— ‘Rage is instantaneous. He's looking at me from a crawling position. I didn't shoot him; I went and kicked him in the head. Rage does funny things. After I kicked him, I shot and killed him.’ ~Marine veteran, Battle of Guadalcanal
— ‘Marched to Camp I at Cabanatuan, a distance of six miles, which is the main prison camp here in the Philippines. Food is scarcer now than anytime so far. Fifty men to a bucket of rice!’ ~U.S. Army prisoner of war, Corregidor
— ‘They were firing pretty heavily at us... it's rather difficult to fly when you have a rosary in each hand. I took more fellas in with me than I brought home that day, unfortunately.’ ~U.S. Navy torpedo bomber pilot, Guadalcanal
— ‘I remember it rained like hell that night, and the water was running down the slope into our foxholes. I had to use my helmet to keep bailing out, you know. Lt. Gower called us together. He said, 'I think we're getting hit with a banzai. We're going to have to pull back.' Holy Jesus, there was howling and screaming! They had naked women, with spears, stark naked!’ ~U.S. Army veteran, Saipan
— ‘After 3½ years of starvation and brutal treatment, that beautiful symbol of freedom once more flies over our head! Our camp tailor worked all night and finished our first American flag! The blue came from a GI barracks bag, red from a Jap comforter, and the white from an Australian bed sheet. When I came out of the barracks and saw those beautiful colors for the first time, I felt like crying!’ ~U.S. Army prisoner of war, Japan, at war's end
— ‘There was a family that lost two sons in World War II. The family got a telegram on a Monday that one of the boys was killed, and that Thursday they got another telegram saying that his brother had been killed. There were about 35 young men from our town who were killed in World War II, and I knew every one of them; most were good friends of mine.’ ~U.S. Navy seaman, Tokyo Bay
— ‘I hope you'll never have to tell a story like this, when you get to be 87. I hope you'll never have to do it.' ~Marine veteran, Iwo Jima
Excerpt- THE THINGS OUR FATHERS SAW
This conversation took place between the author, a married couple, and a group of teenagers about the age of the couple in the story at the time. Jim was a Marine in the Pacific battle of Okinawa, raging at the exact same time the ‘Train near Magdeburg’ was being liberated.
Jim Butterfield
I enlisted into the United States Marine Corps the seventh of December, 1943. I was seventeen years old then and I went because I wanted to help fight the good war. My mother didn’t want me to go. Mary didn’t want me to go. But I heard they threw a party after I left. [Laughter]
Mary Butterfield: Yes, we went to school together and Jimmy left six months before graduation. I told him, ‘Don’t go until after you graduate,’ but he wanted to go. He was afraid the war would be over before he could get in. So he went in, in December, and I graduated in June.
Matthew Rozell: You were high school sweethearts?
Jim Butterfield: Mary and I have been palling around for over 60 years now.
Mary Butterfield: Well, we’ve been married 61 years.
Jim Butterfield: She couldn’t wait to get married, but I think she’s changed her mind a couple times since then… [Laughter]
It was an exciting time, it was an adventurous time, and it was a proud time. I lasted 61 or 62 days up to Okinawa before I got hit. When I got hit, we were going to take Shuri Castle because the 6th Division was already in there, and they were catching it real bad. So they decided to put us in there to pull some of the people away from them—to give them a hand.
