27 June 2008
Veterans’ Wartime Memories Find Home in Library of Congress
Veterans History Project preserves accounts for future generations, scholars
Washington -- Warren Tsuneishi recalls saying goodbye to his parents at Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, an internment camp in Wyoming, in 1944 before shipping off to the Philippines with General Douglas MacArthur’s forces. Tsuneishi and his brother had volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) as soon as the U.S. Army began accepting Nisei, the children of Japanese immigrants.
“My mother was worried because she had two sons in the MIS, and two others would soon be age-eligible for the draft,” Tsuneishi recently told the Veterans History Project at the U.S. Library of Congress. “They were soon taken, and in the WRA [War Relocation Authority] archives there is a photo of my mother and another Issei [first-generation immigrant] mother standing, with unsmiling faces, holding small bannerettes bearing four blue stars.”
The blue star banner is the symbol of mothers whose children are serving in the armed forces.
Tsuneishi, who served with MacArthur as a translator of captured Japanese documents, was awarded a Bronze Star. He said that despite his parents’ internment during the war, “I never gave up my belief in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address -- the fundamental American value of giving equal opportunity and justice for all regardless of race or ethnicity.”
His story is one of 50,000 in the Veterans History Project (VHP) collection. There are more than 17 million American war veterans, and almost 1,000 are dying each day, especially those who served during World War II. To honor them and save this fleeting history, Congress in 2000 initiated a project to preserve their memories in the nation's library.
The collection includes written and recorded oral histories, letters, diaries, photos, historical documents and other mementos. About 10 percent of the stories -- 5,000 -- can be viewed on the VHP Web site, and the rest can be researched at the Library of Congress in Washington.
EXPERIENCING WAR
Some of the most compelling accounts are in the “Experiencing War” section, which has special archives on women soldiers and nurses, prisoners of war, medical and intelligence personnel, African Americans and other ethnicities, veterans of D-Day (June 6, 1944) and others.
More than half the stories are from veterans of World War II. One is Major Corbin Willis, an Army Air Corps combat pilot who crashed and was captured by the Germans in 1944. He survived a 100-mile march through the snow from one POW camp to another in Germany. At one camp, he recalled, “I knocked on the wall [of my cell] and after a period of time the knock was returned -- so I spelled out ‘Hi’ in Morse code and he returned the greeting. Together we managed to learn about each other.”
Willis left the other man a gift: a book. “He had been in the cell, next to mine, for 11 days and they hadn't spoken to him once. He was eager to do something other than pace the floor,” Willis said. He never learned the other man’s name.
Women's stories are about 10 percent of the VHP collection. In 1961 Rhona Marie “Ronnie” Prescott was in her final year of nursing school when she enlisted in the Army. “They recruited nurses then because the Vietnam War was escalating,” she said.
Once she got to Vietnam, it was tough. “When surgery started -- it was usually brain surgery -- we had no idea what we would find and the techniques weren't perfected at that time. … Once we got into a skull we stayed until the work was done to the best of our ability. We worked really long days and scary days,” recalled Prescott.
Rutherford Vincent Brice, an African American, enlisted in the Navy in 1942 at the age of 17. He served with the aircraft carrier fleet in the Pacific as an aviation machinist. “The military was segregated,” he recalled. While on duty he worked with sailors of every race, “and then I had to go to the forward part of the ship out of the hangar deck to speak with my compadres -- the guys that were the cooks, bakers and steward’s mates. Some were black and some were Filipinos. But the quarters were separate, completely.”
Brice also served in the Korean War. During the siege of a hill known as Old Baldy in 1952, he led his and two other companies in securing the hill during a weeklong battle. “The only thing I ate was grapefruit out of a can during that whole seven days. I must have lost, you know, about 12, 14 pounds,” he recalled. Brice was subsequently awarded the Silver Star. “I did a lot of growing up in those seven days,” he said.
MEMORIES FROM THE HOME FRONT
The Veterans History Project also collects stories from home-front civilians who supported the armed forces. During World War II, commercial artist Mimi Korach Lesser sketched patients at local veterans’ hospitals in New York City so their portraits could be mailed to their distant families.
One hospital specialized in facial reconstruction. “The veterans were disbelieving that an artist would want to draw them,” Lesser said. “So it took great daring for a G.I. [soldier], with half his face disfigured, to approach me with bravado and ask what I was going to do about him. Posing him with his good side facing me, I was able to sketch what his face would look like after rehabilitation was complete. Talk about success -- this opened up a stream of eager, brave, sad men.”
This year VHP observed Memorial Day (May 26) by selecting the story of Afghanistan-Iraq war veteran James Nappier to be the 5,000th digitized interview in the collection.
Nappier, who had served in the Marines 20 years earlier, got his chance to return to the service. At age 41 he was recruited by the Navy Seabees. “We built runways, hospitals, schools, bridges, anything that needed to be built,” he said. In Iraq, Nappier volunteered for the most dangerous missions, figuring he was saving younger men with young children from harm's way.
His leg and arm were badly injured in a mortar attack, and he almost lost the leg. When the doctors first saw him, they thought his arm bone was protruding from a wound, Nappier said in the taped interview, “but it turned out to be [a bone] from my buddy’s legs.”
“One of my buddies’ bones are scattered throughout my arm,” Nappier said.
While there are many university and state archives containing veterans’ accounts, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress is the largest archive of military veterans’ oral histories in the United States. More information and links to oral histories, as well as links to other military oral history collections, are available on the Library of Congress VHP Web site.
Note: Sarah Rouse, a former senior staff member with the Veterans History Project, has conducted more than 30 interviews with veterans.
