75 years after the Nazis surrendered, all sides agree: War is hell
John ‘Jack’ Thurman, U.S. Marine Corps: On February 23, 1945, six U.S. Marines planted an American flag atop a battle-blasted hill on the island of Iwo Jima, a fiercely defended Japanese stronghold. The sight of the flag lifted the spirits of the weary marines, remembers John “Jack” Thurman. “Even after dark,” says Thurman, “the artillery shells would go off, and by the flash you could see that flag up there, still waving. Still standing. I couldn’t help but think of Fort McHenry and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ The bombs bursting in air really did give proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Clara Hunter Doutly, American ‘rosie the Riveter’: The youngest of six siblings, Doutly grew up in Detroit. She put on pants for the first time at 19, when she accepted a job at Briggs Manufacturing, riveting components for B-24 and B-29 bombers. She remembers World War II as a time of unity, when neighbors from all backgrounds came together to listen to the radio or memorialise young soldiers killed in battle overseas. “Somebody had a potato. Somebody had an onion. You threw it all together and made soup,” she says. “You see what can be done.”
Maximilian Lerner, holocaust survivor: When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, many Austrian Jews fled. Lerner’s family spent three years on the run, finally landing in the U.S. when he was 16. “We didn’t have a penny and spoke no English, but we were safe,” he says. At 18 Lerner enlisted in the U.S. Army. Because he spoke French and German, he was assigned to the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and spent much of the war interrogating German prisoners and tracking down members of the notorious Nazi SS. The damning evidence? “Every SS member had his blood type tattooed under his left armpit.”
Lawrence Brooks, America's oldest known living veteran: At age 110, Lawrence Brooks of New Orleans is the oldest known U.S. veteran of World War II. From 1941 to 1945 he served in the Pacific with the Army’s predominantly African-American 91st Engineer Battalion, as a support worker to its officers. Brooks says he has good memories of Army days, and bad ones—such as being “treated so much better in Australia” than by white people in America.
Nobuo Nishizaki, Japanese veteran: ‘We were sent to die for the emperor and imperial nation, and everyone acted like we believed in it. But when the soldiers were dying, the young ones called out to their mothers and older ones called out their children’s names. I never heard anyone calling the emperor and nation.’
Leaving home for the navy in 1942, Nishizaki, then 15, was given an order by his mother: “You must survive and come back,” she said. He clung tightly to her words, even as the winds of war swept him across the Pacific, from one battle to the next, and finally to a suicide mission at Okinawa. Despite long odds, he lived—and honoured his mother’s demand.
Vera Nikitina, Leningrad blockade survivor: ‘I don’t want to remember any of it, even to speak of it. It’s all so hard. I don’t want that anyone would ever have to suffer such a thing again. When I talk of my childhood, I get upset. I start to cry. I don’t want to cry anymore; I want to live the rest of my life in peace and see only the good in life. I don’t want to see anything terrible anymore. I’m sorry.’
Nikitina, 87, was a child when the 900-day Nazi blockade of Leningrad began. Having already lost her mother, and with her father off at war, she was quickly evacuated from the besieged city. Nearly all of her relatives who couldn’t escape the Nazi stranglehold died from the hunger, cold, and bombings that claimed some 800,000 civilian lives.
Wolfgang Brockmann, German veteran: Brockmann, now 93, was 12 years old in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and ignited World War II. Hitler was his idol, and he itched to get in the fight. When he did, late in the war, he saw atrocities that were “against all the morals I felt as a German soldier.” He ended the war in Soviet captivity—“the worst-case scenario,” he says.