LIFE Heroes of World War II: Men and Women Who Put Their Lives on the Line
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The White Rose of Stalingrad
Lydia Litvyak
The Jewish Soviet fighter pilot was the first woman to shoot down an enemy plane
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The Nazis dubbed the women pilots of the Soviets’ 588th Night Bomber Regiment the “Night Witches” because when the fliers idled their engines before releasing their bombs, the planes made a whooshing sound, like a witch’s broomstick might make.
On the afternoon of August 1, 1943, Lydia Litvyak—the Jewish Soviet fighter ace called the White Rose of Stalingrad—was escorting a group of Russian planes back to their base when she was attacked by two German Bf 109 fighters. She hadn’t noticed them at first, but “when she did see them, she turned to meet them,” said fellow pilot Ivan Borisenko, who was in the middle of a dogfight at the time.
The last time Borisenko saw Litvyak’s smoking plane, it was being pursued by as many as eight German aircraft. “Then they all disappeared behind a cloud,” he said. Searching for his colleague, Borisenko descended but saw no parachute and no explosion, leaving Litvyak missing in action at age 21. She was the first female fighter pilot of any nationality to shoot down an enemy aircraft, the first to earn the title of fighter ace, and the one with the greatest number of kills.
Born in Moscow in August 1921, Litvyak became obsessed with aviation at an early age and made her first solo flight at 15. She was working as a flight instructor when the German Wehrmacht invaded Russia, spurring her determination to fly for the Soviet Air Force. Though she was rejected more than once, she finally managed to join the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment by lying about her flight miles. She learned to fly the Yak-1, a single-seat monoplane partly made of plywood. Within a month of seeing action, she shot down five Luftwaffe planes.
One of the Germans she downed, Staff Sergeant Erwin Maier, was captured by the Soviets after parachuting to safety. Asking to see the ace who had taken out his plane, Maier was shocked to see a beautiful young woman with gray eyes and blonde hair that she bleached with stolen peroxide, washing it with hot water that she drained from her plane’s radiator.
That was just one of Litvyak’s eccentricities. When she returned from her missions, she would often celebrate by performing acrobatics, knowing that this angered her commander. A lover of flowers, she painted a white rose on both sides of her cockpit, leading to her being nicknamed “The White Rose of Stalingrad.”
After Litvyak’s disappearance, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin refused to award her the coveted title of Hero of the Soviet Union, since no one knew what had happened to her. But in 1979 an unidentified female body was found buried in the Russian village of Dmitrieyka. An examination concluded that the remains were, in fact, Litvyak’s.
In 1990, Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously made the White Rose of Stalingrad a Hero of the Soviet Union.
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Lydia Litvyak posed on her fighter plane.
SOVFOTO
Members of an all-woman squadron made adjustments to a Polikarpov Po-2 airplane in preparation for an All-Union Aviation Day air show.
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Above, from left: Navigator Yekaterina Ryabova, flight commander Raisa Yushchina, pilot navigator Mira Paromova, and squadron leaders Nadezhda Popova and Marina Chechneva of the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment (formerly the 588th Night Bomber Regiment) enjoyed some downtime perusing a fashion magazine.
The Last Storyteller
Janusz Korczak
The children’s book author loved his Warsaw ghetto orphans so much, he refused to let them die alone
ISRAEL TALBY/AKG-IMAGES
Janusz Korczak with children at Dom Sierot, the Jewish orphanage he established in Warsaw.
“He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful,” eyewitness Wladyslaw Szpilman wrote in his memoir, The Pianist. “At last they would be able to exchange the horrible suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms. He told them to wear their best clothes, and so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.”
It was early August 1942, and the man in question, Janusz Korczak, couldn’t bear to tell the children the truth: The German Army was transporting them to the Treblinka extermination camp outside Warsaw, where they would almost certainly be slaughtered on arrival. “He had the chance to save himself,” Szpilman wrote, “and it was only with great difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children, and now, on this last journey, he would not leave them alone.”
Born in Warsaw in the 1870s, Korczak was the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Jewish teacher, humanitarian, and pediatrician who also wrote children’s books—including Kaytek the Wizard, a sort of proto–Harry Potter story that remains unfinished in part because Korczak removed elements that scared children. “Life is like an extraordinary dream,” he wrote in the book’s dedication. “Whoever has the willpower and a strong desire to serve others, his life will be like a beautiful dream, even if the path to his goal was difficult, and his thoughts were restless. Maybe one day I will write the ending to this book.”
In 1912 Korczak established a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, which he ran according to his belief—very much opposed to the principles of strictness that prevailed at the time—that children need freedom and autonomy. Korczak gave his children a parliament and their own newspaper, and suggested possible subjects to his fledgling reporters: “What makes me the most angry?” “My adventure in a streetcar.” “My interesting dream.” “The five nicest names for men and women.” But the rise of anti-Semitism increasingly threatened his activities. In September 1939, the Nazis occupied Poland and established the brutal Warsaw ghetto a year later, forcing Korczak to move his orphans inside its walls. An estimated 400,000 Jews were crammed within the ghetto’s 1.3 square miles, and within two years 83,000 had died of starvation and disease. But Korczak refused to abandon his children.
