CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GENERATIONS
THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES
ORDINARY PEOPLE
THOMAS AND EILEEN BRODERICK
Chicago, Illinois • Insurance Agency Owner • 82nd Airborne
CHARLES O. VAN GORDER, MD
Andrews, North Carolina • Surgeon • 326th Medical Company, 101st Airborne
WESLEY KO
Falmouth, Massachusetts • Printing Business • 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne
JAMES AND DOROTHY DOWLING
Smithtown, New York • Highway Superintendent • Bombardier-Navigator, 8th Air Force
REV. HARRY REGINALD “REG” HAMMOND
Ventura, California • Anglican Orthodox Priest • First Lieutenant, U.S. Army
LLOYD KILMER
Omaha, Nebraska • County Clerk and Real Estate Executive • B-24 Pilot, 8th Air Force
GORDON LARSEN
Orofino, Idaho • Powerhouse Operator • U.S. Marine Corps
The ROMEO Club—Retired Old Men Eating Out
JOHN “LEFTY” CAULFIELD
Cambridge, Massachusetts • School Principal • U.S. Navy
HOME FRONT
CHARLES BRISCOE
Wichita, Kansas • Boeing Engineer • Developed the B-29
DOROTHY HAENER
Detroit, Michigan • UAW Organizer
HEROES
BOB BUSH
Raymond, Washington • Lumber and Building Supply Business • U.S. Navy Medical Corpsman • Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
JOE FOSS
Scottsdale, Arizona • U.S. Marine Corps Pilot • Congressional Medal of Honor Winner
LEONARD “BUD” LOMELL
Toms River, New Jersey • Lawyer • U.S. Army, 2nd Ranger Battalion
WOMEN IN UNIFORM AND OUT
COLONEL MARY HALLAREN
Arlington, Virginia • Colonel, U.S. Army, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps
GENERAL JEANNE HOLM
Edgewater, Maryland • General, U.S. Air Force
THREE WOMEN AND HOW THEY SERVED
Lawrence, Kansas • Teacher/Real Estate Agent • Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), Navy
MARGARET RAY RINGENBERG
Hoagland, Indiana • Women’s Air Force Service Pilot
(WASPs), 2nd Ferrying Division
MARY LOUISE ROBERTS WILSON
Duncanville, Texas • U.S. Army Nurse Corps
SHAME
MARTHA SETTLE PUTNEY
Washington, D.C. • History Professor • Women’s Auxiliary Corps
JOHNNIE HOLMES
Chicago, Illinois • Real Estate Investor • 761st Tank Battalion
LUIS ARMIJO
Fullerton, California • Schoolteacher • Communication Specialist, 20th Air Force
NAO TAKASUGI
Oxnard, California • California State Assemblyman
NORMAN MINETA
Edgewater, Maryland • California Congressman
LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND COMMITMENT
JOHN AND PEGGY ASSENZIO
Westbury, New York • Salesman/Teacher • 118th Combat Engineers
THE DUMBOS
Yankton, South Dakota
GAYLORD AND CARRIE LEE NELSON
Kensington, Maryland • Governor and Senator • Captain, U.S. Army/Lieutenant, U.S. Army Nurse Corps
JEANETTE GAGNE NORTON
Minneapolis, Minnesota
DAPHNE CAVIN
Lebanon, Indiana
FAMOUS PEOPLE
GEORGE BUSH
Houston, Texas • President of the United States • Navy Air Corps
BEN BRADLEE
Washington, D.C. • Journalist • Lieutenant, J.G., U.S. Army
ART BUCHWALD
Washington, D.C. • Writer • U.S. Marine Corps
ANDY ROONEY
New York, New York • Journalist • U.S. Army
JULIA CHILD
Pasadena, California • Chef • Office of Strategic Services
GERTRUDE BELLE “TRUDY” ELION
Chapel Hill, North Carolina • Chemist • Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1988
CHESTERFIELD SMITH
Miami, Florida • Attorney, President of the American Bar Association • U.S. Infantry, 94th Division
AL NEUHARTH
Cocoa Beach, Florida • Founder, USA Today • U.S. Infantry, 86th Division
MAURICE “HANK” GREENBERG
New York, New York • CEO, American International Group • U.S. Army, Signal Corps, Army Rangers
THE ARENA
MARK HATFIELD
Portland, Oregon • U.S. Senator • U.S. Navy
BOB DOLE
Russell, Kansas • U.S. Senator, Presidential Candidate • U.S. Army, 10th Mountain Division
DANIEL INOUYE
Honolulu, Hawaii • U.S. Senator • U.S. Army, 442nd Regimental Combat Team
CASPAR WEINBERGER
San Francisco, California • Secretary of Defense • U.S. Army
LLOYD CUTLER
Washington, D.C. • Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton • U.S. Army, Combat Engineers
GEORGE SHULTZ
Palo Alto, California • Cabinet Member • U.S. Marines
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER
New York, New York • Historian • Office of War Information, Office of Strategic Services
ED GUTHMAN
Pacific Palisades, California • Journalist, Press Secretary to Robert F. Kennedy • Lieutenant, U.S. Infantry, 85th Division
THE TWILIGHT OF THEIR LIVES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
For Meredith, of course,
and her parents,
Vivian and Merritt Auld,
and my parents,
Jean and Anthony “Red” Brokaw
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first came to fully understand what effect members of the World War II generation had on my life and the world we occupy today, I quickly resolved to tell their stories as a small gesture of personal appreciation. As I did that on television, at dinner parties, and in commencement speeches, it had the effect of a chain letter that no one wanted to disrupt. Everyone seemed to want to share their own stories of parents, other family members, or acquaintances who were charter members of this remarkable generation.
