“Notes” in “True to My God and Country”
Introduction
1. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 53. The novel is partly based on his war experiences with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines campaign.
2. I have closely examined approximately one hundred interviews, testimonies, and memoirs. Of these, fifty-two were essays submitted by GIs to the competition organized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1946 on the subject “My Experiences and Observations as a Jew in World War II.” These essays are referenced by author along with full details of the Record Group, Box, and Folder numbers. I have compared these personal accounts with interviews I conducted among French-speaking Jews in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia who welcomed Jewish GIs into their homes during the North African campaign and with letters from Jewish GIs kept at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington. These sources have influenced my comparative research method.
3. Primary sources include oral histories and archival material from the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC (Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center), the William Breman Heritage Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive in Washington, DC, and the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in Latrun, Israel. The documentary film GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II, directed by Lisa Ades, 2017, 87 min., also provided interviews.
4. Art Buchwald, Leaving Home: A Memoir (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 174.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
9. Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Bendersky, Her Work Praised Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
10. Bebe Koch, for instance, enlisted in the WAVES in 1942 at the age of nineteen. Having heard rumors of Nazi persecution, she was eager to help defeat Germany. Eventually promoted to platoon commander, she became an aide to Rear Admiral Ronald Hopewood. Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/discover/infocus/military/navy/koch, accessed September 20, 2021. The figure of approximately ten thousand Jewish women enlisted in the US Armed Forces is given in the film GI Jews.
11. Martin Sugarman, Under the Heel of Bushido: Last Voices of the Jewish POWs of the Japanese in the Second World War (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2014).
12. Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
13. Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
14. Ibid., 207.
15. Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Bendersky’s study sheds light on anti-Jewish policies from the turn of the twentieth century to the decades after World War II.
16. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 273.
17. Ibid.
18. Conversation with Breuer’s daughter, Heddy Abramovitz, Jerusalem, May 28, 2018. Assigned in France to the unit of intelligence reconnaissance, Breuer later participated in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. See Breuer’s interview, Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn513303, accessed September 19, 2021.
19. Atlanta-born Rabbi David Geffen, a friend of David Macarov, kindly gave me the electronic file of the self-published memoir that Macarov intended for his family, “A Small Cog: Tales from My Two Wars” (manuscript in possession of the author, Israel, 2014).
20. Philip Bernstein, Rabbis at War: The CANRA Story (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1971), 33.
21. Ibid., 1.
22. National Jewish Welfare Board-Bureau of War Records, Box 197, Overseas, North Africa, 1942–1943, Folder 14, letter dated November 15, 1942, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York.
23. Menachem Butler, “The Flying Rabbi: Chaplain Werfel (1916–1943),” Commentator, May 11, 2004, 20.
24. Historian Alex Grobman emphasizes that after the war, no other country permitted their chaplains to assist Jewish displaced persons in camps in the American zones of Germany and Austria. Jewish American chaplains helped Holocaust survivors in their struggle to emigrate and efforts to reclaim their rights as free human beings. However, such activities were considered illegal by the military. See Alex Grobman, Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). On American Jewish chaplains who sought out Jewish survivors and interacted with the French communities they helped to rebuild, see Laura Hobson Faure, A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Presence in Post-Holocaust France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022). See also Françoise S. Ouzan, “American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors’ Return to Jewish Communal Life (1945–1952),” in Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth, 1945–1967, ed. Françoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 112–36.
