Tom Brokaw (9 page)

Dowling didn't discuss the war much until he was in his late fifties, and then he went to a reunion of the 8th Air Force. He came home from that with renewed pride in what he had been through, and began to share his stories with his family. “Now,” he says with a chuckle, “my sons and grandsons ask me more about the war. They'll see something on the History Channel and say, ‘My grandfather flew through that!'and they're in awe.”

That's a change from the earlier years, when he first returned from the war. “After we got back, people didn't talk about it and you didn't ask, even if they were in the same age group and likely served in the war. I didn't know until a few years ago that one of my Little League coaches had been in an air raid that I knew of; it was just like that.

“It didn't really become important to talk about until we were in our sixties. When I went back to the site of our prison camp, I started opening up with my wife and family a little more. I felt I could, because other guys were there. But my pilot would never talk to his wife about it. And two members of our crew, when we tried to get them to reunions, they just didn't want to relive it, I guess.”

Three of his sons went to Vietnam and James is proud of that. He's also confident the country and this generation are in good shape. He and Dorothy, his wife since 1945, went into Manhattan a few years ago to march in a veterans' parade, and they were stunned by the number of people “who just came up to us and shook our hands, saying, ‘Thanks.' I think the spirit of America is back.”

As for his future, James has a few more Model A's to restore and then, as he says, “I will look for some civic project to get involved with, some service to perform.”

Dorothy offers the most fitting testimonial. Fifty-three years after she married the young man with the blazing red hair, she laughs when asked the secret to their long love affair. “Simple,” she says. “He's a really great guy.”

Harry R. Hammond, identification card

REV. HARRY REGINALD “REG” HAMMOND

“I think we were on God's side. The United States has done
some foolish things, but in that war I knew we had God
with us.”

F
AITH IN GOD
was not a casual part of the lives of the World War II generation. The men and women who went off to war, or stayed home, volunteer that their spiritual beliefs helped them cope with the constant presence of possible death, serious injury, or the other anxieties attendant to the disruptions brought on by war. Helen Van Gorder's faith helped her through the great strains of having a husband, and later a son, in the line of fire. Faith was the twin to love in the marriage of the Brodericks. On the front lines, chaplains were not incidental to the war effort. Some jumped with the Airborne troops on D-Day and others risked their own lives to administer last rites or other comforting words to dying and grievously wounded young men wherever the battle took them. The very nature of war prompted many who participated in it to think more deeply about God and their relationship to a higher being once they returned home.

“God does not bring war upon us. We bring it upon ourselves. Man's inhumanity to man is not God-driven.” Harry Reginald Hammond—Reg to his friends—came to understand the place of God early in his life through the work of his father, a popular Episcopal priest in Ventura, California. He came face-to-face with man's inhumanity to man as a first lieutenant during World War II.

Those lessons remained fresh in Hammond's mind when, more than fifty years later, he was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Orthodox Church at the age of seventy-nine, the oldest person ever ordained in that faith. It was the spiritual outgrowth of a lifetime of service to others and an abiding faith in God. In his family, Reg had always been expected to wear the vestments of a priest, but no one would have guessed it would take so long or that when he finally answered the call it would be in another church.

After all, his father, Stephen, and his four brothers had all been priests in the Episcopal Church. In his early years, Reg seemed destined for a career in the grocery business. After he married Margery MacPherson in 1941, he happily went to work in her father's grocery business until he enlisted in the Army and shipped out for boot camp and then officer's training in North Carolina.

He landed in Normandy a few days after D-Day, and that's when he began to see the horrors of war. He ran a platoon of antiaircraft guns to protect the field artillery of the 90th Infantry Division, an outfit in the thick of some of the worst fighting; at one point the 90th had a casualty rate of 100 percent among its enlisted men; 150 percent among the officers. He was awarded five battle stars and a Bronze Star for meritorious service. “I saw more bodies in a short time than most undertakers will see in a lifetime. Young men dead alongside the road. Every night I would pray for those guys and myself. I think it deepened my faith.”

When he returned to California after the war, his father-in-law had sold the grocery business, but Reg still was not ready to follow the path of his father and brothers into the seminary. Instead, like 2.3 million other returning vets, Hammond made use of the GI Bill. He enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

He started as an economics major. “I thought I'd catch on with one of the big businesses in California, but then I also thought I might like teaching, so I added education to my major. By the time I started student-teaching I knew what I wanted to do. I liked working with kids. I guess I was drawn to service of some kind—the idea of having some effect on the future. A way of paying back, in a sense.”

