VETS RECOUNT WWII EXPERIENCES AT GAHS
Text by Thomas Cogan, copyright Western Queens Gazette, page 23, May 25, 2005 edition.
A 48-star American flag hung in the front of the room at the Greater Astoria Historical Society May meeting and during the evening seven men of Astoria and one woman gathered before it and told war stories. The meeting celebrated the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. On a nearby wall were photographs from the 1941-45 period of American participation, some of them showing a speaker or two in younger days. They had to have been young then, even to be alive and aged now. The recollections by these eight veterans amounted to an event that GAHS President Bob Singleton called the finest he had seen in 10 years of the society’s presentations.
The first speaker, James Pollock, said he was a civilian working with the military when the war broke out in December 1941. He was chief draftsman with the 62nd Anti-Aircraft at Fort Totten, on Little Neck Bay in Queens. He recalled that on December 9, two days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a warning was issued to Fort Totten that New York City was in danger of imminent attack (perhaps motivated by Germany’s declaration of war on the United States that day) and all anti-aircraft guns were made ready for action, but the alarm was false. He said he worked at Fort Totten until the following August, when he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps. The old Paramount Studios in Astoria became part of the Corps and Pollock spent the war years there as a technical expert. He had a further military story. Discharged in February of 1946, he immediately joined the reserves, believing that the U.S. would soon be at war with its recent ally, the Soviet Union. When war broke out in Korea in 1950, he was back in the service, where he stayed until the spring of 1962. Sensing that war in Southeast Asia was likely, he took action opposite that of 1946 and resigned his commission. He was only about three months short of 20 years’ service and the retirement benefits that would accrue, but "I’ve never regretted it, " he said.
His wife, Barbara Pollock, told the audience she joined the Navy WAVES in 1944, trained at Hunter College and was sent to Washington, where she was confined to duty on land despite the branch of service. (She did not meet and marry Pollock until later.) She and her fellow WAVES tested new equipment, such as the novel cathode ray tubes that were later mass-produced in television sets. When a questioner asked if she had been trained to fire any weapons, she said no with a smile, explaining that women’s military duty in those days was "genteel."
Henry Steinway described his military stint as "undistinguished," in contrast with the experiences of his brothers in the piano-manufacturing family, who served in the Pacific. He had a visual impairment but could and did serve in the Army, assigned to Governor’s Island. His family’s company in Astoria could not manufacture pianos at the beginning of the war, but used its great quantities of wood to build gliders, used in reconnaissance in the combat zones. He said ever since he has been amazed by the bravery of the men who piloted the gliders, since he had seen the planes up close and knew how necessarily flimsy they were. He said that Steinway soon resumed manufacturing pianos, making upright models known as Victory Verticals for the service branches. After the war, he recalled, the company tried to recover a few as museum items but found that, by some perverse miracle, just about all of them had disappeared. Meanwhile in Germany, he said, the Steinway factory had been seized by the Nazi government in 1939, was heavily damaged by bombing during the war and, because of postwar bureaucratic impediments, could not be recovered until 1947.
Other speakers were more direct witnesses to violence and death. One of them, Charles Pappas, said he heard General George S. Patton address troops prior to the invasion of Germany, telling them, in reference to the enemy, "If you see ‘em, kill ‘em. It’s kill or be killed." The meeting provided a reminder that the combat veterans who spoke might indeed have done a lot of killing, and all of them had been spared death.
First of them to speak was Rocco Moretto, who landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and went through five major campaigns in Europe during the 11 months between D-Day and final Allied victory in May 1945. He spoke as one no doubt amazed to this day that of all the members of his combat unit only he and one other got through the landing and those five campaigns without being killed or wounded. Preparation for D-Day, he recalled, included top-secret training in Britain and a landing plan bearing no resemblance to the horror that occurred when the troops really landed. On D-Day, the driver of the troop carrier said he would deliver them to the beach, but in the midst of ceaseless German fire as the ship approached he told them he couldn’t do it and they had to jump out and wade through the water to the beach. Moretto said he went out of the carrier and into water over his head, carrying all his equipment. He was more afraid of drowning than of the bullets and shells the Germans were firing at him. He repeatedly bounced off the sea floor until he could wade with his head above water. When he got to the beach, he heard one of his sergeants say, "in the loudest voice I’ve ever heard," that they had to get off the beach-which meant going straight ahead through an area they discovered was mined. Several troops were blown to pieces, but he was able to keep going through the minefield and beyond, until he and others reached the Norman countryside. There, still running, he hit a wire device that was meant to catch and tangle paratroopers. His helmet was ripped off; he said that momentarily, his nearby buddies thought his head had gone with it too, until he yelled for help finding the helmet. And that was only the first day.
Bert Busch and Charles Pappas were also veterans of European combat. Busch was frank, calling himself a "dedicated coward" who got into Army training courses that seemed the least threatening, such as photo intelligence, at the University of Michigan in 1943. He was spared the rigors of the fight until he was shipped to Europe in late 1944 for the invasion of Germany. Near the end of the year he was in Belgium and wound up in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge. Surviving that, he ultimately got to the Elbe River, where Americans and Russians coming from the Eastern Front had a gigantic meeting. Busch recalled that many of the Russian soldiers he saw were teenagers, being the ones who were left after so many of the older troops had been killed or wounded. Pappas also met the Russians at that time; his recollection was of having a vodka toast with one of them. The Russian soldier drank his vodka at once, but Pappas, not used to that particular spirit, took a gulp and thought he’d poisoned himself. His remembrance of meeting Germans-civilians, that is-was also striking. He found them terrified; they had been instructed by the Nazi government to fight to the death lest the invaders rape and slaughter them all.
Joe Stewart was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese made their attack, December 7, 1941. In fact, he had been in the service in Hawaii since 1938, and he remained there until 1945. He told the audience that on December 6, a Saturday, he and some other Army friends visited sailors on the U.S.S. Arizona. The next morning, when he heard and saw aircraft coming through the Kolekole Pass, he assumed the Americans were on maneuvers again, as they had been the day before. Instead, the aircraft were soon bombing and strafing them. He later learned that Saturday’s maneuvers had left the Americans short of ammunition that might be used to fight back. He also learned that the Arizona had been destroyed and the sailors he had visited had been killed.
The other Pacific war veteran at the meeting was Rocco Collucci, who called himself "the smallest infantryman in World War II." When first in training in 1942, Collucci was told that because of his stature he’d be given light assignments, but that was somehow forgotten, and quickly: only four months after coming into the Army, he had been trained for combat and shipped overseas. He went to Australia with the 32nd Infantry Regiment, made up largely of men from Michigan and Wisconsin. From Down Under, Allied forces made their climb up the chain of islands leading to Japan. Collucci said he spent 18 months in New Guinea with the 32nd Infantry before it and other units went north to retake the Philippines. After they did, they went into training for the invasion of Japan, but the atomic bombs brought the war to an end first. (Several in the room murmured that it was a good thing too.) Collucci said the 32nd Infantry emerged from the war as the most combat-experienced outfit, having been in combat status for some 660 days.
Rocco Moretto brought the story up to date quite well. Last year, to his great surprise, he was informed he would be one of the servicemen awarded the medal of the French Legion of Honor, during the 60th anniversary celebration of D-Day. At the meeting, he recounted his and his family’s visit to France and Belgium and his reception of the award, and said: "I was sky-high for the five days I was over there."