25. The sources and computations for these conclusions are explained in Isidor Kaufman, American Jews in World War II: The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom, vol. 2 (New York: Dial Press, 1947), 25, 26. On page 25, table II provides a distribution of Jewish servicemen by branches. The next page offers an estimation of casualties and awards, as reflected by data processed up to July 1, 1946, except for deaths which have been processed up to January 1947. Distinguished Flying Crosses (2,391) and Air Medals (16,068) confirm the significant presence of Jews among fliers. In addition, there are Distinguished Service Crosses (74), Navy Crosses (37), Navy and Corps Medals (30), Distinguished Service Medals (47), Legion of Merit Awards (344), Soldiers’ Medals (222), Silver Stars (1,627), and Bronze Stars (6,090). “Of the 80 percent who were in the Army, one sixth were in the Infantry, one twelfth were in other ground forces units, nearly three out of ten were in the Air Forces, and of these, almost one forth was flying personnel.” See Louis Kraft, “Servicemen and Veterans,” American Jewish Year Book 48 (1946–1947): 166. A study made late in 1943 and early in 1944 covering Jewish communities all over the United States revealed that about sixty percent of all Jewish physicians under the age of forty-five enlisted in the American military. See Samuel Calmin Kohs, “Jewish War Records of World War II,” American Jewish Year Book 47 (1945–1946), 166. S. C. Kohs, a noted sociologist, was the director of the Bureau of War Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board.
26. Penslar, Jews and the Military, 207. As Penslar emphasizes, many continued to serve in the Polish armies in exile under British or Soviet command.
27. On Lidiya Litvyak, see Bill Yenne, The White Rose of Stalingrad: The Real-Life Adventure of Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak, the Highest Scoring Female Ace of All Time (Long Island City, NY: Osprey, 2013).
28. Leonid Smilovitsky collected letters of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army in the framework of the project on Jewish Soldiers in World War II of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. In a symposium organized by the center in 2017, he noted that the emotions felt by Jews serving in the Red Army were different from those of non-Jewish soldiers. He pinpointed that when one Jew did not behave properly in the military, many Jews were stigmatized. Like American soldiers, numerous Jews in the Red Army concealed the fact they were Jewish. It is generally estimated that at least two hundred thousand of the more than five hundred thousand Jewish soldiers in the Red Army died during World War II. See the number of decorations and statistics provided by the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in Latrun, Israel: http://www.jwmww2.org/USSR_arena, accessed March 23, 2020.
29. Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010), 24.
30. Ibid., 10. See also a synthetic analysis by Gabriel Mayer, whose archival findings illustrate this issue in Gabriel Mayer, “Holocaust and WWII: Jews in the Red Army,” International Journal of Social Science Studies 3, no. 2 (January 2015): 113. Mayer argues that this aspect of Jewish heroism, which has become part of the mainstream cultural narrative of Jews from the Soviet Union, shaped their Jewish identity.
31. See https://www.ordredelaliberation.fr/fr/compagnons/andre-zirnheld, accessed March 8, 2020. See also https://frblogs.timesofisrael.com/les-parachutistes-juifs-de-la-france-libre/, accessed March 9, 2020, by François Heilbronn, whose uncle was a distinguished paratrooper. The translated text of The Prayer of the Paratrooper may be read online: http://airborneassociation.com/e/about/prayer.html, accessed March 8, 2020.
32. Testimony of Woolf Marmot at a workshop initiated by the Goren-Goldstein Diaspora Research Center in Tel Aviv University entitled “Les Combattants Juifs de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,” May 19, 2016. On Jewish participation in the Allied forces in World War II, see Penslar, Jews and the Military, 207–14.
1. “True to My God, True to My Country”
1. Joseph George Fredman and Louis A. Falk, Jews in American Wars (Washington, DC: Jewish Veterans of the United States of America, 1954), 99. The authors are both veterans of World War I. Although estimates of the Jewish participation in World War I may vary, the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, created in 1958 under the auspices of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA, provides the figure of two hundred and twenty-five thousand Jews who served in all the branches of the American military. https://nmajmh.org/stories/over-there-profiles-of-american-jews-in-world-wwi/, accessed June 13, 2023.
2. Moore, GI Jews, 263. This is one of the main arguments of Moore’s important research.
3. Bernard Branson, “I Wanted These Sons of Bitches to Know,” in Ours to Fight For: American Jewish Voices from the Second World War, ed. J. M. Eidelman (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage–Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 2003), 17.