Harry R. Hammond, ration card

Harry R. Hammond, pay data card

It was the beginning of a pilgrimage through the California public education system, from the San Joaquin Valley to Marin County, north of San Francisco. Hammond began as an elementary school teacher but moved over to administration after a few years, commuting to Los Angeles in the summer months to earn a PhD in education along the way. By the time he retired in 1980 he had served as teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent, but he had never completely given up the idea of also serving the church in some formal way.

By then he had started and dropped ordination studies twice. He decided he'd have to be content as a perpetual deacon, a sort of priest's assistant. But then he was unable to finish that training, either. It appeared he would live out his life, as he put it, “as the black sheep” of a family that had sent four other sons to the priesthood.

Besides, he was growing disillusioned with the Episcopal Church in the 1960s, which, like so many institutions at the time, was altering its traditions. “Instead of looking to the Bible for direction,” he says, “they were looking to society for direction in terms of sexual behavior, adultery, these kinds of questions.”

Eventually Dr. Hammond became so fed up he left the Episcopal Church and helped found a branch of its much more conservative cousin, the Anglican Orthodox Church. It uses the original Book of Common Prayer, which stresses the authority of the church. Anglican Orthodox worshipers place more emphasis on the confession of sins and adhere to a stricter definition of what sin is.

When Dr. Hammond and a few like-minded faithful established their church, there was an immediate problem: the denomination was relatively small, so there were few priests. His friends encouraged him to step up his involvement and follow in the footsteps of his brothers and father into the ministry. Since Hammond had spent so much of his life preparing for this role, the bishop of the Anglican Orthodox Church agreed to let him skip seminary and qualify by taking a lengthy and rigorous test.

When he completed the bishop's test and was ordained, thus fulfilling a calling that had been so much a part of his life for so long, Hammond had “a deep sense of satisfaction . . . a sort of wonderment and pleasure.” He was grateful that his brothers, all priests in the Episcopal Church he had left, were supportive of his decision. “My youngest brother had hoped I would stay in the Episcopal Church, but he came to my ordination and participated; you can't ask for more than that.” One of his parishioners, Dr. William Henry, says, “Reg embodies the Episcopal priest of the thirties, forties, fifties . . . he has the Book of Common Prayer memorized. When he was ordained it seemed as if he was correcting a mistake.”

The Reverend Hammond is using the years he has left to continue the call to service he's heard most of his life. He has an older congregation, so that often means house calls for this seventy-nine-year-old clergyman. He takes communion to the shut-ins, aware that if he was not willing to make the extra effort, the people he serves would be left with no opportunity to observe their faith.

As he goes about his ministerial duties, the Reverend Hammond also remembers his experiences during World War II, when he was praying for the young boys who had been killed or were about to face death in battle. “You needed something to keep you going,” he remembers. “It made me realize that there was something much larger than just me. I realized it had to be God. And I think we were on God's side. The United States has done some foolish things, but in that war I knew we had God with us.”

Lloyd Kilmer (with his wife-to-be, Marie Beckwith) with his new wings,
Pampa, Texas

LLOYD KILMER

“My dad's a piece of work. He's the quintessential GI. What
you see is what you get.”

N
OTHING CAME TOO EASY
for Lloyd Kilmer, the son of a Minnesota dairy farmer. When Lloyd was eight years old his father lost the farm to the bank and the family moved onto county assistance in the nearby small town of Stewartville. It was a common migration for farm families across the Midwest and it was a traumatic time in the lives of these proud, independent people.

Typically, everyone in the family went to work wherever they could. Young Lloyd sold newspapers, sacked groceries in the local market, and ran the projector at the movie theater. When he wanted to join the Boy Scouts, a county official lent him the fifty cents for the admission fee. He didn't wear shoes in the summer so that he could have a decent pair in the winter.

He never had a bicycle as a kid, but it's not a bitter memory. “That's the way it was. There wasn't much we could do about it.” What Kilmer remembers most about those years is that his father was humiliated when he had to apply to the WPA, the government relief program, for work so that he could feed his family. Kilmer says it left such a deep impression on him he made a pledge. “I never wanted to experience that sort of thing for my wife and family. I was driven toward never letting that happen.”

