For students, learning about wars often means reading dull black-on-white text in a history book.
But for eighth-graders at Iroquois Middle School in Niskayuna, Thursday, April 19, added some color to history lessons, as they heard firsthand accounts of the past century’s greatest conflict.
Four local World War II veterans visited the school for a panel talk to share personal stories and answer questions.
Dennis Frank, an eighth grade social studies teacher at Iroquois, organizes the annual event to coincide with students finishing their unit on WWII. Typically the students are tested following the event.
“I find it to be the most memorable day of the year and I think the students will feel the same way when it is over,” Frank said. “They really have a very good appreciation and understanding of what these gentlemen have gone through.”
Three of the veterans had talked to students during previous years at the event, but George Williams, an 86-year-old Niskayuna resident, was talking for the first time. Williams even donned his old uniform for the occasion.
“(Dennis Frank) asked me if I would come and share my thoughts and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,” Williams said.
The men gathered in the library at the school before the event, slowly pacing down the school’s hallways. It didn’t take long for them after greeting each other to start talking about the war again.
The veterans remembered that they and their peers weren’t too much older than the students they were talking to when they joined the war effort.
William Rochelle Jr., an 87-year-old Glenville resident, said he enlisted in November 1942 when he was a freshman in college, along with several other classmates.
“The fate of the world, by in large, was put in the hands of people not a whole lot older than you folks and what we did was remarkable,” Rochelle said.
John Moehle joined at an even younger age as a high school senior only three months from receiving his diploma. Moehle became a combat engineer and arrived in England four days before Christmas in 1944.
“One day I am a senior there and then a week later I’m on a crew training boat,” Moehle said. “I had a group of my friends that I had gone all through school with and they had been drafted … so I went over to the draft board and volunteered.”
Moehle, an 87-year-old Scotia resident, said even though he was “safe” until graduating from high school, he wanted to follow his longtime friends into service.
All four veterans speaking at the event had volunteered for service.
Richard Gibbons, an 87-year-old Scotia resident, logged more than 2,000 hours in a B-24 bomber, with much of his time spent on submarine patrol.
“You don’t know how much it means to us veterans to see the results of what we did years ago,” Gibbons said. “We did it mainly because we wanted to see this country continue.”
Flying out the other side
Rochelle, a bombardier with the 15th Air Force out of Italy, said in the early morning hours of Christmas in 1944 he realized what war really entailed.
The night before, on Christmas Eve, he said his crew were told there would be a “No-Fly Day” on Christmas, so immediately pilots and navigators started to celebrate “more than they should,” but at 4 a.m. he was told they were expected to leave in half an hour.
The crew flew over Brux, Germany, which was producing around 65 percent of gasoline for all German purposes, he said. Once flying over Brux the crew was faced with an antiaircraft defense they’d never seen before.
“They had a thousand flak guns in circles every half mile from the center of the target out about three miles,” he said. “They had positioned them so when you were over the target, no matter how you came in at it, all thousand guns were aimed at you and you had to fly through the box.”
He said the expression of “the flak was so thick you could walk on it” was literally true in this situation. His company lost half of his group coming out the other side.
“It got worse when we got back and we had many wounded people and I had to help take a friend out that was decapitated,” he said. “That was gruesome, but it was disheartening to say the least. At that mission we had over 200 holes in our airplane when we got back and … not a man hit. That was the happy part of the trip.”
Touring the remains
Williams had volunteered for the Air Force, but found himself joining an infantry unit landing on the shores of France before walking down crumbled streets and liberating a concentration camp.
In 1943, Williams enlisted in the Army and went into active duty around one month later in January 1944. He became a military policeman for the Air Force, but around the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge he went into infantry training.
Around March 1945, he traveled to Europe, but the Battle of the Bulge had already ended in late January. Upon arrival, he traveled in a train boxcar to Schweinberg, Germany.
“I was a replacement … they had lost about half of their members,” Williams said.
His second day at Schweinberg, he walked through “rubble that was all over the streets piled as high as you are,” he said to the students. This was also the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, he said.
After the war he served as a driver for the chaplain of Munich, Germany, where he saw results of the Nazi concentration camps. He was assigned to this position because, unlike most infantrymen, he had a driver’s license, he said.
He drove the chaplain to the Dachau concentration camp, the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany. He said he wasn’t allowed to talk to the prisoners.
“I did go in the gas chamber and then we went into the crematorium and the bones were still there and they went from that corner up to the ceiling,” he said.
The great bombing debate
Gibbons said at the end of WWII he signed up with 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force, nicknamed the Flying Tigers. He said he got stuck in Okinawa, Japan, because the nationalists were losing the war and the communists were taking over.
This led him to supervising the prisoners of war held at Okinawa, a task he wasn’t thrilled about.
“It was a job nobody else wanted and somehow I got stuck (with it),” Gibbons said.
The one message Gibbons said he wanted to convey was the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was the right solution to end the war.
Gibbons said he talked to a group of “distinguished Japanese officers” that were working for him and asked them what their thoughts were on the bombing. He said they thought the atomic bombings on Japan were the “best thing” that ever happened for either country.
“They said if it had not been bombed, the fighting that was about to take place would have taken place. They were aware of what they had on the other side,” he said. “Even though it was their homeland that got hit, they said that really the number of people that were killed in that particular bombing that it was well worth it as far as they were concerned.”
The casualties that would have been realized from a military confrontation were thought to be much larger than what was sustained from dropping the bombs, Gibbons said.
The atomic bomb dropped at the City of Hiroshima destroyed more than four square miles and city officials estimate the total death toll around 220,000, including those dying after December 1954 of non-acute injuries or radiation.
The Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a science research foundation through a cooperative effort between the United States and Japan, estimates the acute deaths (within two to four months) at Hiroshima to total between 90,000 and 166,000 people and at Nagasaki between 60,000 and 80,000 people.
Gibbons acknowledged everyone has to decide how they feel about the bombing.
“All of us that were in the service were glad to see the war end,” Gibbons said. “Everybody has to make up their own mind as to whether we should have or should not, but … the Japanese themselves felt that that was something that should be done, at least their officers for the military.”
Finding comfort on the front
Students did ask how the food was while in the service. The veterans rather conclusively said it wasn’t the best, but some of the men shared how they made it more palatable.
Moehle said his crew of engineers devised a unique method to cook C-Rations they received.
“There is nothing worse than eating cold meat that leaves your tongue, teeth and your mouth covered with a greasy film when you are eating it cold,” he said, a description students responded to with sounds of disgust.
Since they were engineers, he said they had access to an “awful lot” of explosives, so they used a plastic explosive to help heat the food. They would take a bayonet and poke a hole in the ground with it. Then they rolled some of the explosive material into a “long string” and stick it in the hole.
“It would burn hot and fast, so we would take our bayonet and stick it in the can and hold it over the flame,” Moehle said.
