LIFE Heroes of World War II: Men and Women Who Put Their Lives on the Line
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Heroes of World War II
MEN AND WOMEN WHO PUT THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE
POPPERFOTO/GETTY
A crewman clambered up the side of an FGF Hellcat to help the pilot escape the burning plane after it crashed during landing on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise in late 1943.
Contents
Introduction
Brave Hearts
The Daredevil of Guadalcanal
Joe Foss
The Underground Nurse
Irena Sendler
Hollywood Soldiers
The Ghost Army
The Parachuting Perfume Seller
Violette Szabo
Political Heroes
Winston Churchill
The Nazi Who Saved Jews
Oskar Schindler
The Word Warrior
Sophie Scholl
Iwo Jima’s Indians
The Navajo Code Talkers
The Japanese Schindler
Chiune Sugihara
Hitler’s Would-Be Assassin
Johann Georg Elser
Political Heroes
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The White Rose of Stalingrad
Lydia Litvyak
The Last Storyteller
Janusz Korczak
Purple Heart Patriots
Nisei Soldiers
The Saint of Auschwitz
Maximilian Kolbe
Political Heroes
John F. Kennedy
God’s Double Agent
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Buffalo Soldier
Vernon Baker
The Vanished Rescuer of Budapest
Raoul Wallenberg
The President’s Son
Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Just One More
Chips, the Hero Dog
Front Cover: A U.S. Marine braved Japanese machine gun fire during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Corbis/Getty
RALPH MORSE/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION
A member of the Free French Forces dashed to help French resistance fighters shooting at a German sniper who had opened fire on a crowd following the August 1944 liberation of Paris.
Introduction
Brave Hearts
BETTMANN/GETTY
The Battle of Okinawa was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific. The 82-day fight led to Allies suffering 50,000 casualties and the Japanese more than 100,000, many of them civilians. Here, a U.S. Marine aided a young woman and her baby as she emerged from a hillside cave.
A moneygrubbing Nazi who spent his fortune saving Jews, a Bon Marché perfume seller who became a British spy, a Polish priest who gave his life so that another man could live. These are just a few of the ordinary people who became extraordinary heroes—on and off the battlefields of World War II.
While Allied soldiers fought the Nazis with Brownings in Normandy, piloted fighter planes over Guadalcanal, and wielded flamethrowers on Iwo Jima, unsung heroes from all walks of life—priests, writers, students—used very different kinds of weapons: compassion, kindness, and courage. Transformed in the cauldron of the conflict, they rescued children from the Warsaw ghetto, comforted orphans on their way to Treblinka, and plotted to topple Hitler’s murderous regime.
In this book, you’ll find 20 stories (often heartbreaking but always inspiring) of heroes on both the front lines and the home front—including three well-known figures (Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy)—who helped turn the tide of the war. Of course, the legacy of Hitler’s evil remains, but so does the light that some brave souls shone in the darkness.
The Daredevil of Guadalcanal
Joe Foss
The Marine Corps’ leading fighter pilot fought Japanese squadrons—and hungry sharks—to secure the Pacific base
AP
Dubbed “America’s No. 1 Ace,” in 1943 by LIFE, Joe Foss led Joe’s Flying Circus, renowned for its aerial acrobatics. Foss inspired his comrades and the nation by downing 26 Japanese planes in World War II—23 during the battle for Guadalcanal. The Japanese lost 24,000 men in the battle, which was a turning point for the Allies in the Pacific.
On November 7, 1942, U.S. Marine captain Joe Foss and six pilots in the Marine Fighting Squadron 121—a team known as the Flying Circus—flew Grumman F4F Wildcats from their base on Guadalcanal Island in the South Pacific. Their mission: to attack the Japanese destroyers that had been trying to recapture the strategic outpost ever since the Allies had taken it from them in August.
Not long after takeoff, Foss spied six Japanese Zero float planes just below his squadron—a significant threat. In fact, veteran pilots liked to say that no flyer was a Christian until he tangled with a Zero.
“Don’t look now, boys, but there they are,” Foss radioed his fellows. Though his team quickly downed the planes, Foss soon made a crucial mistake. When he saw another Japanese aircraft—a scout biplane—in the distance, he abandoned plans to return to the base and decided to attack. He succeeded in destroying the scout, but at a perilous price: His Wildcat was now riddled with enemy bullets, his motor was dying, and his fellow pilots had disappeared. “I was alone out over the ocean,” he said, “and storms were coming on.”
When the engine finally gave out, he tried to glide gently toward the island of Malaita, but “the plane went down like a rock,” he said. Salt water flooded the cockpit, and Foss’s right leg was stuck under the seat. Finally freeing himself, he plunged into the water and started swimming toward Malaita. But sharks were closing in. He fended them off with a bottle of chloride—a commonly used shark repellent of the time—but no matter how much he swam, the island remained out of reach.
Had his luck finally run out? Three hours after impact, he saw canoes approaching in the distance, but he didn’t know if they were friendly natives or hostile Japanese—until he heard a shout from the vessels: “Look over here!”