***
I don’t know where that guy, the shot, came from. I got it with a rifle [shot]. I lost part of the right side of my face. I don’t know if it was a day, or two days later—I don’t even know really what happened to me—the enemy laid a mortar barrage when I was on my way to the hospital at the beach, and I got hit again, in the face! That took care of the other side of my face. I was 14 months in the hospital having my face rebuilt, and that’s why I am so good-looking today. [Laughter]
The corpsman came and said, ‘How are you doing?’ I said, ‘How about loosening up these bandages, they’re killing me.’ He said, ‘No can do.’ So I sat up in the sack and started to unroll it myself. The next thing I know, I got a shot in the arm and I was knocked out again. The next time I woke up, I woke up in an aircraft. A C-54 transport. I never flew before. I had no idea where the hell I was! I put my hand out on the deck, and I just could not put it together—that I was in a plane! Someone must have had a word out to keep an eye on me, because the next time I reached out there, there was a patent leather shoe. I moved my hand a little bit, and there was a nice ankle with a silk stocking! [Some laughter] I thought, ‘Jesus, I have died and have gone to heaven!’ [Much laughter from students] I started running my hand up that leg, and she said, ‘I think you’ve gone far enough.’ [More laughter]
She said to me, ‘Jimmy, would you like a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk?’ I said, ‘Real milk?’ She said, ‘Real milk.’ I said, ‘You bet your life!’ She brought it down, and there had to be something in it, because I was out again. I woke up in Guam, in the hospital. I was there about three weeks, I guess. I got an operation there. I didn’t know they did it. But what was left of my left side of the eye and face, they took out. Now see, these people knew that I was not going to see again.
The doctor came up. I said, ‘How am I doing, Doc? I have to go back up there. They’re short of people.’ He said, ‘You’re doing fine, my young boy.’ That was all I would get, see?
I didn’t know, until they told me there.
***
So here’s the climax. Every morning there was inspection with the doctors. So the doctor came around that morning. He said, ‘How are you, Jim?’ I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘You need anything?’ I said, ‘Nope, I’m doing fine.’ He says, ‘Well, are you used to the idea?’ I said, ‘Used to what idea?’ He said, ‘That you’re not going to see again.’
Well, you could hear a pin drop. I said, ‘I don’t think I heard you, Doc.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to see again.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Didn’t they tell you in Guam?’
I said, ‘No! But it’s a good thing that [first] doctor isn’t here, because I’d kill him!’ I got so mad! I couldn’t really grab the idea. I’m not going to see again? … What the hell did I know about blindness? Nothing!
I said, ‘How about operations?’ He said, ‘You’ve got nothing to work with, Jimmy.’
So a pat on the shoulder, and he just walks away. The nurse comes over and says, ‘The doctor wants you to take this pill.’ I said, ‘You know what the doctor can do with that pill?’
Mary Butterfield: Don’t say it.
Jim Butterfield: I’m not going to, Mary.
So I had a hard... two months, I guess. I kept mostly to myself. I wouldn’t talk to people. I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do when I got home. How was I going to tell my mother this? You know what I mean?
So they come around and said, ‘You’ve got a phone call.’ So I went in to where the phone was. They were calling me from home. They got the message, see... This one here was on the phone [points to Mary]. I said, ‘Looks like things have changed, kiddo.’ She said, ‘No, we’ll discuss this when you get home.’ She was already bossing me around. [Laughter]
But that’s how I found out, and that’s how it happened. And after a while, I just started to live with it.
There are not days—even today—I go to bed and I wish I could see. So much I miss. I miss watching a nice girl walking down the street. I miss seeing my daughter, my wife. I even miss looking at Danny [fellow WWII Marine veteran present]. [Laughter]
Mary Butterfield: But you see, I’m only 17 to you now. That’s a good thing.
Jim Butterfield: Since we got in the conversation, when I dream, and I do dream, everything is real. Everything I knew before, I see it as it was then, not today. My wife and daughter would never get old in my eyes. When I dream of Mary, she’s
still seventeen years old.
Mary Butterfield: But you never saw your daughter.
Jim Butterfield: I dream about my daughter. Mary’s caught me doing this. We lost our daughter a year and a half ago. But I sit right up in bed and I’m trying to push away that little cloud of fog in front of her, but I can’t quite make her out.
Mary says, ‘What are you doing?’ I say, ‘Just dreaming’.
Jim Butterfield was nineteen years old at the Battle of Okinawa.
