Tom Brokaw (16 page)

Most of all, what the Lomell daughters remember is their parents as a perfect team. Bud, the energetic and outgoing lawyer with a soft touch for his daughters, always consulted Charlotte, who ran the family finances and preferred quiet evenings to large social gatherings. They were divided politically, Charlotte as a Democrat and Bud as a Republican, but that rarely caused any real rifts. “Our parents are a team,” one daughter said, “and they made the family a team.”

As a lawyer Bud did have certain rules to protect his feelings about his family. If he took on a divorce case he would never discuss it after three o'clock in the afternoon because he didn't want to be upset by someone else's family dispute when he went home to his own family. He often attended juvenile court on Fridays, and the girls remember that when he came home those nights his warnings about the dangers they could encounter took on new meaning.

Daughter Georgine is an Episcopal priest and chaplain at a long-term-care facility in Louisville, Kentucky. She says of her dad, “He walks his talk. He's all about fairness and justice. When my sisters and I were teenagers we looked younger, so when we went to the movies we could have gotten in on the kids' prices, but Dad would never do that. From him we learned how to be straight arrows.”

One of Bud's protégés is Judge Robert Fall, who sits on the New Jersey state appellate court. Fall was in a local grammar school when Bud came to speak, and he made an indelible impression. Later, when Fall was in law school, Bud hired him, first as an intern and then as a member of the firm. “He was just the epitome of a leader in that firm,” Fall says. “The lines were drawn very clearly between right and wrong, and with Bud you just didn't cross the line. I learned so much about integrity from him.”

Fall says Bud didn't talk about his war experiences, but there were occasions when the old Ranger training spilled over into firm activities. “Every year we went as a firm—lawyers and spouses—to the Princeton–Rutgers football game,” the judge remembers, chuckling. “We'd have to meet at the offices at a fixed time, travel in a convoy of cars to the game, eat a tailgate lunch at a specific time, and meet for dinner at a fixed time and place later. Bud ran it all with military precision.”

As time went on, Bud Lomell became much better known in Toms River for his civic contributions than for his war record. He was a director of a local bank, president of the county bar association, a member of the local school board, president of the local philharmonic association, and, as a lawyer, always available to do pro bono work for local firemen, policemen, juveniles, and churches.

Judge Fall says that in his role on the bench, he thinks about Bud Lomell every day, and he is guided by the lessons he learned from him about right and wrong. Although Fall has known about Bud's war record since he was a grade-school student, he remains in awe of the raw courage he demonstrated on D-Day and beyond. “You wonder,” Judge Fall asks, “could I reach down and do that? I guess I'll never know.”

As for Bud, he still goes to his law offices a few times a week, even though he's been retired since the mid-1980s. He's survived two heart surgeries and he still has a military command style. As we were sitting in his comfortable waterfront home along the Jersey shore, preparing to do an interview on his reaction to the Steven Spielberg film
Saving Private Ryan,
a gardener started up a power mower outside. Bud turned to Charlotte and said firmly, “Tell that lawn mower to move out and come back later.”

Bud had been a special guest at the Hollywood premiere of
Sav
ing Private Ryan.
He was impressed that Spielberg had been able to re-create the chaos and the bloody conditions of the D-Day landing so effectively, but he had lots of problems with the rest of the film. Tom Hanks as a Ranger captain, he said, “should never be walking around with his men, all talking loudly in broad daylight. That would only bring in German mortars.” Also, Bud noted that Hanks and his men were much older than the soldiers had actually been. “We were all eighteen or nineteen years old; I was one of the older ones at twenty-four,” he points out.

Bud Lomell is now in his late seventies and he counts his long, happy marriage to Charlotte and the lives of their three daughters as the most meaningful events in the lifetime that began in the poor, immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn and took him to the heights of military and professional success.

Charlotte and their daughters recognize that Bud will always have another family as well. The men of the 2nd Rangers who landed with him on D-Day and fought their way across those beaches and the rest of Europe, those who lived and those who died, are in Bud's heart forever. Bud still leads Ranger tours back to those battlefields, but when they come to the American cemetery on the headland overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy, he stays in the back of the bus. “To walk up to one of my Ranger graves there gets to me to the point I can't do it anymore. I know he knows I've been by—so I'll just go sit in the bus.”