It was a rescue team from a Roman Catholic mission. “That night I slept in [the] mission and I had a dinner with fresh steak, yams, and goat’s milk,” he told LIFE. “In the morning I woke up to hear singing. It came from the church and it was Sunday.”
As his fellow pilots had predicted, he had tangled with a Zero and become a Christian.
Born in 1915 near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Foss caught the flying bug at age 12 after seeing Charles Lindbergh during a tour. But recreational flying was well beyond his means. While he was a teen, his father had died when he was electrocuted in a storm, and his family battled the dust storms and deprivations of the Great Depression. But Foss worked extra jobs to afford flying lessons and joined the Marine Corps Reserve as a flying cadet in 1940, earning his wings mere months before the United States entered World War II. In October 1942, he was sent to Guadalcanal, where the U.S. was struggling to turn the tide of the war.
The battle against the Zeroes on November 7 was hardly Foss’s only triumph. He shot down 26 Japanese planes in 44 days and ended his military career as the highest-scoring Marine Corps ace, having played a crucial part in the defense of Guadalcanal (the Japanese retreated in February 1943). Following a bout with malaria, Foss returned to the States, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1943. The citation was, Foss said, both “embarrassing” and “the proudest moment of my life.”
Before his death at age 87, Foss served as governor of South Dakota, commissioner of the American Football League, and head of the National Rifle Association. But he resisted the temptation to cash in on his war-hero reputation. “I didn’t want
to be a dancing bear,” he told Time in 1955.
AP
Joe’s Flying Circus shot down 72 enemy planes. When Foss, fourth from left, downed his 26th plane, he tied the record of the legendary World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/AP
Marines attacked the Japanese-occupied island of Guadalcanal in 1942.
AP
On May 18, 1943, as his mother, Mary, looked on, Foss’s wife, June, helped President Franklin D. Roosevelt award the Marine the Medal of Honor for “remarkable flying skill, inspiring leadership, and indomitable fighting spirit.”
The Underground Nurse
Irena Sendler
Working in the Warsaw ghetto, she rescued Jewish children by taking them from their doomed parents—and giving them new lives
LASKI DIFFUSION/GETTY
Irena Sendler helped to spirit 2,500 Jewish children out of the doomed Warsaw ghetto. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come,” said Elzbieta Ficowska, who was six months old in 1942 when Sendler snuck her out in a carpenter’s box. Both Ficowska’s father and mother perished in the war.
The woman who became known to hundreds of Jewish children as “Jolanta” was in fact Irena Sendler, a social worker who helped the impoverished and elderly in Warsaw, Poland. But she turned her attention to the local Jews in 1940, when the Nazis began herding 450,000 of them into a 16-block walled area known as the Warsaw ghetto.
Abandoned in filth and squalor, thousands of Jews began dying every month, spurring Sendler, barely 30, into action. Joining Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews organized by Warsaw’s underground resistance movement, she took the code name Jolanta and posed as a member of the contagious diseases department, which allowed her to deliver food and supplies in and out of the ghetto.
But things quickly got worse. In 1942, the Nazis began systematically sending ghetto Jews—eventually nearly 300,000—to the Treblinka death camp. Sendler couldn’t save everyone, of course, so she concentrated on the children, begging bereft parents to let her help their loved ones escape. “Their first question was, ‘What guarantee is there that the child will live?’” Sendler later said. “I said, ‘None. I don’t even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today.’”
Some, of course, made the agonizing decision. “In my dreams I still hear their cries when they left their parents,” said Sendler. She wasted little time forging birth certificates, teaching the children Catholic prayers to recite if they were interrogated, and giving them “Aryan” names. “You are not Rachel but Roma,” she explained. “You are not Isaac but Jacek. Repeat it 10 times, a hundred, even a thousand times.” Children were smuggled from the ghetto in potato sacks and coffins, through sewage pipes, or under ambulance stretchers.
One by one, up to 2,500 Jewish children were placed in homes, orphanages, and convents outside of Warsaw. “I sent most of the children to religious establishments,” she said. “I knew I could count on the Sisters.” Ordinary people welcomed them, too. “No one ever refused to take a child from me,” Sendler said, though they risked their lives in doing so. “No work, not printing underground papers, transporting weapons, planning sabotage against the Germans, none of it was as dangerous as hiding a Jew,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a member of the Polish resistance. “You have a ticking time bomb in your home. If they find out, they will kill you, your family, and the person you are hiding.”
Hoping to reunite the children with their parents after the war, Sendler buried records of their true identities in jars beneath a neighbor’s apple tree. But the Nazis were tracking her activities, and she was eventually arrested and sent to Warsaw’s notorious Piawiak prison. The Gestapo fractured her feet and legs trying to force her to talk, but she never revealed the true identities or locations of the children. Sentenced to death, she was about to be executed when Zegota members bribed a Gestapo officer, effecting her escape from the prison.
