1

“TRUE TO MY GOD, TRUE TO MY COUNTRY”

Some observers contend that there would be little need to focus on Jewish servicemen and servicewomen’s motivation to enlist if the subversive voices of anti-Jewish propaganda in American society had not sown seeds of suspicion regarding Jews and their patriotism. Thanks to the spontaneity of oral testimony and the diverse experiences of young men and women, the reader will discover to what extent the commonly held view of the Jew as a draft dodger is but a lasting stereotype. In addition, this chapter challenges the perception of the war experience of Jewish men and women as one of victimization—even if their last wartime encounter was with death.

Over the course of World War I, approximately 225,000 American Jews enlisted in the US military, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their country and national values out of a sense of moral duty. General John J. Pershing praised their service: “When the time came to serve their country under arms, no class of people served with more patriotism or with higher motives than the young Jews who volunteered or were drafted and who went overseas with our other Americans.”¹ During World War II, fervent opposition to Hitler motivated over 550,000 servicemen and servicewomen to contribute to the war effort. Leaving home to discover the world was an extra incentive. Above all, patriotism often intersected with Jewish identity. Selma Cronan, a certified civilian pilot before the war, enlisted in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) to fight Hitler in hopes of being sent overseas.

It is interesting to explore how Jewish men and women described the impulse they felt when enlisting after Pearl Harbor, complying with their official call to duty. A few relevant questions include the following: When and in what contexts did they mention their Jewishness? How did they explain the influence of Jewish identity on their patriotism? Did basic military training fulfill the expectations of servicemen and servicewomen who had never been away from home?

Jewish men faced many challenges during their military service, but their motivation to answer the call of duty often made the experience worthwhile. Their perceived masculinity was enhanced in the process; they were empowered as men and American Jews from basic training through various war experiences.²

PATRIOTISM, BELONGING, AND JEWISH IDENTITY

Bernard Branson, whose family name was Abramson during his army service, was eager to fight for his country. Patriotism, a desire to fight Hitler, and a sense of adventure stirred him into action: “I graduated at sixteen, in 1941. There was a war on, so what you did was you waited to get old enough to go into the army. . . . I used to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard delivering telegrams. I remember seeing the HMS Barham come in. It was a British battleship, which had been pretty shot up, and I would go down there and look at it and I couldn’t wait to get into service.”³ Branson dreamed of the Army Air Corps, but the Marines wanted him. He recounted the story of his induction, when he received a stamped letter: “It said ‘Army,’ And I’m like Oy!, that’s what I wanted. I’d always wanted the army ever since I was a kid. . . . And then my mother made me swear—and that was the only thing—on my father’s grave that I would not fly as a pilot. I would not try to be a pilot. She had a thing with the military. She had a son in the military. . . . He was a radar man when it was still top secret.” Among other motivations to join the army, finding a way to belong was important at a time when Jews were socially rejected, unwanted in certain jobs, and victims of quotas (as in some colleges).

Young Art Buchwald spent his childhood in an orphanage and several foster homes; shortly after his birth, his mother was admitted to a mental hospital, where she remained confined for the last thirty-five years of her life. His father, a curtain manufacturer, was unable to support the family during the Great Depression. The only son and youngest of four children, he fled his home to join the military at age seventeen. At the news of the war, he said, “I’m going to fight for my country.”⁴ Wearing the American uniform and serving in the Marines or air force was a dream for numerous young men, Jews included. Most of them had never been away from their neighborhoods.