WOMEN IN UNIFORM AND OUT

The transformation in the life of Dorothy Haener as a result of World War II was distinctive and highly visible, but millions of other women were experiencing their own unique odysseys at home as a result of the gender climate changes brought on by the demand for men in fighting jobs. In fact, there were 350,000 women in uniform and an estimated 6.5 million at work in war-related jobs on the home front. Harder to measure but equally important were the contributions of the women who stayed home, raised the children, taught school, clerked in schools and banks, kept the fabric of society together. At night they went to bed wondering if their sons or husbands were safe in those far-off places where they were fighting for their lives every day. All these experiences—for the women in uniform, for those assembling airplanes or ships, for the women who kept families and communities together—shaped that generation of women as much as combat shaped the men of their time. To this day they are living the lessons of those difficult and instructive times.

Colonel Mary Hallaren,
Tokyo, September 1947

Jeanne Holm,
Women's Army Auxiliary Corps,
1942

COLONEL MARY HALLAREN

“You don't have to be six feet tall to have a brain that works.”

GENERAL JEANNE HOLM

“Did you
ever
see an ugly general?”

T
HE FACE OF WAR
is almost always one of a man. The familiar images of World War II are no different: FDR as commander in chief; Eisenhower directing the D-Day invasion; MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines; Patton astride a tank, pearl-handled sidearms prominently displayed; General Jimmy Doolittle, his smiling face poking out of a cockpit; Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima; B-24 pilots, their caps at a jaunty angle; Navy chiefs at their battle stations; GIs in a foxhole. The male was in his historic role as warrior.

Early in America's war effort, however, it was clear there were not enough men to do all the fighting and to fill all the support jobs such a massive military undertaking required. There was a desperate need for military clerks, drivers, telephone operators, medical technicians, cooks, and couriers. The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was created to help fill the need. It was the beginning of a radical change for America's military services that continues to this day.

Mary Hallaren was a natural for the WAAC. She was a junior high school teacher in her home state of Massachusetts when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Her brothers all enlisted immediately and she was not far behind. “To me,” she says, “there was no question but that women should serve.” The Army recruiter wasn't so sure, especially when he sized up Mary Hallaren, who's only five feet tall, by asking what someone so short could do in the Army. She answered, “You don't have to be six feet tall to have a brain that works.”

The idea of enlisting in the war effort was really just an extension of her adventurous ways. She was a schoolteacher who, during summer vacations, went on long hitchhiking trips across Canada, Mexico, Europe, and even China—a highly unusual undertaking for women in those days. During a visit to Munich in the thirties she had been present at a Hitler rally. At the time, he was getting little notice in the United States. She was struck by the buildup preceding his arrival, but as for her, “He just didn't make such a strong impression.” Little did she know then that he would change the course of history, and of her life, forever.

Jeanne Holm, another woman with a taste for the unconventional life, was living at the other end of the country from Mary Hallaren—in Oregon—when the Army formed the WAAC. Jeanne was working as a radio technician for the U.S. Forest Service, the tomboy daughter of a widowed mother. Her brothers were already in the Navy. She signed up for the WAAC, never guessing that her life's course was taking a new and rewarding direction. “At the time,” she says, “the only reason women went into the military was to serve the country; we wanted to help America win the war and come home. No one thought of a career.”

Holm began as an Army truck driver but was quickly accepted to officers' candidate school and assigned to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she rose to the rank of captain and spent the war training WAAC recruits. One of her brothers, John Holm, a Navy officer, wasn't impressed when she enlisted, but when Jeanne returned to their Oregon home on leave wearing her captain's bars, their common experience of military responsibility was a leveling influence. “I found I really admired her,” he said. “She was a person in her own right and very bright.”

Other men were no doubt coming to the same conclusion in their one-on-one experiences with women in the military, but it remained a world dominated by men.

It was the world Mary Hallaren was determined to alter. Given her self-confidence and worldliness at such a young age, it was little wonder the Army promoted her swiftly once the women's corps was founded.

Colonel Mary Hallaren, 1951

She commanded the first battalion of women sent to England and immediately began a lifelong campaign for women to be taken seriously in the military. “At first,” she says, “they only allowed the women to be clerks, telephone operators, cooks, drivers, but by the end of the first year women were filling more than two hundred jobs, including the job of cryptographer. The men discovered the women were very quick to pick up new things—they could do many jobs.”

During the war Mary served in England, France, and Italy and so impressed the brass that when the fighting ended Dwight Eisenhower asked her to oversee the upgrade of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to the Women's Army Corps, which would give women a permanent part in the military establishment for the first time. It was a hard sell in the House of Representatives, especially in the Armed Services Committee.