In July 1942, as the Nazis began the mass deportations to death camps, Korczak tried to prepare the orphans for the inevitable end by casting them in his amateur production of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office. The play is about Amal, an invalid child who—inspired by the building of a local post office—fantasizes about receiving a letter from the king and becoming a postman. The boy’s eventual death becomes a kind of spiritual freedom from worldly desires. “See that faraway hill from our window?” Amal asks his adoptive uncle. “I often long to go beyond those hills, and right away.”
The Korczak orphans longed to go beyond the hills, too, and they were happily expecting meadows, flowers, and streams as they marched in their best clothes to Treblinka. “I saw that tragic parade in the street,” wrote Irena Sendler, the Warsaw heroine who worked with Korczak and whose story is told on page 10. “Those innocent children walking obediently in the procession of death and listening to the doctor’s optimistic words. I do not know why for me and for all the other eyewitnesses our hearts did not break. But our hearts remained intact, and what also remained were thoughts that to this day cannot be understood by any normal person.”
The end of Korczak’s life was hardly a beautiful dream, but like Kaytek the Wizard he had the willpower and the desire to serve others. The path to his goal was difficult, though, and he never wrote the ending to his book.
ISRAEL TALBY/AKG-IMAGES
Children in the dining room in 1929. The orphanage also ran a summer camp.
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Heinrich Himmler decided to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto as a birthday present for Hitler. Realizing that the Nazis planned to exterminate all the Jews, the residents staged an uprising in April 1943. In response, the Nazis torched and blew up the community.
ISRAEL TALBY/AKG-IMAGES
Orphans From Janusz Korczak’s Krochmalna Street orphanage in the center’s courtyard in 1934.
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A bronze sculpture, Korczak and the Ghetto Children, by Boris Saktsier stands in the Janusz Korczak Square at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
Purple Heart Patriots
Nisei Soldiers
The go-for-broke Japanese men of the 100th Infantry helped save the “Lost Battalion” trapped behind enemy lines
GRANGER
Nisei troops making their way across France. Some 17,600 Japanese Americans fought in the U.S. armed forces. Many parents told their departing sons to proudly follow the samurai Bushido code of death before dishonor: Live if you can, die if you must, but always fight with honor, and never, ever bring shame on your family or your country.
In October 1944, the 275 Texans who made up the 1st Battalion in the 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Division, were headed into eastern France as part of an offensive to liberate a strategic ridge in the Vosges Mountains. But their overzealous and incompetent commander, Major General John Dahlquist, pushed the men so hard that they were separated from their fellow soldiers on October 24—and were soon surrounded by Germans.
Two other 141st Infantry units—the 2nd and 3rd—were sent to rescue the so-called Lost Battalion, but they failed. Meanwhile the Texans’ situation was rapidly deteriorating: Temperatures were dropping, supplies were running low, and wounded men were dying. To make matters worse, Adolf Hitler had learned about the surrounded soldiers and told his generals that they must not be allowed to escape.
So Dahlquist turned to the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team, both attached to the 36th Division. Mostly composed of second-generation Japanese Americans—known as Nisei—the 100th had lost so many soldiers that they came to be known as the Purple Heart Battalion. The 442nd’s motto was “Go for Broke.” (Many were inveterate gamblers.) “We all had the idea of proving that we were loyal Americans,” one soldier, Tim Tokuno, told PBS in 2007. “And so everything was ‘go, go, go forward, go forward.’”
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans had been rounded up and incarcerated in internment camps, and all Japanese Americans were barred from serving in the U.S. armed forces. But in 1943, concerned that Japan was using this discrimination to characterize the war in overtly racial terms, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed the military policy—and many Japanese Americans enthusiastically enlisted.
Now the Nisei of the 100th Infantry and 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team slogged through the densely wooded, rocky terrain of the Vosges, braving Nazi artillery fire to rescue the Lost Battalion. It was, many thought, a suicide mission. “You’re in the woods in the wintertime, days are short, and it’s just blacker than the inside of a wolf, you can’t see a damn thing,” company member Fred Shiosaki told PBS. “Basically you hang on to the guy in front of you.”
Six days after the Texans were captured, the Nisei finally reached their fellow soldiers—and faced the Germans who guarded them. “We yelled our heads off and charged and shot the heads off everything that moved,” one soldier, Ichigi Kashiwagi, said in Robert Asahina’s Just Americans. Though they were sometimes outnumbered four to one, they finally rescued the 211 men—all that remained of the original 275.
But the battle wasn’t over. The units pressed on, eventually conquering the ridge that Dahlquist had wanted in the first place. Afterward, the general ordered the members of the 100th and 442nd to attend a parade review to recognize their victory. But when only a small number of men showed up, he accused them of deliberately ignoring him. In fact, they had lost 400 in the siege, leading many to believe that the Japanese Americans were considered nothing more than cannon fodder. “All of us were well aware that we were being used for the rescue because we were expendable,” said Daniel Inouye, a member of the 442nd and later a United States senator.
