World War II Veterans Fading Away

Roughly 680 of America’s remaining World War II veterans die every day. Learn about some of the last of the Greatest Generation.

The refrain of an old Army ballad, made famous by World War II Gen. Douglas MacArthur, goes, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

The truth is, America’s remaining World War II veterans—most at least in their late 80s—are leaving us; about 680 die every day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a few years, the last page will turn on these living, breathing history books, men who fought a war that resulted in more American battle deaths and wounded than any other U.S. conflict. Despite a wealth of documentary films and oral histories in the archives, countless stories of average citizen-soldiers remain untold or forgotten.

“It is sad to see that these simple heroes are leaving us at such a fast rate,” said Floyd Cox, volunteer administrator of an oral history program at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg. The museum has collected 4,400 histories, but most are locked in vast archives and none is available online. Volunteers remain busy capturing stories from veterans before the program inevitably winds down.

In honor of Veterans Day (November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I in 1918), I interviewed more than a dozen Texas World War II veterans. They were mostly small-town and farm-raised kids propelled into deadly situations, living to tell how they survived parachuting into enemy territory, fighting in hand-to-hand combat, firing mortars and suffering frostbite, being stranded in the vast Pacific after the sinking of their ship and escaping a burning tank. Some opened up after years of reticence; some shed tears. One vet and his prewar bride demonstrated their everlasting love, and many told of their unfathomable will to live and immense gratitude.

Now, some 70 years after U.S. troops were pulled into the war, we get the rich details of lives so cruelly interrupted.

‘We didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was’

On December 7, 1941, 17-year-old Jetty Cook and some buddies heard the news after they watched a matinee of “Sergeant York,” the World War I movie starring Gary Cooper.

“Extra, extra! Pearl Harbor attacked!” a paperboy cried.

“We didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was,” Cook said of Japan’s bombing of the Hawaiian military base that instantly drove America into war.

A year later, Cook left his hometown of Big Spring and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. In the following months he trained as a gunner on a B-17 bomber.

On July 20, 1944, on a bombing run over Germany, his aircraft was hit by flak, which caused two engines to fail and another soon to catch fire. The plane limped westward as it slowly fell from the sky. The airmen jumped just before the bomber crashed somewhere in German-occupied Belgium. Cook parachuted, landed safely, quickly gathered up his chute and hid in some bushes. He watched as German soldiers captured fellow U.S. troops, narrowly escaping detection by a Nazi soldier and his dog.

When the coast was clear, Cook walked westward, drank from a muddy puddle and after midnight took a chance by knocking on the door of a modest farm house, not knowing whether he was in Germany. A farmer gave him some bitter coffee, black bread and shelter in a hayloft. The next day, a member of the Belgian Resistance questioned him at length to ensure he wasn’t a German plant.

Over the next two months, a cast of Belgian partisans took turns hiding Cook, who often posed as if he couldn’t hear or speak. He was periodically reunited with some of his crewmates and shuttled to safe houses, including a room over a bar frequented by German soldiers, a brothel (also visited nightly by the Germans) and a convent. He participated in a bank robbery to obtain food rations, helped a team of Resistance members blow up a railroad bridge to send a trainload of German troops to their deaths and helped capture German Gestapo agents after American and British forces began to liberate Belgium.

Cook and a fellow airman narrowly escaped death when a group of Belgians, emboldened by the retreat of German forces, captured them and put nooses around their necks, insisting they were German spies as they dragged them to a lamppost to be hanged. Then a young Belgian woman stepped up and said she knew the local police chief secretly housed an American and insisted they check. They phoned from a nearby store and verified Cook had been hiding out with the chief’s family. Within minutes, they broke out bottles of wine and they all celebrated.

Cook eventually made a career in the Air Force. Over the years, he returned to Belgium numerous times to reunite with people who aided him and attend anniversary events. Today, Cook, 88, lives in Hunt with his wife of 42 years, Wanda.

‘They were bayoneting and shooting everything that moved’

On May 18, 1942, five months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Arwin J. “Jay” Bowden enlisted in the Marines. One of eight children born to a cotton farmer and his wife near Vernon in North Texas, he had just graduated from high school.

By November 1942, Bowden, quickly trained as a radio operator, was shipped off with his division to New Zealand, where they set up a defense force to guard against a possible attack by Japan and built camps for troops. Within a year, Bowden and his regiment entered their first combat at the Battle of Tarawa, a strategic atoll about 2,400 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor that U.S. forces needed to refuel aircraft and serve as a launchpad to retake the Philippines and, eventually, attack Japan.