In the final push at the Shuri Line that cost him his eyesight, the Marines lost over 3,000 men and the U. S. Army even more. When the island was declared secure near the end of June, in Lawler’s K/3/5, only 26 Peleliu veterans who had landed with the company had survived Okinawa. It had been the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific, with over 12,500 Americans killed or missing and nearly three times that number wounded. For the Japanese, no accurate counts are possible, but perhaps 110,000 were killed.
Get the full book at
bit.ly/FATHERSSAW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Rozell is an award–winning history teacher, author, speaker, and blogger on the topic of the most cataclysmic events in the history of mankind–World War II and the Holocaust. Rozell has been featured as the ‘ABC World News Person of the Week’ and has had his work as a teacher filmed for the CBS Evening News, NBC Learn, the Israeli Broadcast Authority, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the New York State United Teachers. He writes on the power of teaching and the importance of the study of history at his blog, TeachingHistoryMatters.com, and you can also ‘Like’ his Facebook author page at MatthewRozellBooks for updates.
Mr. Rozell is a sought–after speaker on World War II, the Holocaust, and history education, motivating and inspiring his audiences with the lessons of the past. Visit MatthewRozell.com for availability/details.
About this Book/
Acknowledgements
My wife Laura began beta reading the manuscript for this book just before publication and was peppering me with questions about the Holocaust, even before completing Chapter 1. I took this as a good sign, as I knew many of her questions would be answered as she read through it; however, questions about the people living under Nazi rule in Germany who did nothing were the most troubling to her, in the sense of, what if our places had been changed? What would we have done, as individuals? I hope questions raised in this work empower the reader to think about the power of choice.
A note on historiographical style and convention: to enhance accuracy, consistency, and readability, I corrected punctuation and spelling and sometimes even place names, but only after extensive research. I did take the liberty of occasionally condensing the speaker’s voice, eliminating side tangents or incidental information not relevant to the matter at hand. In some cases, two or more interviews with the same person were combined for readability and narrative flow. All of the words of the subjects, however, are essentially their own, and sources are mentioned in the endnotes. My students helped identify troublesome words/phrases in the text, asking for clarification, and since they appreciated this, as well as the explanatory commentaries in the beta readings, it has been standardized throughout in the form of footnotes.
*
Over thirty years have passed now since I became a teacher. My early students went on, some to even become teachers themselves, while others today make many times my salary. Since the early days, I even had their kids in class (much better behaved, actually). We built a foundation and ventured forth to great things.
My parents laid that foundation. As educators themselves, they showed me the power of nurturing youth and being a role model by listening and advocating for the kids they cultivated. My father never came home from school angry or upset; my enduring afterschool memory of him as a teacher is of him humming or singing to himself.
Writing this book has been a catharsis of sorts for me, just as the reunions were for the survivor and liberator families. I knew I had to write it even before the reunions began, as evidenced in combing through nearly 15 years of email correspondence with the soldiers and survivors. Of course, I was gathering material along the way, and developments were really never-ending. The actual writing process began many years ago, I suppose, with the launching of my blog, TeachingHistoryMatters, soon after the very first reunion in 2007. Still, I did battle with the form for years, in hindsight because all of the pieces were not yet in place. As the twilight of my teaching career is at hand, it finally began to take shape in this form—even though as I write this, there are more developments; it will never end. Feel free to subscribe to my blog for updates.
I struggled with the framework for telling this story because my challenge was really three-fold. I wanted to do justice to the narrative of the Holocaust, as evidenced by this microcosmic event of the liberation of the train in the backdrop of the vastness of the macrocosm of the Holocaust. I tried to write it the way I teach my class. I start the narrative of the Holocaust at the end, with the discovery of the camps. And then we ask the hows, and the whys, and walk it backwards in time, to explore what happened, to try and search for context and meaning. For me, the most powerful way to do that was to utilize the voices of those who were there. I am indebted to those who submitted their testimony, and the authors who allowed me to use their previously published materials, which I edited for this purpose, especially the works of Aliza Vitis-Shomron, Leslie Meisels, Fred Spiegel, and Peter Lantos. Irene Bleier Muskal’s unpublished manuscript was graciously proffered by her family. Thank you all for allowing me to edit your works into the framework of the narrative here; to the reader, in the source notes you are directed to the full versions of their important narratives.