It rapidly became a kind of extended family, and with the encouragement of a number of friends I began to understand that this was a mother lode of material that deserved the permanence a book would represent. It was a daunting undertaking: because there are so many stories to tell and because the lives of these people are so special I didn’t want to do anything in a book that would not live up to their deeds, heroic and otherwise.
If I have failed them, it is entirely my fault.
In the course of gathering this material, interviewing the subjects, and collecting the photographs, I had invaluable assistance from the best and brightest of a new generation, young women and young men in their twenties and thirties who came to care about these subjects as passionately as I did.
Elizabeth Bowyer, now a law student at the University of Virginia, and Phil Napoli, a newly minted Ph.D. in history from Columbia, teamed up with Julie Huang, my research assistant at NBC News, to work tirelessly and brilliantly to provide me with an unending supply of stories, facts, insights, and ideas. I am more grateful to them than they’ll ever know. I’d also like to thank Tammy Fine, who helped get the project started before moving to Washington and a new assignment on the Today show.
Through it all, Erin O’Connor, who runs my NBC life with the organizational and mission-oriented skills of a battlefield commander, was
simply peerless in her ability to juggle all of the needs of this book, my NBC News duties, and the considerable logistical demands of both. Metaphorically, if I go into any battle, I want Erin at my side.
Other friends who initially encouraged me to expand my thoughts on the World War II generation into a book include Stephen Ambrose, Ellen Levine of Good Housekeeping, and William Styron. I was further encouraged in the effort by reading the works of William Manchester, Paul Fussell, Ben Bradlee, Andy Rooney, and Art Buchwald.
So many ideas came from so many places, but I would be remiss not to single out my pal Mike Barnicle, the best newspaper columnist Boston has ever had; Bob Karolevitz, a fine writer in my hometown who wrote of his generation for the local newspaper, The Yankton Press and Dakotan; the astute observations of my friends Kurt Andersen and Frank Gannon; and my NBC colleagues, who offered to share notes and enthusiasm and tolerated my fits of frustration, distraction, and emotion.
Special thanks go to Craig Leake and Andrea Malin, my colleagues on the NBC documentary also called The Greatest Generation. They were simultaneously able to get some of these stories on screen while also helping me get them on the pages of this book. I could not be more proud to be associated with both of them on both projects.
Also, since a book is about more than writing it and publishing it, I am deeply grateful for the counsel and expertise of my business manager, Kenneth Starr. (No, not that Ken Starr. This is a New Yorker with an altogether different line of work.)
And what can I say of the keen eye, the great heart, and the indomitable spirit of the woman who has been commander in chief on this project, Kate Medina, my editor at Random House? Her enthusiasm for the subject, coolness under fire when the schedule was shattered by events in Washington and elsewhere, and, most of all, her friendship through it all will live in my heart forever. For all that she managed during the last twelve months, Kate deserves her own chapter in this book. And special thanks to the team at Random House who helped produce this book: Meaghan Rady, Benjamin Dreyer, Richard Elman, and Carole Lowenstein.
As always, I’m grateful for the love, encouragement, and tolerance of the women who have made all the difference in my life: Meredith, my wife; Jean, my mother; Jennifer, Andrea, and Sarah, our daughters.
Finally, to the men and women whose stories I did not get to, I am genuinely sorry, for I have loved them all. I hope you will tell them in your own way. To those families and friends of other members of the greatest generation, may I suggest you now begin to ask the questions and hear the stories that have been locked in memory for too long.
Tom Brokaw, Igloo, South Dakota, U.S. Army Ordnance Depot, 1944
GENERATIONS
In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. I was well prepared with research on the planning for the invasion—the numbers of men, ships, airplanes, and other weapons involved; the tactical and strategic errors of the Germans; and the names of the Normandy villages that in the midst of battle provided critical support to the invaders. What I was not prepared for was how this experience would affect me emotionally.
