‘Greatest generation’ has stories to tell

  • Published
  • By Senior Master Sgt. Rick Burnham
  • Air Force Print News
WASHINGTON --  It turns out that the new digital recorder I bought my dad for his 80th birthday to record his memories of World War II for his grandchildren and their grandchildren just won’t do. The buttons are a bit too small for his fading eyesight, and he is somewhat technology-challenged as well.

So I push the buttons for him, and I am amazed at the stories he tells.

Those blues eyes were clear and crisp back then, back when he made the switch from 17-year-old farm boy to Sailor at the request of a nation at war. He could run like the wind and was strong as a bull, attributes he would need to help fight the Nazi war machine that threatened the free world. He left on a troop train for New York City, and by the time he returned, he had crawled across the beaches of both southern France and northern Africa.

He laughs at thoughts of himself and his fellow Sailors sprawled across the deck of their ship, bitterly seasick only days after leaving New York. And his voice grows quiet as he speaks of the view his Normandy foxhole gave him of a burning Allied ship that sank less than two miles off the coast.

He broke formation on a 30-mile hike through the French countryside, and later got chewed out by the officer in charge for doing so. But he did it anyway, collecting francs from his buddies as he left the group. When he caught up with them, carrying as much bread as he could carry from a local bakery, everyone got a piece, including the officer, who stopped yelling long enough to eat half of Dad’s last loaf.

When he returned to north Florida, it was only for a couple of weeks. It seems that help was needed on a different front, so he packed his bags and headed for the Orient. This trip included a stop in Hawaii, and another in Okinawa, where fragments from a Japanese grenade ripped through his left forearm. He could have used that arm while rescuing a comrade who was injured in the same attack, but the arm was rendered useless. He got that buddy back to camp anyway, dragging him for more than an hour.

When he got home again it was for good, his U.S. Navy days behind him. Still, he was wearing his dress uniform when he walked 10 miles to greet the lady who would become his wife and my mother. My aunt still remembers seeing him walking up the road in that white uniform.

I ask him about his Purple Heart for the grenade wound, and he says he never got one, that to the best of his knowledge his superiors never put him in for one. Like many of his time who served, I suppose that service to his country was enough for him. He is intensely proud of that service, and he is equally proud of mine, never missing a chance to let me know it. I still remember the smile on his face when I took him to the Pentagon in 2002.

He dates himself when he calls me “flyboy” instead of “Airman,” and speaks of P-51s flying overhead, and of seeing Gen. George Patton on the beaches of southern France. Such images remind me constantly of his age, and that 1,100 or so of his buddies are dying each and every day.

So I push the buttons on the recorder again, and tell him to keep talking.

My dad wants to visit the Pentagon again -- one last time, he says -- and I intend to see to it that he can. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is also going to the official dedication of the new World War II Memorial while he is in our nation’s capital. I want him to see the monument they have erected to recognize our “Greatest Generation,” a label that I feel fits them to a T.