Veterans’ voices saved for history

November 16, 2007 09:45 am

— By Brad Kellar
Herald-Banner Staff

COMMERCE — They tell stories about incidents which took place more than six decades ago, epic accounts of war and heroism and horror and sacrifice, but they may be tales no one has ever heard.
With hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans reportedly dying each year, the effort undertaken by Texas A&M University-Commerce may serve as one of the last chances many North Texans will have to tell the world about their experiences.
The university library began the “We Remember: Honoring Those Who Served in World War II” project several months ago and already the voices and images of several dozen veterans and/or their family members who waited on the homefront have been captured on digital recorders and saved for history.
The Director of the University Library, Gregory Mitchell, said using digital media forms has been become the standard for libraries, not only for their ease of use, but for how items of data can be shared with other institutions and library patrons all over the world.
Mitchell said he and university archivist Jim Conrad began talking about starting the “We Remember” project about a year ago and both immediately realized the importance of the work.
“This is a chapter in our history that is disappearing right before our eyes,” Mitchell said, noting how an estimated 1,025 World War II veterans die across the United States each day.
“And of course we have our share here in Texas,” Mitchell said.
The project began on a small scale.
“I always joke about it, because we started off that our whole expenditure was $40 for a set of shop lights at Wal-Mart,” he said. “Later on, we bought some more software and got some more sophisticated equipment.”
The effort has been so successful that Mitchell sees where several more library collections will eventually be turned over to digital archives.
“But it was our World War II collection which had a sense of urgency for us, because it is fading away before our eyes,” he said.
The original goal was to conduct 100 interviews within the first year. That number was surpassed by the end of October, as they discovered how quickly veterans and their families wanted to open up about their pasts.
“We’re doing World War II veterans, then we are also doing homefront veterans,” Conrad said. The interviews also included Korean and Vietnam veterans who asked for the chance to speak up.
Mitchell said the university began to distribute a brochure at the start of the project.
“We were really prepared to have to advertise to promote this,” Mitchell said. “But we discovered we had a waiting list of people waiting to go into interviews, simply by word of mouth.”
Each interview lasts about one hour, during which the university is usually given access to personal items related to the subject.
“Souvenirs they brought home from the war, letters and personal correspondence during the war, photos and things like that,” Mitchell said.
The tales the subjects tell can be uplifting, heartbreaking or a mixture of both.
Conrad recalled the interview with Mary Jane Vance of Greenville.
“She and her three sisters were interned (in their home) in the Philippines during World War II,” Conrad said. Their father, as an American citizen, was imprisoned. “It was quite an ordeal for them to survive. Once a week the Japanese would let them go out for supplies, under very close supervision.”
There are stories of veterans serving in every theater of the war, including from those who were captured and held as prisoners of war, such as Harry Thompson of Wolfe City.
The interviews are not only taking place with local or Hunt County veterans. Stories have come from individuals across North Texas, including Rockwall, Emory, Plano, Bonham, Dallas, Terrell and Sulphur Springs. Others have come from California, Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
“We’ve gotten all kinds of stories,” Conrad said. “The veterans we’ve interviewed have been very open and willing to talk, because in some cases no one has ever asked them to tell their stories.”
The interviews have included two Holocaust survivors and they have been trying to reach Germans who were held in POW camps in Princeton and Paris.
“It ought to be a real contrast, what their experience was to what our POWs had,” Mitchell said.
Conrad said most of those who have been interviewed were in their late teens to early 20s when they began their service.
“And almost all of these were on the front lines,” Conrad said.
“So many of these people were so terribly young, to have shouldered such responsibility,” Mitchell said.
David Garrett, who grew up in Emory, found himself driving trucks used to supply Gen. George S. Patton’s troops.
“They’d drive all night and all day,” Conrad said, recalling how Garrett told of the frequent fire from German ambush snipers along the routes. “He said he lost several of his friends that way.”
Dewey Fitzpatrick of Greenville, former owner of the fabled Spare Rib Barbecue restaurant, served on the same base as the Tuskegee Airmen.
“He told us a wonderful story about Eleanor Roosevelt,” Mitchell said.
U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall of Rockwall shared his memories as a Navy airman during the war.
One copy of each interview is saved at the library, where it can be viewed online, with one copy provided at no cost to the subject of the interview and one copy sent to the Library of Congress.
The library’s Glenn Gainer did many of the interviews and said it was often hard to get away from the subjects, who had been waiting most of their lives to tell their stories.
“It was very educational, extremely educational,” Gainer said. “It was the best way to learn history.”
Gainer noted how the experiences relayed by the veterans are hardly the stories included in “dry” reference books about the war.
“Some of these were probably never written down before,” Gainer said. “They tell me things I know have never been written down.”
Having faced such horrors during the war, Gainer said some of the veterans were obviously shattered for the rest of their lives.
“One man in particular, who is in the VA Hospital up in Bonham, said he was wounded by a mahogany bullet,” Gainer said of the wooden ammunition crafted by some Japanese soldiers during the latter days of the Pacific Theater. “He said when it hits you, it just splinters and sends all these wooden splinters into your back.”
Another tale was from a navigator on a B-24 Liberator flying out of North Africa.
“One day, the bombs didn’t drop right, but they didn’t explode and they got hung up in the bomb bay doors,” Gainer said. The navigator had to climb down into the bomb bay doors and kick the bombs loose, but in so doing the doors themselves were damaged and could not close. The plane could not land safely with the doors open.
“So he had to climb down and rope those things together and then climb back up into the plane and pull and pull and pull to get the doors high enough to where they could land,” Gainer said, adding the drama occurred on the navigator’s 50th aerial mission.
Gainer said he is already booked for interviews through November, but is still wanting to hear more.
He should get his chance, as the university library intends to continue the “We Remember” project for a while.
“It will continue at least another three years ... and we want to collect as much as we can,” Mitchell said.

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