Art Buchwald’s motivation to leave home and join the military was so strong that he bribed a vagrant in the streets to sign as his legal guardian. “You have to be my father for an hour,” exclaimed the young Art. The vagrant replied, “That’s very patriotic.” Was Art Buchwald eager to belong for the first time in his short life? Was he eager to embark on an adventure? In any case, years later, the famous humorist would say that his “father was the Marine Corps,” not hesitating to reiterate this assertion in various ways.⁵ He spent most of his two years in the Pacific on an atoll cleaning machine guns as an ordnance man. The future columnist also edited his squadron’s newsletter, “The U-man Comedy,” a two-to-four-page leaflet with squadron news and jokes to boost soldiers’ morale.⁶ Of the new recruits who relieved his squadron, whereby “guaranteeing his survival,” he wrote: “The next stop for the squadron was Okinawa, where the new men saw far too much action from the kamikazes.”⁷ Discharged as a sergeant, Buchwald expressed gratitude to the army for having made him feel “at home” after “leaving home”: “I owe the Corps a lot. When I meet another Marine, we share a bond. It’s like belonging to the same lodge. . . . I can now say without hesitation the Marine Corps was the best foster home I ever had.”⁸

Eager to belong and integrate, European refugees were thankful for their new country and keen to avenge themselves on Nazi Germany. That was the case for Maximilian Lerner, whose parents were emigrants from Vienna. They had first fled by going to France: “On September 4, 1942, when I was eighteen, I volunteered. I didn’t want to wait to be drafted. I signed away my right as a foreigner. And I remember standing and getting it notarized. . . . And they didn’t call me in for induction until I reported for duty the beginning of May 1943. I had anticipated they would get me sooner. Mysterious are the ways of the army. . . . This was my war and I wanted the opportunity to get my own back. . . . You know, at eighteen you’re invulnerable.”⁹ Maximilian Lerner had only been in the United States for two and a half years when he joined the American military. Like many refugees fluent in German, Lerner was assigned to the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. He found there a group primarily made up of emigrants from Germany. Along with other Jewish refugees, he joined experts on Germany, Japan, and Italy—the enemy countries. Army life brought changes to his practices as an observant Jew, yet he was willing to adjust: “I stopped putting on tefillin [phylacteries], but I kept kosher to the extent that I could. It meant occasionally not having the main dish and filling up on potatoes or bread; it was not onerous.”¹⁰

The refugee soldiers were stationed at Camp Ritchie for intensive instruction after completing basic training. Lerner became an American citizen in September 1943. He and his group (made of German and Austrian Jewish refugees) shipped out to Europe in March 1944. Once in Paris on August 25, 1944, he interrogated German soldiers and prisoners brought by the Forces Françaises de L’Intérieur (FFI), “The Résistance.” Some missions carried out by other “Ritchie Boys” involved considerable risks, such as going on patrol to capture prisoners when there were not enough prisoners for questioning. Guy Stern, a scholar of German and comparative literature, fled Nazi Germany and escaped to the United States in 1937. He became a “Ritchie Boy” while his whole family—deported to the Warsaw ghetto—perished. Young refugees in uniform played a pivotal role in highly classified missions. Most were eager to exact revenge on their former oppressors. Their determination and courage saved American lives: “Sergeant Sy Lewin was charged with inducing Germans to surrender. He approached the German front lines and, using a microphone, appealed directly to the enemy to capitulate. His sound truck was blown up several times. Sergeant Tom Angress jumped behind German lines during our initial paratroop attack just hours prior to D-Day without ever having jumped before.”¹¹ A few days later, Werner Tom Angress was captured behind enemy lines; he was personally motivated to take revenge on Hitler and the Nazis who had humiliated him so much. A prisoner of war (POW), he managed to conceal his identity as a German-born Jew. Finally freed by advancing American forces, he rejoined the fight. He, too, became a shrewd battlefield interrogator. As a former victim of Nazi persecution, Angress was shocked at the liberation of the Wöbbelin concentration camp. So was Manfred Steinfeld, a Ritchie Boy who had fled Germany without his family, arrived in the United States in 1938, and joined the army in 1943. In the Military Intelligence Specialist Unit, he was attached to the Eighty-Second Airborne Division and took part in the entire Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. He also participated in most of the central European campaigns.¹²

To better understand soldiers’ desire to prove themselves in combat, it is rewarding to turn to archives kept from their basic training. For instance, the lines of the Rifle Creed might have made an impression on servicemen.

This is my rifle. It is my best friend—without it, I am helpless. Without me, it is useless.

I will master my rifle as I will master my life—I will know it as I know myself. I will know its strength and its weakness, its balance, its sights, its “feel.”