Goals in those difficult times were modest by modern standards.

Again and again I have heard from this generation, “We really didn't have any expectations.” For too many of them, the idea of any real prosperity was simply too remote. Lloyd Kilmer was the first member of his family to graduate from high school, an achievement of considerable pride. He was working as a bellhop at a hotel in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, when the war broke out.

Kilmer, who had never been in an airplane in his life, knew immediately what he wanted to do. He wanted to become a combat pilot. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on July 22, 1942, and was accepted for officer's candidate school. Suddenly he went from being a bellhop in a comfortable hotel in a small, prosperous mid-western city to the rigors of pilot training in a succession of bases in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Understandably, Kilmer is still very proud that he passed every test along the way and that within one year of the day that he first set foot in an airplane, he was a qualified pilot of a four-engine bomber, the B-24. His girlfriend pinned on him the silver wings and gold bar of a second lieutenant. In return, he gave her an engagement ring paid for by assigning to the jewelry store his ten-thousand-dollar military insurance policy. As he says, “My dreams had come true.”

He was assigned to the 448th Bomb Group, 712th Squadron, 2nd Air Division, 8th Air Force, based in England. He was flying combat missions on a regular basis, including D-Day, June 6, 1944. From the cockpit of his plane he could see the first wave of GIs going ashore on those murderous beaches. Kilmer says it is a day that “will live in my mind and heart forever.”

Twenty-three days later was another date fixed even more firmly in his memory. On June 29, 1944, his sixteenth mission, Kilmer was on a bombing run over a Nazi tank factory in Germany. He was taking heavy fire from antiaircraft guns on the ground.

“One shell went through the wing, rupturing the gas tanks, disabling an engine, and starting a fire. Another burst knocked the propeller off an engine. Other planes were exploding all around us. We could see parachutes coming out of some—and others with no parachutes. We were in big trouble.”

Still, Kilmer, who was just twenty-four years old, was confident they could make it back home or at least to the North Sea, where, if they ditched, they'd be picked up by an Allied sub or ship. “I didn't have any real question,” he says. “I had a wonderful crew. They were superbly trained. There's no doubt we could make it back. But it didn't work out for us.”

Liberation Day—Stalag 7A,
April 29, 1945

Lloyd Kilmer,
aviation cadet, 1943

Lloyd Kilmer's plane,
June 29, 1944, Beemster, Holland

They managed to put out the fires on the plane by going into a steep dive, but they were losing too much fuel to make it to safe territory. Kilmer was forced to crash-land in a potato field near Beemster, Holland. They all managed to survive the crash without serious injuries but the Germans had total control of the area, and within a short time Kilmer and his crew were all prisoners of war.

For the next ten months Kilmer was an inmate at two German POW camps. One interrogation was especially memorable for him. After days in solitary confinement, he was repeating only his name, rank, and serial number while being pressed at gunpoint for information about the 8th Air Force. Kilmer was taken to see a German officer.

Kilmer recalls, “The officer said to me, ‘Mr. Kilmer, you've been very stubborn. You haven't told us what we want to know, so we're going to tell you what we know about you.' ” With that, Kilmer says, the officer pulled out a book describing the activities of Kilmer's bomber squadron, its bombing reports, and biographies of the crews. Kilmer was stunned. Then the German officer said, “You think we're pretty smart, don't you? We know ninety-five percent of what's going on in the American armed forces. However, your government knows
ninety-seven
percent of what's going on in the German armed forces.”

That was the end of Kilmer's solitary confinement and interrogation and it was the beginning of the long, cruel fight to survive, days of watching other inmates getting shot as they tried to escape, the same meals of watery cabbage or turnip soup, the cold nights with only a thin blanket for cover. When asked if he ever came close to just giving up the fight to live, Kilmer says, “Nope. I had a bride that I was going to marry. My mother and father, family, and great friends. No, I was going to go home.” Those same thoughts were in the minds of so many veterans I interviewed. In the worst of combat or other dangerous situations they were sure they were going to survive to return to the girl back home or to their families.

