News-World War II Stories

OSCEOLA MILLS -- They were thin pieces of paper that could crush a heart in a second.

Frank Wawrynovic knew how his tour of duty with the U.S. Army's 29th Division was going to end.

PATTON TOWNSHIP -- They spoke of betrayal, of murder, and the little girl listened. She heard the adults argue about the man hiding them from the Nazis, whether he would carry out his threat to kill them and save himself. They talked about where he would put the bodies.

Chuck Bailey doesn't need the new blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" to see Sunday morning sunshine turn into fire. He just closes his eyes.

Not since his bar mitzvah had Jack Seidner uttered one of the holiest prayers in Judaism.

But he couldn't think of anything else while falling toward the Gulf of Mexico in a disabled bomber.

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one," the staff sergeant whispered as his B-17 Flying Fortress plummeted with half of its engines dead.

The first mortar round landed mere feet from where Tom McBride lay flat on his stomach.

It didn't explode.

The second drove into an Okinawan rice paddy a couple of yards away. McBride, pinned down by Japanese gunfire, couldn't move.

He stared at the shell's tail fins.

Two duds.

A chill lingered in the spring air of Washington, D.C. Sunshine bathed bare branches and cherry blossom buds.

Down on Constitution Avenue, Elizabeth Tallichet was crying.

Through her tears, she marched in her olive-drab jacket, gray skirt and yellow gloves, eyes forward, chin up. Tallichet, then Capt. Machen of the Women's Army Corps, led 195 other WACs past weeping people who were crowding to glimpse President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral procession.

Bob Barraclough earned his promotion to major the hard way. Barraclough was a captain flying B-17 bombers in the 490th Bomb Group when his wing commander gave him the bad news: His promotion papers had bounced. But the deal was, if he flew two missions beyond the 30 required for a command pilot to go home, he would rise in rank.

More than anything, Roberts Martin feared being trapped.

It would happen like this: Martin would be crouched in the ball turret below his B-24 Liberator bomber. German anti-aircraft fire would jam the mechanism that raised the turret into the plane. And he would be stuck — with a death sentence.

All John Hellmann had to say was "ja." One nod, and the marches through the snow, the hunger, would be over. He would still be a prisoner of war, but as a kitchen assistant in an enemy field hospital.

Allen Crabtree needed a mission, any mission. His stateside orders had been clear: Join a light-tank battalion and help push the German army closer to surrender.

They called it the Hump, rows of mountain peaks jagged as shark teeth and just as lethal.

Somewhere between Borneo and the Philippines, two officers puffed their pipes on the deck of a light cruiser.

Gerald Stein made an odd Santa Claus. For one thing, he was thin and dressed in olive drab.

STATE COLLEGE -- Calvin Conklin couldn't see well enough to pass the Army Air Force physical, but that didn't stop him from spending World War II as an aerial photographer monitoring U.S. coasts for lurking German U-boats.