My rifle will be cleaned before I am cleaned, before I eat, before I rest. It will be ready always. I will be true to my rifle and guard it from weather and dirt, from all harm or damage. As I guard my rifle, so it will guard me in time of danger, shoot straight and destroy the enemy that would destroy us both.

I am true to my God, true to my country and true to my rifle, we will conquer.

Right from basic training in Camp Pickett, these words were distributed and read aloud. Herman J. Obermayer went through basic training multiple times, including combat engineer basic training. They were “somber words” each time he heard them during basic training.¹³ Others saw handling a rifle as an opportunity to prove that they were no coward. The courageous medics in the battlefields, who carried no rifle because the Geneva Convention forbade it, accounted for a high proportion of casualties among the Jews. As a medic, Hyman Epstein’s motivation to remain his “brother’s keeper”—a Jewish value—even on a bloody battlefield is worth recalling. Epstein, a young medical aide from Omaha, Nebraska, risked his life for others under heavy shell fire from Japanese troops in New Guinea. The last twelve hours of his altruistic dedication to his buddies were recounted thus by another soldier: “But the Japs knew we were all there and kept their fire in that spot. . . . But this little Jewish kid crawls right from the mud to the wounded man.”¹⁴

A few paragraphs of a letter written “in the possibility of my not coming back,” found on the body of a boy of eighteen, encapsulate Jewish Americans’ motives for fighting. Corporal Harold Katz of the Bronx suffered serious wounds in an attack on the German town of Attweilnau on March 30, 1945. He received the Silver Star but was killed in action shortly after. The letter reads as follows.

Dear Mom,

Mom, I want you to know that I asked for combat assignments. I did so for several reasons. One is that I had certain ideals within my own mind, for which I have often argued verbally. I didn’t feel right to sit safely far behind the lines while men were risking their lives for principles which I would fight for only with my lips. I felt that I also must be willing to risk my life in the fight for freedom of speech and thought I was using and hoped to use in the future. Another reason is the fact that I am Jewish. I felt again it wasn’t right for me to be safe behind the lines while others were risking their lives with one of their goals the principles of no race prejudice. I knew this meant fighting for me because if Hitler won, my family, you, Rolly, and Pop would certainly suffer more than the families of other soldiers who died in the fight.

I hope you realize exactly what I am trying to tell you, Mom. I want you very much to be more proud than sorry. I don’t want you to think of it as losing a son for no good reason, but rather as sacrificing a son so that all mankind could live in a peaceful and free world.¹⁵

Many more last letters found on servicemen show the eagerness of loyal Jews to serve the United States of America during World War II. Sergeant Irving Strobing, a radio operator, sent a last message before his capture by the Japanese “to tell Joe to give them hell for us.”¹⁶

In numerous cases in World War I, “four or more members of a single family” enlisted.¹⁷ Such instances also occurred during World War II, perhaps even more frequently, since “fighting Hitler” was not only a strong motive but also a leitmotif—all the more so as women, too, were encouraged to serve their country. A notable example of the patriotism of a whole family is the enlistment of Navy Aviation Machinist Mate Sidney Friedlander together with six of his siblings, one of whom died in combat. Several cases were recorded in which women enlisted after learning that a brother or husband had been killed in action, as if to pursue the mission he had been trying to accomplish when he met his death. Some instances were also recorded of World War I veterans reenlisting after the enlistment of a son.¹⁸ Elizabeth (Betty) Haas Pfister from Great Neck, New York, enlisted as a WASP after her graduation. While she was in basic training, her brother, who had been flying torpedo bombers off an aircraft carrier, was shot down and killed in the Pacific. Betty Haas went home to comfort her family after the tragedy but returned to Avenger Field, Texas, to participate in the flight classes she needed to complete her training. In some families, patriotism was so strong that the moral duty of serving one’s country was transmitted from one generation to another. This patriotism is exemplified in the case of Naval Lieutenant Jacques Rodney Eisner, born in 1918 in Red Bank, New Jersey, a veteran of Pearl Harbor who was killed in action aboard the San Francisco in the battle of Guadalcanal on November 12, 1942. A midshipman of the United States Naval Reserve in March 1941, Lieutenant Eisner participated in most of the battles in the Pacific over the course of his two and a half years of service. The words of his father J. Lester Eisner, a major in World War I and a colonel in the reserve, are most significant: “While I am grieved at the loss of my son, I am at the same time proud that he contributed his life to make this world a decent place in which to live for those of us who remain.” At the time he spoke, he had two other sons in service: Lieutenant J. Lester Eisner Jr., Air Corps, and Lieutenant Gerald Eisner in the field artillery.¹⁹ Their World War I veteran father expressed that human history is shaped by numerous individual acts of courage.

