LIFE Heroes of World War II: Men and Women Who Put Their Lives on the Line

by The Editors of LIFE

  “Ship at two o’clock!” he shouted.

  Kennedy looked up to see the Japanese destroyer Amagiri heading for his starboard bow. He tried to deploy his torpedoes, but it was too late: The ship sliced the small boat in half, killing two men.

  “This is how it feels to be killed,” Kennedy thought, lying on the half of the boat that was still afloat, staring up at the destroyer as it left wreckage in its wake. The 10 surviving crew members were scattered around the boat, and burning fuel was flickering on the surface of the water.

  “Mr. Kennedy!” someone shouted. “Mr. Kennedy! McMahon is badly hurt.”

  Jumping from the wreckage, Kennedy swam to the injured man, whose name was Patrick. “How are you, Mac?” he asked.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m kind of burnt.”

  This was an understatement. Burns covered the man’s face, neck, hands, and feet, and they stung in the salt water. Kennedy towed him to the boat, which was no small feat: Kennedy suffered from debilitating lower back pain, which the collision likely worsened.

  Over the next five days, Kennedy exhibited extraordinary courage. He towed McMahon for five hours to a deserted island and risked his own life by swimming in search of help. When none arrived, he decided to lead his men to another island, Olasana. It was larger and therefore more likely to attract Japanese attention, but it was also more likely to offer food to the starving crew.

  Sure enough, after swimming for three hours (Kennedy towed his burned comrade again), the crew arrived at Olasana to find coconuts on the ground. They cracked them open and drank the milk, which sickened some of them.

  The men were steadily weakening, some suffering from coral cuts—and McMahon’s burns were beginning to rot—so Kennedy kept searching for a way out. He and Ensign George Ross found a box of Japanese candy on a nearby island. The sugar helped allay their hunger but also raised the question: Was the enemy near? After encountering natives who were acting as Allied scouts and had access to a boat, Kennedy dispatched them to an Allied post with a message he had scratched on a coconut husk, reading in part “11 alive … need small boat … Kennedy.”

  On the fifth day at sea, the islanders returned and brought Kennedy to the post. Soon, a PT boat showed up to take him back to rescue his crew. “Hey, Jack!” someone shouted from the approaching vessel.

  “Where the hell you been?” Kennedy replied.

  “We got some food for you.”

  “No thanks,” the young lieutenant wryly said. “I just had a coconut.”

  God’s Double Agent

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Forbidden to preach by the Nazis, the Lutheran theologian grappled with his pacifist beliefs and supported the plot to kill Hitler

  AKG-IMAGES

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer in London one month before Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

  On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg—a 36-year-old Nazi officer who secretly worked for the resistance—placed a briefcase containing two bombs at the feet of Adolf Hitler during a meeting in the Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s East Prussian headquarters. Part of a resistance effort known as Operation Valkyrie—to which the outspoken theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was linked—this was one of dozens of attempts on Hitler’s life. Like the rest, it failed.

  After smuggling the weapons into Hitler’s inner sanctum, Stauffenberg started priming them in a bathroom, but he was interrupted just before the second bomb was set. He then brought the briefcase to Hitler and left the room. About 10 minutes later, the single bomb went off, but infernal luck was once again on Hitler’s side: The briefcase had been moved away from the dictator, who was leaning over a heavy oak table that helped shield him from the blast.

  Four people perished, but the dictator emerged with little more than a perforated eardrum. Typically the Nazi retribution was swift: Thousands of people were arrested in connection with the conspiracy, nearly 5,000 of whom were killed. Some, such as Stauffenberg, were simply shot; others were strangled and revived, their suffering filmed for Hitler’s viewing pleasure, before finally being killed.

  Others suffered in different ways—among them the Lutheran Bonhoeffer, one of Hitler’s earliest and most vocal critics. At the time, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in Berlin’s Tegel prison for his work with the German resistance. But after links between the theologian and the assassination attempt were discovered, he was moved to the concentration camps at Buchenwald and, later, Flossenbürg.