The 442nd became the most decorated unit of its size and length of service in U.S. history, and the Nisei were lauded by President Harry Truman, but after returning to the United States they once again faced racism and discrimination. Fully seven years after the conflict ended, one former soldier was refused service at a restaurant. But the tide eventually turned. In 1962, Texas governor John Connally made the members of the 100th and 442nd “honorary Texans,” and in 2000 President Clinton awarded 21 of them the Medal of Honor. Sadly, only seven were still alive.
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Japanese Americans arrived at the Manzanar internment camp near Independence, California. One of the camps set up across the country and authorized by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
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Nisei infantrymen with the 442nd Regiment in Italy taking cover from an incoming artillery shell.
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Victorious members of the 442nd arrived in New York on the way home to the West Coast and Hawaii.
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In 2011, Tim Yamane, 88, assisted George “Joe” Sakato, 90, with his Medal of Honor, which President Clinton awarded him in 2000 for his heroism during a 1944 firefight in France’s Vosges Mountains.
BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY
In 2012, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii announced the national tour of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Japanese American World War II veterans.
The Saint of Auschwitz
Maximilian Kolbe
When a fellow inmate was condemned to die in the concentration camp, the Polish priest selflessly offered to take his place
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Franciscan Priest Maximilian Kolbe in an undated photograph.
“The fugitive has not been found!” Auschwitz commandant Karl Fritsch shouted at terrified camp inmates in July 1941, furious that one of their number had escaped. Now others would have to pay for the infraction. “Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until you die.”
One of the men marked for this agonizing death was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish army sergeant and civilian farmer who couldn’t stop himself from crying out: “My wife, my children! I will never see them again.”
But his luck changed in mere seconds when a 47-year-old Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe—prisoner number 16770—offered to die in his place. “He has a wife and family,” Kolbe said to the commandant. “I am alone. I am a Catholic priest.”
The stunned silence that followed was interrupted when the commandant let Gajowniczek return to the ranks—and sent the priest and nine other victims into the bunker, where they were left to die of starvation and thirst. “I could only thank him with my eyes,” Gajowniczek later said.
The son of a poor weaver, Kolbe was born near Lodz, Poland, in January 1894. He was a typically mischievous boy, but his life changed forever following a vivid dream of the Virgin Mary. “I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me,” he later claimed. “Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.”
In 1910, Kolbe became a monk in the Franciscan order. He studied in Rome, taught church history in a Polish seminary, and built a friary near Warsaw. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe and his fellow friars established a shelter for Polish refugees. This inevitably aroused the suspicions of the Nazis, who closed the friary in May 1941 and sent Kolbe and four others to Auschwitz.
“Everything is well in my regard,” Kolbe wrote his mother from the death camp. “Be tranquil about me and my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love.” But objectively speaking, everything was not well. An SS officer put heavy planks on Kolbe’s back and ordered him to run. He was kicked, whipped, and left for dead. In response, Kolbe prayed for his tormentors.
But few punishments compared to the slow death the 10 men endured after being thrown into the bunker. Tortured with hunger and t
hirst, some drank their own urine. Kolbe simply prayed. On August 14, 1941—two weeks after being confined—only four remained alive. Kolbe was among them. But the Nazis needed the cell for new victims, so they killed the survivors with injections of carbolic acid. Always precise, they noted the hour of Father Kolbe’s death as 12:30 p.m.
After the war, Gajowniczek was reunited with his wife, though he never saw his two sons again—they had been killed in a Soviet bombardment. But he never forgot the man who had died in his place, proudly attending Kolbe’s canonization as a saint in 1982 and returning to Auschwitz every August 14 to pay him homage. He “had a deep sense of Kolbe’s presence and had a feeling Kolbe will know when to take him,” Gajowniczek’s widow told the Associated Press after her husband’s death in 1995 at age 94. “Now he has gone to Kolbe.”
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Kolbe was a fervent devotee of the Virgin Mary. In 1927 he founded Niepokalanów (“City of the Immaculate”), a Franciscan community, and that year he and other followers paid reverence to a statue of Saint Mary of Niepokalanów.
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Franciszek Gajowniczek, whose life Kolbe saved, paid homage to the priest at Toronto’s St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church.
L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO/AP
John Paul II recognized Kolbe as a saint in 1982, and, here, in 2016 Pope Francis visited Auschwitz and prayed in the underground cell in the starvation bunker where Kolbe and others met their deaths.
Political Heroes
John F. Kennedy
After his boat was torpedoed, the future president nearly died—more than once—to save his crewmates
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On August 2, 1943, a 26-year-old American Navy lieutenant named John F. Kennedy was piloting PT 109, one of 15 U.S. Patrol Torpedo boats charged with attacking the Japanese convoys that were helping soldiers in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands. He was cruising a waterway called Blackett Strait, and all was quiet—until 2:30 a.m., when one of his crewmen saw a massive shape looming out of the darkness.