WOMEN: BEYOND PATRIOTISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY

Since the birth of the United States, women have been informally serving in the American army. In the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, they often fought disguised as men. While women primarily served as drivers, secretaries, or telephone operators during World War I, their participation was most needed by the army in World War II to replace men in the positions they left to serve in combat units.

In the USSR, Great Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere, the military thus encouraged the participation of women. In the United States, massive publicity campaigns and attractive posters urged women to contribute to the war effort in both traditional and nontraditional roles, which they did. Motivated by patriotism, hundreds of thousands volunteered on the home front, on bases, and close to battlefields, in the case of nurses. The Army and Navy Nurse Corps recruited civilian nurses from every segment of American society, while millions of young people enlisted or were drafted into the American armed forces. Growing concern with manpower shortages led to the creation and development of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), with servicewomen sent throughout North Africa, Europe, and the Philippines, and the navy’s Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), mostly performing secretarial and clerical duties. The first women in history trained to fly American military aircraft were the WASP, whose narratives will be shared in chapter 3.

It is interesting to focus on what motivated Jeanne Zamaloff (Dworkin) of New York to volunteer when her boyfriend joined the army: fighting against Hitler, who symbolized evil and was a threat to European Jews, and escaping the boredom of everyday life following the Great Depression. Eager to join the WAC, she changed her birth certificate: “I had to be twenty, so I only changed it by about six months.” Jeanne Zamaloff had graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and a half and taken a job “so the family could eat.” Her family greatly objected to her decision to enlist, but the young woman’s determination won them over. To her mother (originally from Poland), who did not want to let her go—especially as her brother was already in the navy—she replied: “All your relatives are in danger there.” Zamaloff recorded what led her to volunteer for military service: “Not only did I want to get away from the home front, which was a little boring at the time, I really did want to participate in the war and I wanted to see the world. I knew there was a woman’s division in the army, which was available to me to participate in. The politics of it was that Hitler was conquering the world and I’m not going to stand by and let him do it.”²⁰ The desire to fight Hitler was omnipresent among Jewish men and women and strengthened their Jewish identity. In contradistinction, non-Jewish servicemen and women tended to express wanting revenge for the humiliation and death inflicted by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

First assigned to the Medical Corps in Fort Dix, New Jersey, to do secretarial work, Zamaloff “was totally disillusioned with the brutality of army life.” She eventually managed to get sent overseas to one of General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, New Guinea, Leyte, and Manila in the Philippines, as the famous general advanced through territories the Japanese had conquered.²¹