Japan had built a landing strip on Tarawa’s main island and fortified the island with many stockades, firing pits, underground tunnels and concrete bunkers protecting big guns aiming down the island’s lagoon and beaches. One Japanese commander said it would take “1 million men 100 years” to conquer Tarawa. “This was probably the most fortified 290 acres in the world,” Bowden said.

Before dawn on November 20, 1943, Bowden was aboard a troop transport with about 2,000 Marines, part of the largest U.S. operation in the Pacific at the time. He was among troops sent ashore on landing craft known as Higgins boats, but his boat got stuck on a reef. He and 32 other Marines boarded two amphibious track vehicles to get ashore. As they approached the beach, the Japanese blew up Bowden’s vehicle and killed most of the men who were with him.

The fire burned off nearly all of Bowden’s clothes except his boots, knife belt and the leggings he wore under his uniform. His right ear was nearly burned off, as was most of his hair. He dove into knee-deep water and then hid with five other Marines behind a second vehicle. They nursed their wounds and stayed there as Japanese soldiers aimed their weapons at other targets. Near dusk, they decided their best hope was going into deeper water—to the reef about 500 yards out, where they hoped for a rescue.

Earlier in the day, Bowden had picked up a waterlogged rifle that was useless except for the bayonet at the end. As they moved out, Japanese soldiers spotted them by the light of the fires on the island. “They came out and they were bayoneting and shooting everything that moved,” Bowden said. Several enemy soldiers came near, and Bowden somehow got close enough to one of the Japanese carrying a machine gun to plunge his bayonet into his chest.

In such an adrenaline-charged moment, “you don’t know where all your energy is coming from, and you don’t remember where or when. Anyway, I survived,” Bowden said.

He and the two other surviving Marines scrambled away and were picked up by a U.S. ship on which they received immediate medical attention before being sent to a hospital in Honolulu.

Meanwhile, after 76 hours of fierce fighting, the Marines took the island but suffered more than 1,000 deaths and 2,000 casualties, while the Japanese lost more than 4,600 troops. Tarawa shocked the nation for its high cost in U.S. lives and was the subject of a documentary that won an Academy Award in 1944.

Bowden, 89, recovered after six weeks of medical care and returned to participate in other battles in the Pacific. After the war, he spent most of his work life at Southwestern Bell. He is a widower and lives in San Antonio.

‘I was thrilled to death because he came back whole’

It was 1939 in a small town in Oklahoma when Marion Henegar, 21, married his sweetheart, Oletha, just 17. By 1943, Henegar had entered the Army Air Corps and spent three years as a radio operator on a C-47 that hauled supplies and paratroopers to the front lines in Europe.

To drop parachutists, Henegar’s aircraft often flew low, just 650 feet above ground, plenty close enough to be shot down by the Germans. “When we got back, we’d count the holes in the planes,” Henegar said.

For three years, Henegar and Oletha corresponded constantly. “We wrote sometimes once a day, sometimes two,” Oletha said.

Oletha sent her husband care packages with ground coffee, canned milk, pecan pies and—once—a pair of boots better-made than his Army-issued pair. Because of weight limits on packages, she sent each boot separately.

Near the end of the war, Henegar and his crew were assigned a new C-47. The only married one of the bunch, Henegar was given the honor of naming the plane. He chose “Little Oletha.” Henegar proudly showed a black-and-white photo of a strapping young man in a jumpsuit, standing under the plane with his wife’s name painted on the fuselage.

After the war, Henegar flew back to the States, landed in Boston and hopped a bus back home. Oletha drove to pick him up at the bus station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was swarming with giddy GIs who grabbed any female they could.

“They would run if they saw a woman, and they would hug her and kiss her and fling her in the air. They were so happy the war was over,” she said. “Most of them were drinking. It was wild.”

Oletha wanted none of that, so she hid behind a tree and snuck into the terminal. She was at the door of the bus station when Henegar stepped off the bus. “Oh, he looked wonderful. He was a very handsome Air Force guy,” Oletha recalls. “He still is. I was thrilled to death because he came back whole, and I felt for the ones who came back the other way.”

“We spent lots of time kissing and hugging, and we couldn’t keep our hands off one another,” Oletha said. “We were looking forward to being together again.”