Kilmer was living in squalid conditions with 125,000 other prisoners at a German camp called Moosburg Stalag 7A in the spring of 1945. He had lost sixty pounds; his weight had dropped below one hundred. He was attending a POW church service on April 29 when the chaplain, a fellow American POW, paused to listen to the small-arms fire that had suddenly erupted around the camp and looked up to see low-flying aircraft. Kilmer chuckles as he remembers the chaplain saying, “Men, we'd better hit the deck.”

Not long after that, an American tank rolled through the German barbed wire. Lloyd Kilmer's ordeal was over. To mark the liberation, the American rescuers went to a nearby church steeple where the Nazi swastika was prominently displayed on a flag. Kilmer says the men of Stalag 7A fell quiet as the swastika was lowered and an American flag was raised in its place. In a way he could not have fully appreciated at the time, that became a defining moment in Lloyd Kilmer's life.

When Kilmer got back home he married Marie immediately and the Army arranged for medical and psychiatric treatment at a prisoner-of-war rehabilitation center in Miami Beach. He was eased back into a normal life in time to use the GI Bill and attend the fall term at Creighton University in Omaha in 1946. For a young man who was proud of his high school diploma just four years earlier, this was an unexpected opportunity.

He made the most of it, getting a degree in just three years while selling real estate part-time so successfully that, when he graduated, Omaha's largest firm offered him a full-time job. Kilmer and Marie started a family. Their first son, Lloyd Jr., was born in 1950, and Frank followed four years later. Baby Boomers.

The boys remember Kilmer as a “God-and-country patriot,” a stern disciplinarian, and a driven businessman. Kilmer worked long hours in real estate and in a savings and loan company, where he became an officer. He was deeply involved with ex-POW organizations and the VFW. He was a scoutmaster for the local Boy Scout troop and active in his church. He organized a law-enforcement appreciation dinner during the sixties, when “law and order” were fighting words for a new generation.

For his sons, however, Kilmer was a distant figure. Lloyd Jr. and especially Frank had a difficult time relating to him. Lloyd Jr. says his father “always had a rigid set of ethics. He would say, ‘This is the way it's going to be.' Other parents threatened to send their kids to military school. My dad followed through.” Both boys went to Culver Military Academy in Indiana for a time, a point of pride for their father but far less so for them.

Frank and his father had some monumental arguments during the Vietnam War, when Frank dropped out of college. “It was a very difficult time in my family. And my father felt betrayed by his sons for not agreeing with his values and views about the war in Vietnam and about that era in general.”

Kilmer became such a well-known public figure in Omaha that he ran for county clerk and controller in Douglas County, and he won as a Republican at a time when the courthouse was a Democratic stronghold. But at home he was an intensely private man when it came to his past. He never talked to his sons about his war experiences. As Frank says, “His work habits and his devotion to work were typical of men of that generation who went through traumatic experience, and his relative emotional distance was also quite typical.”

The boys took their own paths in life. Lloyd Jr. recently received his PhD in education after a quarter century as a school principal. Lloyd Sr. was in the audience when his elder son received the degree. Frank left college and went into a Buddhist monastery for two years before becoming a plumber in California. Both have been married and divorced.

Their often strained relationship with their father was not unique for Baby Boomers, especially when their two worlds diverged so sharply during the sixties. The fathers were wholly unaccustomed to a permissive society. They were happy simply to be alive and, given all they had been through, they had this nagging fear it could all happen again. Their children came of age at a time when excess, not deprivation, was the rule, when their government lied about a new war, when the concepts of duty and honor were mocked.

Those were the two conflicting views of life and of the world in the Kilmer household. Now that both generations have aged and mellowed some, they're slowly finding more common ground.

For Frank it began when his parents moved to Sun City West, a popular retirement community outside of Phoenix. His father noticed that the main boulevard had no flags displayed on the Fourth of July. Ever since that day, April 29, 1945, when the swastika went down and the American flag went up near his prisoner-of-war camp, Lloyd Kilmer has looked for the Stars and Stripes. He started a campaign to do something about R. H. Johnson Boulevard. “I devised a plan to attach an American flag to each of the hundred power poles along the boulevard,” Lloyd says. It's now known as the Boulevard of Flags. Red, white, and blue American flags flutter every twenty yards or so along the thoroughfare that leads to the spacious retirement homes of so many World War II veterans.