Sendler remained in hiding until the end of the war, when she dug up the jars containing the true identities of the children. She had hoped, as always, to reunite them with their parents, but she was devastated to discover that most of the parents had perished in Treblinka.
Years later, some of the children that Sendler had saved tried to find her, but they were stymied by the fact that they had known her only as Jolanta. After her picture appeared in a newspaper, however, one finally reached her. “A man, a painter, telephoned me,” Sendler said later. “‘I remember your face,’ he said. ‘It was you who took me out of the ghetto.’”
In 1965, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, gave Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She is a national hero in Poland, where she was awarded the country’s highest honor, the Order of White Eagle, in 2003. During the ceremony, one of the rescued Warsaw children read a statement from Sendler. “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” she had written. “Over a half century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its specter still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.” And yet, until she passed away on May 12, 2008, Sendler expressed self-reproach about her work during the war. “I could have done more,” she said.
KEYSTONE/GETTY
Jews in the Warsaw ghetto surrendered after their uprising in 1943. The Nazis had established the ghetto in November 1940, forcing 450,000 Jews into its confines. They surrounded it with a 10-foot wall topped with barbed wire and soon started shipping 5,000 people a day from there to concentration camps. In April 1943, the Nazis decided to liquidate the sector, and the residents staged a revolt. “We saw ourselves as a Jewish underground whose fate was a tragic one,” said doomed resistance leader Mordecai Anielewicz. When the fighting ended, the Nazis rounded up the remaining 50,000-plus residents and either executed them there or sent them to camps and near-certain death.
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY
A few of the 2,500 children rescued by Irena Sendler.
CZAREK SOKOLOWSKI/AP
In May 2005 she greeted one of a group of American students who regularly perform a play about her efforts during the war.
Hollywood Soldiers
The Ghost Army
More than a thousand painters and designers fooled the enemy with inflatable tanks, toy guns, and cinematic special effects
PHOTO BY VICTOR DOWD, COURTESY GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
Members of the Ghost Army posing with one of their dummy tanks. These men served with the Camouflage Engineers, landing on Omaha Beach just eight days after the D-Day invasion. Once in France, they started to set up fake artillery ahead of the actual troops in order to deceive the enemy.
By March 1945, the war was winding to an end with an Allied victory in sight, but the Germans still controlled one crucial stronghold: the industrial heartland west of the Rhine. Two American Army infantry divisions planned to conquer the area by storming a bridge they had captured near the town of Wesel, but Hitler’s troops were putting everything they had into this final defense. Thousands of lives were at stake. How could the Americans ensure victory?
Enter the Ghost Army. Unlike other units, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was composed mostly of artists and designers. Recruited from art schools and ad agencies in New York and Philadelphia in 1944, its 1,100 members included such future luminaries as designer Bill Blass, who read Vogue in the foxhole, and artist Ellsworth Kelly. Led by former New Yorker managing editor (and cofounder of LIFE) Ralph Ingersoll, the so-called Cecil B. DeMille warriors fooled the enemy through illusion rather than force. “It’s the highest kind of creativity in the art of war,” retired General Wesley Clark later said.
Between June 1944 and March 1945, the men of the 23rd participated in more than 20 missions across Europe: posing as generals to spread disinformation while eating omelets in French cafés, pretending to be fighting outfi
ts on the front lines, and using phony airplanes, bogus command posts, fake radio broadcasts, inflatable tanks, and sound effects to confuse the enemy. (In between missions, they painted and drew, leaving behind a unique artistic record of the war.) In short, their mission, as Rick Beyer wrote in The Ghost Army of World War II, “was to put on a show.”
It was hardly the stuff of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies, however. In the course of their work, two dozen members of the Ghost Army were wounded and three were killed. But they were mostly successful—especially when it came to the March 24 assault on the Rhine. Tasked with tricking the Germans into thinking that U.S. forces were attacking 10 miles south of the actual spot, the Ghost Army created phony airfields, played recordings of trucks and bridge-building equipment, and put fake guns and inflatable tanks among real ones. “We were, I suppose, a rubber army,” one member said.
The result? German defense of the bridge near Wesel—the point of the real crossing—proved weak and ultimately ineffectual. Just 31 Americans were killed in the early-morning maneuver—about the number that would have died in a big training exercise, according to one expert. “We were told we spent three years in the army just for that one week,” one Ghost Army private modestly said.
The truth is the Ghost Soldiers saved tens of thousands of lives, but their top-secret role was not officially revealed until 1996—by which time Ellsworth Kelly had become a major American artist and Bill Blass sat atop a multimillion-dollar fashion empire, having been featured many times in the magazine he devoured in the trenches. “It’s a great example,” Beyer told Smithsonian magazine, “of how many fantastic, amazing, sort of mind-bending stories there still are 70 years later coming out of WWII.”
ANTHONY YOUNG. COURTESY OF ERIKA YOUNG VRABEL AND THE GHOST ARMY LEGACY PROJECT
When not creating work to deceive the Nazis, many of the American soldiers spent their time making art. Private First Class Anthony Young painted this streetscape in France in the fall of 1944.