The couple had two children and moved to Texas, where Henegar spent 37 years in the energy business, making use of the skills he developed in the military to operate electronic instruments to find oil for Phillips Petroleum Co. and Chevron. This year, the Henegars marked 73 years of marriage.

“I’m proud that I served in the war,” said Henegar, 95, who lives in Livingston. “You just do what you’re supposed to do. And I thank the Lord for watching over me.”

‘I thought it was angels coming’

In July 1945, L.D. Cox was a 19-year-old helmsman aboard the USS Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser that carried a secret wooden box across the Pacific to the small island of Tinian. He later learned the box contained parts and enriched uranium for the atom bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” the weapon loaded on the aircraft Enola Gay and dropped on Hiroshima.

Just after midnight on July 30 and one week before the dropping of the atom bomb led to Japan’s surrender, Cox’s ship was struck by two torpedoes fired by a Japanese sub. The more than 600-foot-long Indianapolis sank in just 12 minutes, resulting in one of the most dramatic stories of the war.

With the ship quickly going down, Cox put on a life preserver and handed one to the ship’s captain, Charles McVay. In the ensuing chaos, the captain ordered the sailors to abandon ship.

For the next four days and five nights, Cox and hundreds of men floated, most without food and water. Many men died of dehydration, drowning and attacks by sharks, which Cox could see circling under the surface. Some hallucinated and swam off, never to be seen again. Dying of thirst, one sailor removed his life vest, went under to drink the saltwater and died within about two hours with brown foam around his tongue and mouth.

Cox floated with a pack of about 30 others. A couple of days after the sinking, Cox remembers a shark surfaced and locked onto a sailor floating only three feet away from him. “He came up like lightning and took him down and you couldn’t see anything else,” Cox said.

Cox and the remainder of his group who survived slowly sank lower and lower in their waterlogged life preservers, their noses barely above the water after being afloat more than 100 hours. They were finally rescued when a U.S. pilot saw them by chance one afternoon. Ships were eventually dispatched and picked them up after dark. Cox remembers seeing a spotlight shining up into the dark sky, a beacon of hope from a ship that many sailors later said saved their lives by giving them the will to hang on. “I thought it was angels coming,” said Cox.

The sinking of the Indianapolis resulted in the deaths of almost 900 of the 1,200 men on board. McVay, who also was rescued, was later court-martialed for failing to zigzag to avoid torpedo attacks, a controversial rebuke that Cox and other survivors never have supported.

After the war, Cox graduated from Texas A&M University, served as state sales director for a livestock feed company and operated a ranch. He still owns an 800-acre cattle ranch and lives in Comanche with his wife of 63 years, Sara Lou.

Only the grace of God—and his strong will to survive—allowed him to live, said Cox, 86, who frequently speaks to groups of schoolchildren about his war experience. Unlike some senior citizens chagrined by young generations, Cox expresses optimism and encourages elders to impart strong moral leadership and guidance on today’s kids, who one day will lead the country.

“What I tell them is freedom is not free,” Cox said. “Somebody has to fight to keep our freedom.”

D Day on a PT boat

On June 6, 1944, Clyde Combs was aboard PT 515 looking upon history’s largest amphibious landing before dawn.

All he could hear was the constant drone of U.S. and Allied bombers flying above, thunderous shelling from nearby battleships. About one-third of a mile away, soldiers waded to shore.

Combs was a nineteen-year-old quartermaster on the speedy PT boat, one of dozens lined up on D-Day to guard the western flank of the invasion force that marked the beginning of the end of Germany’s occupation of France and Europe.

In his upscale west Houston townhouse he shares with his wife, Virginia, Combs, 88, told me the story of his life before and during the great war. I learned about PT boats, speedy eighty-foot-long boats made of mahogany that FDR insisted the War Department build at a time that U.S. Navy more favored big battleships.

Combs gave me a copy of a drawing he made of the D-Day invasion showing where his boat was stationed and then other encounters his PT 515 was involved in during the ensuring months off the shores of Normandy. It’s hard to make out on this copy, but Combs noted on the drawing his boat picked up a dead seaman floating in the channel later in the day on June 6 following the sinking of the USS Corry destroyer, which struck a German land mine.

Visiting a WWII stalag in a small Texas town

Heino Erichsen was born June 7, 1924 in Kiel, Germany, a Baltic Sea port. When he was nine years old, Adolph Hitler became Germany’s chancellor and led the country into its irrational and destructive decade that led to perhaps the world’s largest and most gruesome war and ethnic persecution.