Patriotism among immigrants and their children appears to have been particularly strong. Beatrice (Bea) Hirshcovici Abrams Cohen, who was born in 1910 in Bucharest, Romania, and grew up in Los Angeles, confessed in a filmed interview that she enlisted in the American army out of gratitude for the generosity of the country that took her in. To “pay back for becoming an American,” as she put it, she enlisted in the WAC in 1943. On D-Day (June 6, 1944), Beatrice Abrams, who had never been away from home, was stationed at Elveden Hall outside London, mimeographing top-secret documents in the Communications Department. A private first class, she was awarded a good conduct medal. She explained that her mother, who spoke mostly Yiddish and Romanian, was proud of the American flag and what it represented. For Beatrice, who had received a Jewish education, life consisted of doing mitzvot, performing good deeds. Immediately after the United States entered the war, she took a job with Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California, before enlisting. Beatrice worked there for less than five cents an hour in the manner depicted by Rosie the Riveter, the iconic wartime poster of a female factory worker and the title of a movie released in 1944. It was a turning point for women in America; their contributions outside the home were most needed. As a private first class in communications, she, as a Jew, “got along beautifully” with the Irish girls.²² On September 28, 1945, she was discharged and lived with her mother before meeting her husband, Ray E. Cohen, a Marine who had been captured at Corregidor in the Philippines and spent three and a half years in a Japanese POW camp. “He did not do much talking,” she recalled, perhaps hinting at post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while he remained in the army for twenty years. Beatrice Abrams Cohen’s motivation to serve her country was so deeply entrenched and linked to her inclination to do good deeds that she continued good deeds in war veteran organizations after her service in uniform: “My life is dedicated to helping others.” During an interview, she emphasized several times her Jewish-ingrained need to help the underdog. She spent more than seventy years supporting American military organizations and charities and helping children with palsy in the framework of the National Ladies Auxiliary of the Jewish War Veterans. “Makes me feel good to make a mitzvah,” she stated, using again the Jewish word for “a good deed.”²³ “Never forget our veterans,” she repeated in front of the camera. “It is because of them that we are enjoying freedom.” Her statements encapsulate how Jewish values reinforced and interacted with patriotism.

Selma Kantor Cronan, another strong-minded woman, knew how to fly before the Japanese forces bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The next day, the American Congress was asked to declare war on Japan. A few days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. In an interview conducted in Florida in June 2000, Selma Cronan explained why she enlisted in the WASP as a pilot: “I wanted to fight Hitler.” “I simply had to do it,” she later added. While her family was not particularly observant, she “never had any doubts about my religious identity” and never sought to hide it. An outdoor person, she was a Girl Scout as a child and met other scouts at the synagogue. Her interest in aviation, which developed when she was about eight years old, was initiated by her mother’s love of planes. When she left home to enlist in Washington, DC in 1944, she took with her an old mezuzah, a small parchment scroll inscribed with a biblical passage, that belonged to her mother.²⁴ Reflecting on her war experiences, Selma Cronan called the WASP “a peculiar organization.” The twelve hundred pilots who enlisted in the WASP in 1944 “went in as civilians but with the promise that we would be militarized.”²⁵ That promise materialized in the late 1970s through an Act of Congress obtained by the relentless lobbying of women pilots who had served in World War II, such as Bernice Falk Haydu, another Jewish American pilot. Selma Cronan made the point that she would not have enlisted as a WASP had she not been promised she would become military personnel. “Why wouldn’t you have enlisted?” asked her interviewer. “I was much more interested in fighting that war, than anything else,” she replied with a sad smile. She confessed that she had been considering joining the navy when she received a call from Jacqueline Cochran, a renowned American pilot who was promoting the WASP and with whom she was on friendly terms. After passing a test, she had to wait for a telegram from General Arnold to be admitted to a military base in Texas. She left her supportive husband, Walter Cronan, with whom she had been religiously married in 1935, and arrived by train near Sweetwater, a very small “ghost town,” in her words.

Selma Kantor expressed her surprise that men were not permitted to land at the base, where about four hundred women pilots worked “twenty-four hours a day.” There were a few male mechanics on the base, but most mechanics were women—“they were protecting the men from us,” Selma noted with humor. Women underwent the same basic training as men, the final aim of which was to be able to fly a plane. Being a WASP meant taking part in an experiment: for the first time in history, women were being trained to fly American military aircraft.