4. Arthur Buchwald Collection (AFC/2001/001/24003), Veterans History Project at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
5. Ibid.
6. Buchwald, Leaving Home, 168.
7. Ibid., 177.
8. Ibid., 196.
9. Maximilian Lerner, “I Wanted to Get My Own Back,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 68.
10. Ibid., 69.
11. Kathryn Lang-Slattery, Immigrant Soldier: The Story of a Ritchie Boy, with a foreword by Guy Stern (Laguna Beach, CA: Pacific Bookworks, 2014), 3. Werner T. Angress, Witness to the Storm, A Jewish Journey from Nazi Berlin to the 82nd Airborne, 1920–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), a posthumous memoir first published in 2012.
12. “Oral History Interview with Manfred Steinfeld,” Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn507500, accessed October 10, 2021. An American liberator, Steinfeld found that his mother and sister had been murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp. He arrested a former concentration camp administrator after the end of the war.
13. Herman J. Obermayer, Soldiering for Freedom: A GI’s Account of World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 63. A large proportion of the over 550,000 Jews who served in the US forces reached the European continent.
14. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 121.
15. Ibid., 216–17.
16. Ibid., 115.
17. Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 120.
18. Bruce H. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II: Personal Narratives of American Men and Women (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 203n2.
19. Jewish Veteran, 10–12 (December 1942): 11. See also William Starr Myers, Prominent Families of New Jersey (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical, 2000), 1:638.
20. Jeanne Zamaloff Dworkin, “I Am Not Going to Stand by and Let Him Do It,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 33. Zamaloff Dworkin added that her mother’s family in Poland was eventually “wiped out,” while most of her father’s in Russia was saved.
21. Ibid., 34–35.
22. Bea Abrams Hirshcovici Cohen Collection (AFC/2001/00/86629), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. A short interview with Bea Abrams Cohen also appears in GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II, documentary film directed by Lisa Ades, 2017, 87 min. Bea Abrams Cohen died in 2015 at the age of 105, the oldest female veteran in California.
23. Ibid.
24. Testimony of Selma Cronan (2000.A.116), oral history, tape one, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York. The passage in the mezuzah begins with “Shema Israel” (Hear O’ Israel), which has become a motto of the Jewish people, a sign of belonging as well as an emotional cry. The scroll is traditionally mounted on the doorpost of a Jewish home to symbolize commitment to Jewish ideals and values.
25. Ibid.
26. Material for Annual Report of CG/AAF to Secretary of War. AC/AS, OCR, Requirements Division (Asst. for Air Forces), November 25, 1944, Archives of D. D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower Library, Military Era, World War II, Abilene, Kansas.
27. Ibid. African American women were not allowed to participate in the WASP program. Only two Chinese American women were accepted.
28. Ibid.
29. Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 331.
30. Sandor B. Cohen, curator, Women in the Military: A Jewish Perspective, with an introduction by Harvey S. Friedman and Judith Weiss Cohen (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish Military History, 1999), 24.
31. Ibid., 22.
32. Ibid., 21.
33. Ibid.
34. See “Veterans’ Testimonies/Veteran Testimony—Ellan J. Levitsky and Dorothy Levitsky,” https://www.med-dept.com/veterans-testimonies/veterans-testimony-ellan-j-levitsky-dorothy-f-levitsky/, accessed February 28, 2020. The Levitsky sisters were sent together to Normandy. See also https://www.defense.gov/observe/photo-gallery/igphoto/2001129317/, accessed February 28, 2020.
35. Cohen, Women in the Military, 44–45.
36. Joanne Wallace Orr, “An Oral History, Women, Airforce Service Pilots,” interview by Jean Hascall Cole, The Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, 2004, 46.
37. S. C. Kohs, “Jewish War Records of World War II,” American Jewish Year Book 47, no. 5706 (1945–46): 165.
38. Benedict Solomon Alper, Love and Politics in Wartime: Letters to My Wife, 1943–45, selected and edited by Joan Wallach Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 21.
39. Michael Berenbaum, “Arthur Szyk: The Artist as Soldier, the Artist as Messenger,” in Arthur Szyk, Soldier in Art, ed. David Ungar (Burlingame, CA: Historicana, 2017), 61–81.
40. Ibid., 78.
41. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 172–73.