  Born into an aristocratic family in 1906, Bonhoeffer studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While there, he taught Sunday school at Harlem’s African American Abyssinian Baptist Church, where his exposure to black culture and white racism inspired a lifelong love of gospel music and profoundly affected his later response to Nazi oppression after his return home.

  His reputation as a brilliant writer and Christian philosopher grew steadily—until January 30, 1933, when Hitler was named German chancellor. A few days later, Bonhoeffer denounced the fascist on the radio: “This is the leader who makes an idol of himself and of his voice, and who thus mocks God,” he said. The Nazis pulled the plug on the broadcast.

  With the rise of the Third Reich, non-“Aryans” were forbidden to accept parish posts, prompting Bonhoeffer to turn one down in protest in 1933. In the rootless years that followed, he was forbidden to publish or speak in public and was banned from Berlin. In June 1939, as World War II loomed, Bonhoeffer fled the country to teach at Union seminary in New York. But his conscience would not let him rest. “I have made a mistake in coming to America,” he wrote to fellow theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany.”

  One month after arriving in New York, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, where he began to question his pacifist beliefs. In July, he joined the German secret service with the intention of serving as a double agent. While supposedly collecting information about churches throughout Europe, Bonhoeffer was in fact helping Jews escape. The funds he helped raise to facilitate these efforts were eventually tracked by the Gestapo, who arrested him in April 1943—three months after he’d become engaged to a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer.

  Incarcerated in Tegel prison for two years, Bonhoeffer ministered to fellow prisoners and wrote the theological works that were later collected as the classic Letters and Papers from Prison. He also corresponded with his fiancée. “Your life would have been quite different, easier, clearer, simpler, had not our paths crossed,” he wrote her.

  “You are all around me,” she responded.

  Following Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt, the Gestapo discovered documents linking Bonhoeffer to Operation Valkyrie. On April 9, 1945—just weeks before Flossenbürg was liberated by the Allies—he was stripped and hung from a meat hook. He was 39. “This is the end,” he said just before he died. “For me, the beginning of life.”

  HULTON-DEUTSCH/CORBIS/GETTY

  Adolf Hitler showed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini his damaged Wolfsschanze, Wolf’s Lair, the Nazi headquarters in East Prussia where Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate the Nazi leader.

  BPK BILDAGENTUR/STIFTUNG PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ, BERLIN, GERMANY/ART RESOURCE, NY

  Bonhoeffer Taught a confirmation class in the Harz region of Germany in 1932.

  WALTER SANDERS/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY

  An early critic of National Socialism and its anti-Semitic beliefs, Bonhoeffer was active in the Confessing Church movement, which opposed efforts by the Third Reich to unify, and Nazify, the Protestant churches of Germany. The Nazis executed him in April 1945 at this site at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, above. They also killed his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law.

  Buffalo Soldier

  Vernon Baker

  Part of a segregated—and scorned—black regiment, Baker battled racism and Nazis in his perilous quest to capture a
castle

  THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW/AP

  Vernon Baker led his men in the capture of Castle Aghinolfi, a German stronghold near the coastal town of Viareggio, Italy, north of Pisa. Baker grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and joined the Army half a year before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Showing leadership skills, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, and he arrived in Italy in 1944 with the 92nd Infantry Division’s 370th Regiment.

  Just before dawn on April 5, 1945, Second Lieutenant Vernon Baker was leading 25 men from the 370th Regiment of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division through hills near Viareggio, Italy. The mission: to capture the heavily fortified German stronghold of Castle Aghinolfi. Much of the 370th had already attempted this feat, but “they got cut to pieces,” Baker later said. “When they got back down, or were driven back down, we knew it was our turn.”