When he was growing up, Heino was among many thousands of German boys who became members of Hitler Youth, a compulsory military indoctrination program of the the German war machine. In May 1943, a month away from his eighteenth birthday, Heino was drafted into the German Army and sent to boot camp in Denmark, where he trained to fire machine guns, and within months he was a member of the German Afrika Korps sent to North Africa to fight a losing battle against the Allied forces. He was taken as a prisoner and shipped with hundreds of thousands of German prisoners to newly built POW camps in the United States. After arriving in New York and deloused, Heino was put on a train to Hearne, a little town in East Central Texas.

Heino was among as many as 4,800 German POWs who lived at Camp Hearne, where the government built 250 buildings: barracks, hospital buildings, guard towers, administrative facilities, mess halls and a building that prisoners converted into a 200-seat theater. The barbed wire that fenced in the POWs would line 1,800 miles, more than enough to stretch to Chicago.

Camp Hearne POW camp now houses a museum.

Hearne city boosters had successfully lobbied the War Department to build the camp just outside of town as a way to bolster the local economy. It was among the largest of dozens of facilities in Texas that housed POWs during World War II.

Most of the German POWs at Hearne were noncommissioned officers, hard-liner sergeant types who were strong believers in the Third Reich. “We had some scary guys,” Melissa Freemen told me Friday during a tour of the Camp Hearne Exhibit and Visitors Center.

From all indications, Heino was not among the scaries. This morning I met Heino at the independent living facility he lives in The Woodlands, a little more than an hour’s drive from Hearne. He greeted me with a smile and lightly touched my arm as he shook my hand. His demeanor is of a kindly, gentle man in a cardigan sweater.

Speaking in a s German accent, Heino recalled that he spent most of his days as a prisoner working in local farms, shearing sheep, working with cows and plowing fields.

Heino was a lowly private in the German infantry, and was compelled to labor in the fields. But the German officers in the camp, roughly eighty percent of the prisoners, were not required to work, which is a provision of the Geneva Convention, the international agreement that governs the treatment of war prisoners to which the United States abided. The officers spent much of their days in recreation, playing soccer, going to classes, staging plays, crafting artwork and woodworking projects, and building gardens and water fountains to beautify the 700-plus acre site.

After the war, Heino went back to his hometown in Germany, and lucked into a cushy job: as a translator for a British government official who managed two German counties. But he never forgot Texas. In 1953 he emigrated to the United States with his young German bride and their son. He worked as an accountant at a hospital in Minnesota, and eventually divorced and became a single parent to his son. He met Jean, a Minnesota native and also a single parent, and they married in 1962. They both earned master’s degrees (his in business, hers in counseling). They adopted three children from Colombia and moved to Austin, where in 1981 they launched what the Erichsens say became the state’s first international adoption agency, Los Ninos.

Three years ago, after placing 3,000 orphans from 20 countries into new homes, the Erichsens retired and closed the agency and they now live outside of Houston.

These days, Heino is a celebrity of sorts at the Hearne camp, where he frequently visits to speak about his life and his experiences. “I’m the only former prisoner who came back and became a U.S. citizen and live in Texas,” Heino said. He co-authored a book about his life, “The Reluctant Warrior: Former German POW Finds Peace Texas.”

Nearly seventy years after the end of WWII, Camp Hearne is a shadow of its former self. The only original structures that remain are a water pump house and a small structure for a water well (both were renovated with a brick facade by the city long ago). The museum maintains eleven acres, where there is a newly built barrack that houses displays of artifact, photos and exhibits showing how the POWs lived and worked. Outside, is recently completed a guard tower.

Across the road from the museum, I walked about one-third of a mile down a path that long ago went down the middle of one of the three POW camp compounds. You can make out numerous concrete foundations on both sides that seem to want to be taken over by the scruffy underbrush, weeds and mesquite. You have to use your imagination to see thousands of German prisoners, dressed in Army fatigues with “POW” stamped on the back and wearing shorts during the hot summer months. Some sit on stoops, eyeing visitors walking this way, while others go about their activities, perhaps kicking a soccer ball or telling a story in German.

The Kneeling Lady Foundation built by German POWs once had an elegant kneeling woman holding a platter. Three frogs positioned on the edge of the fountain sprayed water onto the platter.