Mary, who was put out front by General Omar Bradley and other returning heroes of the war, remembers the House Armed Services Committee wanting to rename the bill The Reserve Act of 1948. “They felt,” she said, “the cost of integrating women into the service would be prohibitive—because when women reached menopause they'd be worthless!

“We organized men who were now out of uniform to lobby the committee members. After a few weeks I got a call from a staff member of the committee and he said, ‘Call off this lobbying and letter-writing campaign. We can't handle it all.' ” The committee finally agreed that women should become a permanent part of the military as WACs (Army) and WAVES (Navy). “That was a major step toward the role of women in the military today.” It was a profound change for the place of women in American society, not fully appreciated at the time and not fully accepted by military traditionalists even now.

By then Jeanne Holm was back in Oregon, attending Lewis and Clark College on the GI Bill, still uncertain what she wanted to do with her life. A letter arrived from the newly named Defense Department, informing her of the Women's Armed Services Integration Act and inquiring whether she'd like to be considered for regular duty. She left immediately in her car for Fort Lee, Virginia.

“I was flat broke,” she says, “so as I drove across the country I had to sleep in my car for two or three nights. When I got to Fort Lee for the physicals and exams, I remember that first night listening to the bugle calls and Taps and realizing how much I missed the military.”

Jeanne Holm, AIRSOUTH, NATO, Naples, Italy, 1957

Promotion to major general, 1973

Jeanne Holm, at the White House with President Ford

Mary Hallaren was promoted to colonel and took charge of the new branch of the U.S. military, the Women's Army Corps. She was called the “Little Colonel” because of her diminutive stature, but when it came to promoting a wider role for women in the military she was a towering figure, a godmother to the women who continued to struggle to find their places in the male-dominated military establishment. Her assistant, Mary Lever, recalls visiting WACs stationed abroad. “Wherever we went she'd get a standing ovation—the enlisted people adored her.”

Mary Hallaren was the first American woman to achieve the rank of colonel, but under the 1948 legislation that was the highest rank for women in the military, so she decided to retire in 1960. Her seminal work for women in the U.S. military, however, cleared the way for the eventual dissolution of the WACs and WAVES in the 1970s and the integration of women into all branches of the service.

By then, Jeanne Holm was well on her way to a distinguished military career, having served in Germany during the tense time of the Berlin airlift in 1948. She had been assigned to the Air Force, and she was the war plans officer at Erding Air Force Base near Munich, responsible for determining how Erding's massive supply depot would be protected if war broke out with the Soviet Union. She was the first woman selected to attend the Air Force Air Command and Staff College.

Major Holm represented the Air Force at the Army's mustering-out ceremony for Mary Hallaren, and they began a long, deep friendship that grew out of their shared sense of adventure, duty, and commitment to an equal role for women in the military and the civilian worlds.

Mary was leaving the military but that did not mean the end of her service to the nation or to women. After her retirement, she heard from a friend about a new organization called Women in Community Service, WICS. It grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when women's organizations found common ground and common strength in the fight for equal rights for black Americans. Why, they wondered, don't we have a common cause for women?

Representatives of the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, Church Women United, the National Council of Negro Women, and other organizations began to meet secretly to see what could be done. About that time President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, was trying to recruit women for the new Job Corps, one of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty projects.

Shriver approached the women who had been trying to find a new crusade and asked them for help. They decided it was exactly the kind of mission they had been trying to define, so they helped organize WICS, which became the recruitment wing of the Job Corps. Mary Hallaren was the first executive director.

“I moved right into it,” she said. “The military was good training. I liked the challenge.” One of the officers of WICS has a vivid memory of her first encounter with the Little Colonel. “I heard this sound. I thought, ‘Is there a loudspeaker in here?' It was Mary. She was saying,
‘Atten-shun!'
in that military voice. She looks like a cute schoolmarm with those braids, very cute, but when she barks an order she can stop you in your tracks.”

Mary agreed just to get WICS off the ground. She thought she'd stay for six months; in fact, she stayed for thirty-four years, leading WICS through its formative years, when the primary role was to attract young women into the Job Corps, and into the modern era. WICS is now a full-service organization for women in trouble: it is one of the great success stories to grow out of the War on Poverty of the Johnson years. It's a vibrant organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, where it coordinates a national network of local chapters and their work with poor young women who desperately need help developing job and child care skills.