Secondly, I wanted to honor the experiences of the soldiers, both during the war and after the survivors began to appear. The only way to do that well was, again, to try to let them tell the story themselves.
Thirdly, as the curtain closes on this part of my life as a teacher, this book is also an attempt at personal self-exploration in the sense that I still cannot believe everything that has happened, or stop wondering how and why it all came about. I hope that maybe it can also serve as an inspiration for any young teacher or young person struggling with the question of whether or not they are making a difference. The fact is, I have been lucky, but most often, a teacher may not really know until that letter, email, tweet, or post arrives in the most unexpected of ways. (And if you are one of those persons who was powerfully moved by a teacher in your life, what are you waiting for?)
Finally, lest I be taken to task for survivor/soldier narrative omissions, I apologize in advance. There are HUNDREDS of people affected by this story directly, most of whom I have never met. Unfortunately, there was no way to incorporate everyone’s accounts in the book, so I tried to tell the story the way I knew best, the way that it unfolded for me. Each reunion could have a book written about it, and I go into much more detail at my blog. If you know more about this story, or spot an error or grave omission, I encourage you to visit and leave a comment. And if you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review/feedback at Amazon.com so that others might know more about it. This is especially crucial to keeping the story alive. You can also drop me a line via [email protected].
*
There are many people to acknowledge in the actualization of this work, and it is difficult to know where to start, so perhaps again, I should work backwards.
Alan Bush served as my wingman in reading the entire manuscript at several intervals and responding with pointed questions, excellent comments, and calling my attention to technical elements which needed addressing. Ashley Libben also sent me her commentary and encouragement, as did Donna Payne Hughes and Pauline Kolman Rosenberg. It is no surprise that all are passionate educators themselves, and all shared the experience of traveling to the authentic sites of the Holocaust with me in 2013 with Vladka Meed's Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program, led by the inco
mparable Elaine Culbertson and Stephen Feinberg. The program is highly recommended and helped me to better understand the background of the many survivors I have been privileged to know. To learn more, or apply as a teacher or support the teachers who go on to change many lives because of it, visit www.hajrtp.org.
Bernd Horstmann, the Custodian of the Book of Names at the Bergen–Belsen Memorial, took time to read my first two chapters and offer clarifications. Susan Winchell-Sweeney of the New York State Museum took time out of her busy schedule to put her remarkable talents to work to get the maps just the way I needed them. I have known Susan for over two decades, starting on archeological dig sites and beginning when she asked if she could feed my Labrador retriever a part of her peanut butter sandwich, which I denied; nevertheless, thereafter we became fast friends, and for this I am forever grateful. Mike Edwards, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker at the 5 Stones Group, bounced ideas off of me, and I, him, as we brainstormed what a film would look like. He also supplied me with access to his interviews of the eyewitnesses I recommended to him. As our friendship grows, I hope that this element of my life’s work comes to fruition, and I admire his tenacity in wanting to tell the story and getting it right; a draft trailer can be viewed here (bit.ly/5STFarsleben).
My recent study at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies near the completion of the manuscript also confirmed for me that I was on the right track with what I was trying to achieve with this work. To my fellow teachers, to our top-notch instructors and guides, and to the immediate parties who had a hand in my development, Ephraim Kaye and Stephanie McMahon-Kaye, my deepest thanks for an enriching experience.
My friend Varda Weisskopf in Israel offered encouragement and moral support. As noted in the book, Varda found many (90!) of the Israeli survivors and organized the great reunion in 2011, a major undertaking. I helped her get in contact with Frank Towers in 2010, and together, Frank, Varda, and I tracked down nearly 280 survivors of the train. She also looked out for my arrangements in Israel, getting me to the airport and back safely.
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