At the end of the path, in a small circular clearing, there is the remnants of the Kneeling Lady Fountain, an elaborate construction that once featured a kneeling woman on a pedestal holding a platter. A photo in the museum shows an artistic creation, a Greek-like woman in the middle of a pool, with three cement frogs that spouted water onto the platter she held. An exhibit case in the museum holds portions of the frogs. If you try, you may very well hear trickling water and the spray from the frogs.

Features such as this were uncovered by Mike Waters, a Texas A&M anthropology professor who has explored the site and wrote a book about the camp, “Lone Star Stalag.” His work helped inspire Cathy Lazarus, a retired pharmacist who led the creation of Roll Call, Friends of Camp Hearne, the nonprofit organization that opened in the museum in 2011 with community support. The museum preserves the history of the POW camp. It is well worth the trip, especially if Freemen and Lazarus provide you a personal tour. Learn more about the museum on its website.

Crystal City internment camp

During World War II not all the internment camps established by the federal government were in California. Several of them were created in Texas, with the largest one in Crystal City built on the grounds of an old migrant farm worker camp.

Other than some historical markers and informational signs, you would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of the old camp, which has been taken over by two schools and athletic facilities operated by the Crystal City Independent School District and a part of the dormant municipal airport.

There is no museum or visitor center. Nor a fence or guard towers or buildings left standing from the camp. But you can find evidence. My guide was Buddy Guyler, a history buff and amateur anthropologist, who attended middle school on the property in the 1950s. He showed me foundations of old administrative buildings and homes for camp supervisors that sat just outside the fenced camp. We visited the remnants of a large circular pool that internees built in an irrigation tank. It was the best swimming pool in town and Buddy remembers sunny days when he cooled off in it when he was a boy. You have to use your imagination to see hundreds of camp buildings, small homes and other camp structures that once housed thousands of internees and their families. Many of them were born and died in the on-site hospital.

I visited the Crystal City Library and a helpful librarian brought out an old box of letters hidden in a filing cabinet in a hallway. The letters were addressed to a German internee, Walter Steiner and his wife Gerda, and came from friends and relatives in Germany, California and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Some of the letters were mailed in 1946 and 1947, more than a year after the end of World War II. The envelopes were stamped to note they were examined by a censor. One letter writer said that she hoped the Steiners can be discharged soon and remain in the United States because conditions in Germany are “none too good” with strict rations on food — too little to live on and too much to die.

Later, as darkness approached, I drove down a dead-end street to see if I could find some structures that I was told still exist at what would have been the back-end of the camp property, near a city dump.

I stopped in front of the last house, where debris was aflame near a driveway, a way the homeowner discarded trash. I asked the man who was standing out front whether he knew about the internment camp.

“The concentration camp?” said Manuel Gonzalez, the homeowner. “Yeah.” He said that the buildings were all collapsed, but he was quite happy to let me take a look. Manuel and his 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, led me down a little-worn path, pushing past overgrown bushes and stepping around prickly pear cactus, and soon we stood in front of what may be the only on-site wooden remains left of the camp, five large piles of wood where five buildings had collapsed. One after another, we poked through the mounds of broken boards and shingles and junk and found a few relics: a bicycle tire, shoes, bottles and ragged slacks. The largest of the buildings appeared to have been a school. Manuel said desks were found there, and a rusty metal skeleton of a chair. Manuel said while he was growing up he combed through the wreckage and his brother once found a SKS rifle that had Japanese writing on it.

I left with a piece of a door that still had a rusty door knob attached. I brought it to Buddy’s house to see what he thought and for safekeeping. He said the old gray pine wood didn’t immediately indicate it was from the original camp. He said the first buildings were built with redwood. I left in the dark. The next day I spoke to Betty Fly whose father was a supervisor at the camp and to Virginia Payne who worked in the camp post office.

“I felt sorry for them because because they were uprooted and hauled off,” Virginia said. “I always wondered how they felt. I felt they were treated well. They had everything they needed. I know it wasn’t a good time for them and I felt bad about that. But underneath all that we still had to remember we were at war.”

I’m in contact with one internee who was born in Germany and whose parents moved to Cincinnati when he was a young boy. He was arrested while in high school one day and sent to the camp where he spent a good part of the war. He tells a riveting story and I will write about it in my upcoming book. I’m searching for Japanese internees who can shed a light on that time. Write me if you have leads at charles@charlesboisseau.com.