A document prepared for an annual report to the secretary of war helps explain why the WASP program was limited in duration and in scope, leaving Selma Cronan somewhat frustrated at not being sent overseas or immediately recognized as military personnel in the Air Corps. Written and signed by Jacqueline Cochran, director of women pilots, and dated November 25, 1944, the document sums up the program in which Selma Kantor Cronan and Bernice Falk Haydu took part: “There was a two-fold purpose in the activation of the WASP program; (a) As an experiment to prove their capabilities in handling domestic flying missions in case of potential need in great numbers, (b) To release men pilots for higher types of duty including combat. This purpose has been accomplished. It has been established that women pilots can be relied on in great numbers to perform any domestic flying mission.”²⁶ The abrupt ending of the WASP program was a shock for women pilots, who had performed their mission to the best of their abilities. With the return of sufficient male pilots to handle all American air force missions, the WASP program was inactivated on December 20, 1944.²⁷ However, the successful experiment involving highly motivated women pilots, Jews among them, did entail casualties. Thirty-eight young women lost their lives during approximately two years of the program.²⁸

As for nurses, there was high motivation to enlist in the military. Born in New York in 1923, Ruth Gottlieb Cohen recalled the life-changing moment when ineluctable decisions were made that would affect many lives. The military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service against the naval base at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, surprised and shocked all Americans. She remembered it as the moment when all the boys she knew exclaimed, “Well, this is it!” It was their elliptic way of expressing the basic necessity of enlisting without too much thought. Ruth Gottlieb’s parents were “devastated,” since both her brother, Milton, and her older sister, Yetta, enlisted too. The atmosphere of that ineffable period is best encapsulated in a sentence that notes the turning point: “Anxiety about the next paycheck gave way to anxiety about loved ones in uniform.”²⁹

As a WAC, Yetta Gottlieb was sent overseas, but Ruth was assigned to a hospital in the South as a nurse, together with a group of Jewish friends. Racial discrimination in the South came as a shock. Expanding on her motivation to enlist, Ruth insisted that “we were patriotic, we felt this was something we had to do.” She also shed light on a positive element of her military service: “It was an opening instead of staying in a nursery home.” Yet, she was “surprised” by the difficulty of basic training at Fort Dix: girls had to do everything men did except learn how to handle a weapon. Barracks life and basic training included scaling fences, climbing ropes, and even taking hikes with gas masks. Going through such a harsh physical challenge required strong motivation. Asked if she had felt the need to keep kosher, Ruth admitted that she had not and had only occasionally accepted invitations from Jewish families outside the base on Friday evenings. A Jewish chaplain was there to encourage observance and boost morale.

Yetta Moskowitz, from New York City, was just finishing nursing school when she enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in June 1943: “Fever was running high for nurses to serve in the military.”³⁰ She went through difficult training at the Air Force School of Air Evacuations in June 1944. It was not long before she was called on to evacuate combat casualties from battlefields in the South Pacific. There, she took care of the wounded GIs with whom she flew to the nearest regional area hospitals, becoming a pioneer in air evacuation medicine. The urge to enlist was shared by many young Jewish nurses like Ruth Karsevar from Atlantic City, New Jersey, who cared for troops under combat conditions before switching to the difficult medical treatment of inmates recently liberated from POW and concentration camps in Germany suffering from PTSD.³¹ Lilian Krell enlisted in October 1943 after her graduation from Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in New York City. After being stationed at Fort Dix, she was sent to England on the eve of the Normandy invasion as part of the 297th General Hospital Unit. Nothing could lessen her motivation to care for the wounded under the most difficult conditions in combat zones: “Nurses worked 12–15 hour shifts and round the clock whenever a new load of patients arrived.”³² If resilience was needed from servicemen, it was also required from the nurses who kept them alive and comforted them. Their altruism was noteworthy. Lilian Krell voiced the hope that their dedication would remain in the writing and rewriting of history: “In retrospect I would like to feel that I, and my fellow nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps served our wounded men and our country well. I also would like to feel that as women we played an important and much needed role in the Armed Forces.”³³

A number of Jewish nurses received recognition from the army. They include Ellan Levitsky Orkin and her sister Dorothy, who grew up in Salem, New Jersey, and were children of immigrants. They enlisted together and treated numerous soldiers wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in France. In recognition of their selflessness and helpfulness, the two sisters received the American Theater Ribbon and the European-African-Middle Eastern Theater Campaign Ribbon, as well as the World War II Victory Medal. It is interesting to note that they both chose to have an H on their dog tags, as seen in the pictures of their World War II memorabilia.³⁴