42. Ibid., 25. Abe stands for Abraham.
2. Invisibility of Jews in the Military?
1. Branson, “I Wanted These Sons of Bitches to Know,” 22. The tail gunner on a B-24 provides an example of zeal, as discovered in this chapter.
2. Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 131.
3. Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 59.
4. Ibid., 78. A symbol of endurance and a friend of Israel, the Hollywood icon died at the age of 103 on February 5, 2020. A photo in his memoirs captures the moment when he shook hands with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. His wife, Anne Buydens, converted to Judaism when they renewed their wedding vows in 2004.
5. Ibid., 383.
6. Ibid., 47.
7. Ibid., 383.
8. Testimony of Ruth Cohen (1999.V.50), oral history, tape one, Museum of Jewish Heritage–Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
9. Testimony of Selma Cronan, tape one. She was given a military discharge while at the base of Avenger Field but refused to accept an interruption of her service that was not justified in her eyes and won her appeal.
10. Testimony of Selma Cronan. 2000. A.116, tape one, Museum of Jewish Heritage.
11. Hank Greenberg, Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life, ed. with an introduction by Ira Berkow (New York: Times Books, 1989), 159.
12. John Rosengren, Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes (New York: New American Library, 2013), 230.
13. Ibid., 235–50.
14. Greenberg, Hank Greenberg, 256. Greenberg noted a link between his secularity and the fact his parents, who both understood Hebrew, did not find the time to teach him the language of the prayers. He died of cancer on September 4, 1986, before he could finish his autobiography, later completed by journalist Ira Berkow. He was the first Jewish ballplayer elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame (1956).
15. Ibid., 257.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 255.
18. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 23.
19. Ibid., 25–26.
20. Joanne Wallace Orr, interview by Jean Hascall Cole.46. For Jean Hascall Cole’s book based on interviews with her fellow WASP, see Jean Hascall Cole, Women Pilots of World War II (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992).
21. Berenice Falk Haydu, Letters Home 1944–1945: Women Airforce Service Pilots, World War II, ed. Rita Cody Casey, foreword by Sally Van Wagenen Keil (Riviera Beach, FL: TopLine, 2003), 27.
22. Baumgarten’s interview can be found in the digital collections of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWnPWbx-sXo&ab_channel=TheNationalWWIIMuseum, accessed August 30, 2021.
23. “Farewell to Dr. Harold ‘Hal’ Baumgarten, D-Day Survivor and Friend of the National WWII Museum,” http://www.nww2m.com/2016/12/farewell-to-dr-harold-hal-baumgarten-d-day-survivor-and-friend-of-the-national-wwii-museum/, accessed August 30, 2021. See also Harold Baumgarten, D-Day Survivor, An Autobiography (New Orleans: Pelican, 2006).
24. Branson, “I Wanted These Sons of Bitches to Know,” 18.
25. Ibid., 18–19.
26. Ibid., 22.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 126.
30. The popularity of antisemitic demagogues and hate organizations is developed in ibid., 122, 134.
31. In print on June 22, 1994, Section A, page 20 of the National Edition of the New York Times with the headline “In World War II, Many Jewish G.I.s Left Religion Off Dog Tags,” quoted in Akiva Males, “Jewish GIs and Their Dog Tags,” Hakira: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 15 (2003): 275, http://www.hakirah.org/Vol15Males.pdf, accessed April 6, 2020. Males points out the fact that Lippman and many Jewish combat soldiers had no religious preference stamped on their metal identification tag to explain why there are fewer Stars of David in military cemeteries than there should be. Consequently, an estimation of over 600,000 Jewish servicemen and women is likely more accurate than the figure of over 500,000 Jews in World War II usually mentioned.
32. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/22/opinion/l-in-world-war-ii-many-jewish-gi-s-left-religion-off-dog-tags-470333.html.
33. Edward T. Sandrow, “Jews in the Army—A Short Social Study,” Reconstructionist, March 17, 1944, 12.
34. Harold U. Ribalow (pseudonym Meyer Cherniak), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 7, 13.
35. Ibid., 14.
36. Ibid. Often transliterated “Ein Keloheinu,” this verse of daily sung prayer means “There is none like our Lord.” Sh’ma refers to the prayer “Shema Israel” (Hear O’ Israel), recited twice a day, morning and night. It is an emotional cry of the Jewish people as well as a commitment to Jewish values and ideals.