  Looking for a spot to set up his machine gun, Baker spied two objects poking from a slit in a hill—a German observation post. He destroyed it, along with the two men inside, and went on to uncover a camouflaged machine gun nest, where two Nazis were eating breakfast. Needless to say, they didn’t finish, but Baker himself soon came under attack as the Germans began bombarding the regiment with heavy artillery and mortar fire. Worse, Baker’s commander deserted the men on the pretext of going back for reinforcements that never arrived. “It made me all the more determined to accomplish our mission,” Baker later told PBS. “Because at that time the Army was segregated. It was thought that we were unable to fight. That we were cowards. Because we were black.”

  Known as the Buffalo Soldiers—a term given to black cavalrymen after the Civil War by Native Americans—the segregated 92nd Infantry Division first served in World War I and was reactivated in 1942 as part of the 370th Regiment, with Baker’s division becoming the only black unit to see combat in World War II. But they often faced discrimination from their comrades in arms. “Look, bud, they don’t train colored soldiers to fight,” one white soldier told a member of the 92nd. “They train them to load ships, and you don’t expect them to put white boys in a Negro outfit, do you?”

  Nearly 13,000 Buffalo Soldiers served in the Italian theater, until May 1945. “We got to know each other,” Baker said of his platoon. “Most of them couldn’t read or write. And I read their letters, and I wrote letters home for them. And we became quite close.”

  Though there was controversy about the 92nd’s collective performance—one white officer blamed his own failure on the men—no one questions Baker’s heroism in the battle for Castle Aghinolfi, during which he eventually killed nine Germans and destroyed three machine gun nests, an observer post, and a dugout.

  Nineteen of Baker’s men died that day. “What made me really angry was the fact that nobody gave us any word of encouragement or any words of thanks,” Baker later said. “When I went back to regimental headquarters to turn in the dog tags of the 19 men that I’d left up on that hill there, I was chewed out … because I wasn’t wearing a steel helmet.”

  Nevertheless, the next day Baker volunteered to lead the battalion that finally secured the castle for the Allies. He later received the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions, but he never forgot the men he left behind. “It was 19 men that I left over in Italy there that couldn’t be here with me today,” he later said. “And without them, four of those men, I probably wouldn’t be here myself. And everybody calls me a hero, but those are the heroes.”

  The 92nd Infantry advanced more than 3,000 square miles and helped capture about 24,000 prisoners. An estimated 3,000 Buffalo Soldiers were killed, captured, or wounded in the process, but not a single one of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded to World War II soldiers went to any of the 1.2 million black men who had served. For Baker, the injustice was rectified in 1997 when President Clinton presented him and six deceased black servicemen with the Medal of Honor. (Baker died in 2010.) During the ceremony, a tear trickled down the old soldier’s face. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he later said.

  PHOTOQUEST/GETTY

  A surgeon stitched up Captain Ezekia Smith who was wounded during a battle near Querceta, Italy, in February 1945.

  PHOTOQUEST/GETTY

  Private First Class William Peebles of the 92nd Infantry Division Signal Company, above, right, relayed information during a battle near the Italian front while Private First Class Percy E. Laney scanned for the enemy.

  PHOTOQUEST/GETTY

  German Forces in Italy had capitulated by May 1945, and members of the 92nd pursued retreating soldiers.

  BOB BERG/GETTY

  So-called Buffalo Soldiers first fought in the 19th-century Indian wars in the West, and in 2014 veterans from three wars attended an annual Veterans Day ceremony at Forest Lawn cemetery in Hollywood Hills.

  The Vanished Rescuer of Budapest

  Raoul Wallenberg

  A Swedish diplomat created safe houses for Jews in the embattled Hungarian capital—then disappeared without a trace

  LASKI DIFFUSION/GETTY

  Realizing the Nazis’ murderous intent, Raoul Wallenberg took advantage of his position as first secretary for the Swedish legation in Budapest to save some 100,000 Jews from death.

  Long after he mysteriously disappeared from Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg was reportedly seen in an Estonian prison, a Slovakian castle, and the Stockholm airport. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal reported that he languished in a Siberian mental hospital. Russian officials variously claimed that he had been murdered by the Gestapo, had died of a heart attack in 1947 in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison, and had never been in Russia. Some even said they’d seen an old Swedish man—Wallenberg?—playing chess in a Soviet gulag.