Jewish servicewomen, like all American women serving in the military, came from every segment of American society and were eager to comply with the call to duty. Serving in traditional or more unusual roles, their motivations to enlist included a spirit of adventure, an interest in a physical challenge, and a dream to make the world a better place. For Jewish servicewomen, many of whom had ancestors who had fled anti-Jewish hostility and violence in Europe, the idea of “repairing the world” (Tikkun olam) present in Judaism may have been in the back of their minds. The concept was congruent with the American ethos. Often appreciated by combat servicemen, Jewish servicewomen performed all sorts of necessary tasks behind the front lines, including decoding enemy messages, weather forecasting, and operating radios. They even developed artificial eyes for wounded GIs, as in the case of Jewish servicewoman Bernice Baumel, stationed at San Diego Naval Hospital. She became a pioneer in using a new technique that matched the existing eye. Her desire to help translated into a patient temperament that served her well when dealing with the emotions of young soldiers who had lost an eye in the war.³⁵ Servicewomen of all faiths repaired cars, checked planes, served as Link trainer (flight simulator) instructors, or operated control towers, while women pilots like Selma Cronan or Bee Falk Haydu were assigned flying duties so that more soldiers could fight on the front lines.

***

Despite the strong resolve of Jews to enlist, as illustrated in this chapter, stereotypes persisted among officers or soldiers who clung to uninformed representations of Jews as draft dodgers, quartermasters, or clerks. The mass of oral and written testimonies and the list of war casualties will not suffice for those who, like Holocaust deniers, persist in denying the fact that Jews have been faithful patriots since 1654, when Jewish men and women, led by Asher Levy, took part in defending the walls of New Amsterdam. Jewish servicemen have fought in every branch of the US Armed Forces and in every war since the founding of the United States. During World War II, the military assigned different roles to women, and a departure from traditional models can be seen in the case of women pilots, a group that included some Jewish servicewomen. However, some instructors claimed that “Jewish women can’t fly” and were intent to “wash them out” after their training period.³⁶ Although anti-Jewish hostility reflected the trends of civilian society in the 1930s and 1940s, as of June 30, 1945, the Bureau of War Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) recorded 6,477 awards received by Jewish servicemen and servicewomen.³⁷

It is impossible to generalize what motivated Jewish servicemen and women to enlist in the Allied armies. For instance, some left-wing Jews shared an involvement in politics that included a commitment to economic justice. Their participation in the war was prompted by an eagerness to save socialism after the invasion of the Soviet Union by German troops on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). The letters of American serviceman Benedict Alper, written to his wife from Algiers, French North Africa, reveal that he identified more with communism than with Judaism. A letter dated December 12, 1943, relates an encounter with the local superintendent of education, who inquired whether he was “juif” (a Jew), to which Alper simply replied, “My parents were.”³⁸ Still, servicemen and servicewomen whose parents or grandparents were immigrants from Europe were more intent on combating the Nazis and their allies, even if patriotism seemed like the first reason for enlistment.

Furthermore, testimonies vary depending on the audience and the questions asked. If a testimony is delivered in the presence of a Jewish audience or given to a Jewish museum, a veteran may feel obligated to shed light on the Jewish elements of his war experiences. Besides, the reasons to fight evolve among combatants in a unit. With the experience of comradeship as the war progressed, the reasons for Jewish GIs to go on waging war included the desire to save their comrades. An esprit de corps developed while on the battleground, aboard a ship, or on a plane. Motives may thus have become mixed: fighting for a cause, for glory or promotion, and—more often than not—to gain respect and acceptance. On what inner resources did Jewish servicemen and servicewomen draw to be good soldiers despite encountering prejudice? Each chapter of this book considers this question from a different perspective and focus.