The D-Day fortieth-anniversary project awakened my earliest memories. Between the ages of three and five I lived on an Army base in western South Dakota and spent a good deal of my time outdoors in a tiny helmet, shooting stick guns at imaginary German and Japanese soldiers. My father, Red Brokaw, then in his early thirties, was an all-purpose Mr. Fix-It and operator of snow-plows and construction machinery, part of a crew that kept the base functioning. When he was drafted, the base commander called him back, reasoning he was more valuable in the job he had. When Dad returned home, it was the first time I saw my mother cry. These were powerful images for an impressionable youngster.
The war effort was all around us. Ammunition was tested on the South Dakota sagebrush prairie before being shipped out to battlefront positions. I seem to remember that one Fourth of July the base commander staged a particularly large firing exercise as a wartime substitute for fireworks. Neighbors always seemed to be going to or coming home from the war. My grandfather Jim Conley followed the war’s progress in Time magazine and on his maps. There was even a stockade of Italian prisoners of war on the edge of the base. They were often free to wander around the base in their distinctive, baggy POW uniforms, chattering happily in Italian, a curious Mediterranean presence in that barren corner of the Great Plains.
At the same time, my future wife, Meredith Auld, was starting life in Yankton, South Dakota, the Missouri River community that later became the Brokaw family home as well. She saw her father only once during her first five years. He was a front-line doctor with the Army’s 34th Regiment and was in the thick of battle from North Africa all the way through Italy. When he returned home, he established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld’s Army coats with the major’s insignia still attached, I remember thinking, “God, Doc Auld was a big deal in the war.”
Yet when I arrived in Normandy, those memories had receded, replaced by days of innocence in the fifties, my life as a journalist covering the political turmoil brought on by Vietnam, the social upheaval of the sixties, and Watergate in the seventies. I was much more concerned about the prospects of the Cold War than the lessons of the war of my early years.
I was simply looking forward to what I thought would be an interesting assignment in a part of France celebrated for its hospitality, its seafood, and its Calvados, the local brandy made from apples.
Instead, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had landed there and now returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories in the cafés and inns, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished. These men and women came of age in the Great Depression, when economic despair hovered over the land like a plague. They had watched their parents lose their businesses, their farms, their jobs, their hopes. They had learned to accept a future that played out one day at a time. Then, just as there was a glimmer of economic recovery, war exploded across Europe and Asia. When Pearl Harbor made it irrefutably clear that America was not a fortress, this generation was summoned to the parade ground and told to train for war. They left their ranches in Sully County, South Dakota, their jobs on the main street of Americus, Georgia, they gave up their place on the assembly lines in Detroit and in the ranks of Wall Street, they quit school or went from cap and gown directly into uniform.
They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.
They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible, across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria. They fought their way up a necklace of South Pacific islands few had ever heard of before and made them a fixed part of American history—islands with names like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. They were in the air every day, in skies filled with terror, and they went to sea on hostile waters far removed from the shores of their homeland.
New branches of the services were formed to get women into uniform, working at tasks that would free more men for combat. Other women went to work in the laboratories and in the factories, developing new medicines, building ships, planes, and tanks, and raising the families that had been left behind.
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America’s preeminent physicists were engaged in a secret race to build a new bomb before Germany figured out how to harness the atom as a weapon. Without their efforts and sacrifices our world would be a far different place today.
When the war was over, the men and women who had been involved, in uniform and in civilian capacities, joined in joyous and short-lived celebrations, then immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They were mature beyond their years, tempered by what they had been through, disciplined by their military training and sacrifices. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith.
They became part of the greatest investment in higher education that any society ever made, a generous tribute from a grateful nation. The GI Bill, providing veterans tuition and spending money for education, was a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation’s future. Campus classrooms and housing were overflowing with young men in their mid-twenties, many of whom had never expected to get a college education. They left those campuses with degrees and a determination to make up for lost time. They were a new kind of army now, moving onto the landscapes of industry, science, art, public policy, all the fields of American life, bringing to them the same passions and discipline that had served them so well during the war.
They helped convert a wartime economy into the most powerful peacetime economy in history. They made breakthroughs in medicine and other sciences. They gave the world new art and literature. They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation. They gave America Medicare.
They helped rebuild the economies and political institutions of their former enemies, and they stood fast against the totalitarianism of their former allies, the Russians. They were rocked by the social and political upheaval of the sixties. Many of them hated the long hair, the free love, and, especially, what they saw as the desecration of the flag. But they didn’t give up on the new generation.
They weren’t perfect. They made mistakes. They allowed McCarthyism and racism to go unchallenged for too long. Women of the World War II generation, who had demonstrated so convincingly that they had so much more to offer beyond their traditional work, were the underpinning for the liberation of their gender, even as many of their husbands resisted the idea. When a new war broke out, many of the veterans initially failed to recognize the differences between their war and the one in Vietnam.
Tom Brokaw Page 1