  Wallenberg, born August 4, 1912, was the scion of an illustrious Swedish banking family. He studied architecture in the United States, but after returning to Sweden, he was moved by the increasingly public Nazi persecution of the Jews. In June 1944 he was made first secretary for the Swedish legation in Budapest, which the Germans had occupied since March 19.

  When the 31-year-old arrived in the Hungarian capital, some 437,000 Jews outside the city had been deported—mostly to Auschwitz, where they faced forced labor or death. At least 200,000 were still living in Budapest, under the control of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, but their position was precarious: About half of them would eventually be deported, too.

  With courage and inventiveness, Wallenberg issued passports that offered many of the endangered Jews protection as Swedish citizens. (He even changed the passport’s design to make it look more impressive to the often uneducated Nazis.) In Budapest’s international ghetto, he created 34 safe houses—bedecked with large Swedish flags and bearing such names as THE SWEDISH LIBRARY—where thousands of Jews took shelter.

  On October 15, 1944, the Nazi-backed Hungarian fascists known as the Arrow Cross Party seized power and resumed the deportation of Jews, which the Hungarian head of state had stopped in July. The Jews were sent on a brutal, freezing forced march to concentration camps. Again Wallenberg rushed in with food and medicine, rescuing 1,500 Jews with the help of counterfeit papers and more passports.

  Wallenberg knew that the Nazis were a personal threat, but the Soviets proved his undoing. Having been granted a visit to the Soviet military headquarters in Debrecen, east of Budapest, Wallenberg was seen on January 17, 1945, leaving the city with his driver and Russian officers.

  He was never seen again.

  Over time the mystery surrounding his disappearance deepened. Who wanted him out of the way? In 2001, a Russian-Swedish panel released a report indicating that the Soviets had arrested him because they believed he was an American spy. But, perhaps more important, what happened to him?

  In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wallenberg’s mother and stepfather—despairing after decades of searching for their son—had committed suicide two days apart in 1979. The bereft couple asked their daughter and Wallenberg’s half-brother to continue the search until 2000. But 2000 came and went with no sign of hi
m.

  In the end, at least 100,000 Hungarian Jews owed their lives to the man who may well have died in a Soviet prison. Or maybe—just maybe—he lived out his life playing chess in a gulag.

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  The Siege of Budapest started in late 1944, and Allied troops endured brutal street fighting trying to liberate the city known as the “Pearl of the Danube.”

  DENNIS GILBERT/VIEW PICTURES/AKG-IMAGES

  As the Germans and their Hungarian allies retreated, they slaughtered as many as 20,000 Jews in Budapest.

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  Wallenberg was never found following his disappearance in January 1945. In 1997, a statue of the diplomat and humanitarian was unveiled in London. In 2016 the Swedish government officially declared the diplomat dead after Wallenberg’s family asked for a death certificate. His relatives released a statement saying that a “declaration of death is a way to deal with the trauma we lived through, to bring one phase to closure and move on.”

  The President’s Son

  Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

  Though lame, in poor health, and past his prime, Teddy’s firstborn helped spearhead the D-Day invasion

  ELIOT ELISOFON/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION

  Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was the only general to wade onto the beach during the first wave of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. He landed with his men on Utah Beach, and his heroism earned him the Medal of Honor.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, 6:30, on the beach,” Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. said over the USS Barnett’s intercom around midnight on June 5, 1944. He was speaking to the 600 or so soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division, 8th Regiment—mostly teenage southern boys who, under Ted’s command, would be among the first to storm the Normandy coast on D-Day.

  Ted, on the other hand, was a 56-year-old who had been crippled by machine gun fire in World War I and suffered from a debilitating heart condition—hardly an obvious choice to help lead the Battle of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in history. Code-named Operation Overlord, it involved some 156,000 men landing on five beaches along 50 miles of France’s Normandy coast.