For most Jewish Allied soldiers, the issue of motivation was complex. Jews in France defended their country out of patriotism. In 1939, when French Jews volunteered, the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler were not yet known. Their patriotism was as strong as during World War I. Though Jews endured discrimination and persecution, they enlisted in the Free French Forces and in Jewish resistance groups. Free France was the government in exile led by French army officer Charles de Gaulle in London after the Armistice of June 22, 1940. In early November 1942, a high percentage of the total Jewish population were members of the underground in French Algeria. They fought as French patriots against the Vichy regime—aligned with Germany—when they helped Anglo-American landings in Operation Torch and facilitated its success. More generally, for Jews and American Jews in particular, motivations to fight included different perceptions of Nazism.

Using a pen and colorful illustrations to motivate American soldiers, Arthur Szyk’s work was noteworthy during the war years. A Jew and a Pole born in 1894, exiled from Lodz and living in Paris, Szyk (pronounced “shick”) was interested in creating heroic Jewish models inspired by Jewish history. As an immigrant in the United States, he felt privileged to fight the Nazis through powerful cartoons on Collier’s covers. Widely circulated, they appealed to a large public. He even used a magazine insert to emphasize his deeply personal involvement as “a soldier in art,” a Polish exile, and a future American. The first of the artist’s eight covers for Collier’s magazine compares to the wide circulation of Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Entitled Historic Poker Game and published in New York in 1941, it exposes the game being played. Hitler holds three jokers: Japan, Italy, and the Vichy regime in France. Ivan of Russia holds only two cards against Hitler’s three jokers, but the expression on his face reveals how powerful his cards are. The symbols on the cards represent Great Britain and the United States.

The earlier works of the Polish immigrant—who had fought in World War I—had an impact on American Jews. A famous watercolor and gouache entitled Trumpeldor’s Defense of Tel Hai (1936) was created in the context of the Arab revolt against the British Mandate in Palestine, which began in 1936. In response to this event, Arthur Szyk depicted the hero against the Arab riots in 1920: having lost an arm, Captain Joseph Trumpeldor defended the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in Galilea. He was eventually shot, and Tel Hai was burned by the Arab militia. But his dying words were: “It is good to die for our land.”³⁹ In July 1942, an enlarged reproduction of the painting was significantly retitled The Modern Maccabees, aiming to inspire Jewish heroism and self-defense in Europe and America. Numerous issues addressed in Szyk’s work still resonate today, including the fight against prejudice and bigotry. For Szyk, “the Jewish struggle for freedom,” notes Michael Berenbaum, “was part of a universal freedom.”⁴⁰ It is significant that one of the artist’s final works was the illumination of Thomas Jefferson’s Oath, New Canaan (1951), a pledge against tyranny, making Szyk, the immigrant, a prominent patriot.

Fig. 1.1 Collier’s magazine cover, November 1, 1941. Reproduced with the cooperation of Historicana, Burlingame, CA.

Of the young Jewish American patriots who readily enlisted, some were disappointed about not taking part in the war in Europe. Gideon Lichtman, for instance, was an American Jewish pilot eager to fight a war that was both American and Jewish. He wanted to stand up against the Nazis. Stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines with the Third Air Commando, where he flew P-51 aircrafts, he was unable to do so. After the war, he saw British soldiers sending the survivors of the Nazi extermination scheme back to Germany, as they did with the ship Exodus in 1947. He transformed his deep frustration into steadfast involvement to “rescue my people.” His self-imposed mission culminated in his heroic fight in the new Israeli Defense Forces in 1948. He appeared as Israel’s first pilot and founders of its fledgling air force.⁴¹ His response was shared by non-Jewish servicemen who had witnessed the liberation of concentration camps and were willing to fight for the survivors’ rights to have a homeland.

During his service in the American military, Gideon Lichtman never hid his Jewishness. Yet it was not unusual for cadets to be discriminated against while in training: “My name is Gideon and [because] I was Jewish [they] called me ‘A. B.’ for Abe, so you can go from there.”⁴² Indeed, it was not unusual for Jewish GIs to be called Abe because many Christians gave that name to Jews automatically. The notion of visibility as a Jew is fathomed mostly through Jewish-sounding names. The issue of self-identification will be addressed in the next chapter.