William Godfrey; Ogden Bacon; Charles Mickett, Jr.; Lloyd Kalugin; John Archibald; Livy Goodman.

FOREWORD “The real war does not get into the history books,” said the

poet Walt Whitman, fresh from the bloody job of comforting soldiers wounded on Civil War battlefields. His lament, fortunately, is no longer valid. Over recent decades, historians have

discovered that while the grunts and swabs who do a war’s dirty work tend not to write, they and other ordinary citizens can often be persuaded

to talk, and out of that discovery has come

the

modern practice of oral history. The result is a democratization of the historical record. While the history of wars was once mostly that of statesmen and generals, garnered from official records, military documents and the

memoirs of high-ranking personages, we now have genuine voices from the foxholes as well. This new wealth of material has been a treasure trove for scholars and authors. The Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II has posted nearly 300 comprehensive interviews on its web site, and more arrive as quickly as they are processed. The Archives are being used not only by those interested in World War II and its military component, but also for genealogical research, and for sociological studies that include immigration history, the GI Bill and Rosie the Riveter. But members of the public, while they may have computer access to the web, are likely to find it a daunting task to wade through the equivalent of 15,000 pages and some four million

words of interview transcripts currently on the web site. Tom Kindre’s book, The Boys

From New Jersey, overcomes

that difficulty for the average reader. What the author has done is mine the Archives for their most poignant, dramatic and personally revealing stories of wartime experiences and behavior. He has arranged the material chronologically, following scores of New Jersey boys from the neighborhoods of their youth through growing up, college days, training camps, battlefields and the distant places where duty sent them. And the stories are all in their own words. Many of the insights are arresting. A GI on Okinawa, overcome by the chaos of battle, muses that “Somebody must have been in charge. Maybe it was the Good Lord pulling the strings.” A captured B-24 pilot who was marched along a road while German civilians threw rocks and spat at him, says, “I un-

derstood how they felt. I might have killed their brother or their father.”” A Seabee in the Pacific who was hit by shrapnel as he waded across a river observes, “You know something’s happening, but you don’t want to know.” The author, himself a World War II veteran and a participant

in the Archives, brings an informed commentary to the presentation. His viewpoint with respect to the times and the material is we” rather than “they,’ and in his introduction to each secWe tion, his personal experiences are often brought to bear. In “The >

Far Side of the World,” he notes that “The places we went, the

people we met, the assignments we were given, were beyond anything our imaginations could have conjured.” The immediacy of oral history is one of its most appealing attributes. Some experiences have been repressed for years and are revealed for the first time in the interviewing process. Many interviewers have expressed the awe they feel from being present at moments of personal catharsis, when the person speaking is obviously reliving the experience and feeling once again the emotions that accompanied it. But in the interview transcripts, it is sometimes difficult to recapture that immediacy in its fullness. The typical interview is discursive, full of lost beginnings and unfinished thoughts. The

interviewer asks questions to provoke follow interesting trains of thought by happened next?” Often the complete ence comes out piecemeal as the doors

memory and attempts to asking, in effect, “What recounting of an experiof memory are gradually

opened, and the story unfolds in fits and starts, between the in-

terviewer’s questions and comments on other points. To the researcher dispassionately seeking nuggets of information, finding his way through this barrier is simply part of the job, but the average person looking for entertainment or historical insights may not have that kind of patience. The author of The Boys From New Jersey has attempted to work around that roadblock by means of careful editing, deleting the interviewer’s questions and the hems and haws of normal speech to give us amore or less seamless story from each speaker. He has sometimes shifted material from one place to another, he tells us, to make a more cohesive narrative, but he states, “I have added nothing, so there are no words here that

were not spoken by the storytellers themselves.” Scholars, in reviewing wartime sources, are frequently looking for insights into motivation, morale, discipline and obedience to orders, and how those factors might have influenced the out-

come of the battle or the war. For the interested reader, those qualities are there to be ana-

lyzed, if one wishes to do so, but perhaps more rewarding is the pure storytelling, of a very personal sort, that goes right to our own emotional depths, makes us aware that these boys were no supermen but ordinary individuals like the rest of us, and makes us wonder what we would have done under the same circumstances. This, too, is the reaction most often expressed by undergraduates involved in the interviewing process. The generation whose stories have been recorded for the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II were born after the “Great War,” or the “War to end all wars,” as the First World

War was known. Their stories begin with memories of life in their home communities, the towns and farms where they grew up. Their voices speak of family legends and myths, customs preserved or lost, of best friends, favorite pastimes, hard work,

hard times and hope. They lived in a small, insular world which

for some had expanded only to the college campus before the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

Their generation will be remembered for their humility when asked to recall their experiences of war, and for their deep sense of commitment to comrades, their families and their country. Today’s generation is asked to think “outside the box,” but the generation of the war years never knew there was a box, as evi-

denced by their adaptability and ingenuity both during the war and in the years following. Their stories fascinate scholars. Scores of researchers across the world tell us through email, telephone calls and research visits that they are utilizing the Archives materials. Many ask to be put in touch with interviewees to further develop their research. The material is being used in scholarly journals, monographs, exhibitions, documentaries and books such as the 2003 Pulitzer

Prize-winner, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, by Rick Atkinson. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the impact on today’s generation. At Rutgers, an undergraduate history seminar, The American Experience in World War II, is based on the Archives. Students participate in the interviewing process, edit interviews and prepare research papers on subjects derived from the interview materials. Occasionally they meet in small, informal seminars with the interviewees themselves. Tom Kindre finds that opportunity remarkable: “It’s the equivalent of our having been able to talk with Civil War veterans when we were in school.” The Boys From New Jersey is a wonderful entree to the oral histories being recorded in the History Department and housed in the Alexander Library’s Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. After reading this book, you will want to read more. You can find us online at oralhistory.rutgers.edu. Sandra Stewart Holyoak Director, The Rutgers

Oral History Archives

CONTENTS PROLOGUE--

|

ANCESTRAL TRAILS-- 3 “My father got out of Russia by hiding under the seat of a train. When they got to the border, he just walked across.” THE STREETS AND FIELDS OF HOME-- 39 “We had no water, no electricity, the outhouse was up the hill, but we had a grand piano and Mother sang.” HARD TIMES-- 67 “IT came home from school and found all our furniture out on the street. We had lost our house.”

COLLEGE DAYS-- 87 “Tt was a little college. You’d meet the Dean on College Avenue and he’d say, ‘How’d you do on the math exam?’” AND ALONG CAME LOVE-- 115 “We saw each other maybe four times before we married. You didn’t know if there would be tomorrow, so you took today.” TRAINING CAMPS-- 141 “T carried a back pack and four boxes of machine gun ammo. My gear weighed more than I did.”

THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD-- 167 “We went up this river, liberating China, and hundreds of people along the banks waved American flags to welcome us.” THE CHAOS OF COMBAT-- 227 “You shot him because he was the enemy, but when he lay there dying, he was a human being.” EPILOGUE-- 321; THE RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES-- 323; INDEX-- 329

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