37. Jack Scharf, “I Just Couldn’t Face It,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 90. The complete Hebrew verse is “Baruch Atah A-donay, Eloneinu Melech Ha’Olam borei pri hagofen,” uttered to pronounce the blessing on wine and grape, meaning “Blessed are you Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who Creates the fruit of the vine.”
38. Ibid., 94.
39. Ibid., 95–96. Over a month before the German surrender, The Rainbow Haggadah was printed in Germany by Chaplain Eli Bohnen and his assistant Eli Heimberg for the Passover seder in Dahn. This was the first Haggadah printed on German soil since the rise of Hitler. A copy is in the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington. It can be seen here: https://nmajmh.org/2016/04/three-fascinating-world-war-ii-haggadot/, accessed April 12, 2020.
40. Sandrow, “Jews in the Army,” 13.
41. Morris Rubin, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 21, 3.
42. Ibid., 4. Jewish chaplains themselves had to be checked for possible subversion, as Jewish GIs were sometimes equated with communism, especially when recent immigrants. Jewish displaced persons seeking admission to the United States after the Nazi genocide of the Jews were often perceived as communists by both public opinion and members of Congress.
43. Ibid.
44. Sandrow, “Jews in the Army,” 13.
45. Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 260. In the European theater, Major General Maurice Rose, who fought heroically in World War I and World War II, received over fifteen medals and awards, including the Distinguished Service Cross. After his death in March 1945, the Jewishness of General Rose, the son and grandson of Polish rabbis, was questioned. His records indicated P for Protestant, but no record was found of a religious conversion. The American military later replaced the initial Jewish marking on his grave in the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Margraten, Limburg, by a cross. His example is significant because Jewish officers often concealed their Jewish identity to avoid preventing promotion.
46. Martin Silverman, “The Lord Would Provide,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 123.
47. Ibid., 116.
48. Preface to Prayer Book, Abridged for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States (New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1941, 1943), iv.
49. Bernstein, Rabbis at War, 33. A decade ago, “Operation Benjamin,” whose adviser is Rabbi Professor Jacob Schacter, strove to rectify cases of incorrect gravestones in military cemeteries. This nonprofit organization manned by volunteers is working to uncover erroneous headstones and obtain authorization from the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) to rededicate the headstones. The first headstone change occurred on June 20, 2018. So far, more than twenty American soldiers mistakenly buried under Latin crosses have been identified as Jews, and their headstones have been replaced by a Star of David. See https://www.operationbenjamin.org/our-soldiers, accessed July 19, 2023.
50. Ibid., 34.
51. Ibid., preface. Yet the figure of 550,000 is provided by war correspondent I. Kaufman right from the subtitle of his book. His sources were the war records published in Kohs, “Jewish War Records,” 153–72. Due to the reasons quoted earlier about the invisibility of Jews in the American military, the figure of 600,000 may be more plausible.
52. GI Jews (film).
53. American Jewish Committee Archives, “First Broadcast of Jewish Religious Service from Nazi Germany,” under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). American forces fought fiercely in Aachen, the first German city to be captured by Allied forces. http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/RD40.pdf, accessed September 27, 2021.
54. It is interesting to mention Eleanor Roosevelt’s words about women pilots in 1942: “This is not a time when women should be patient. We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.” Wings across America, http://www.wingsacrossamerica.us/wasp/, accessed April 23, 2020.
3. Heroines Took to the Skies
1. Haydu, Letters Home, 102.
2. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 406 of 934.
3. The recruiting poster for the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve read “Be a Marine, Free a Marine to Fight.”
4. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 392 of 934. Ironically, medics on the battlefield did not usually carry weapons.
5. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 24.
6. My own copy of Haydu, Letters Home bears the hand-written dedication “Always blue skies, Bee.”
7. Ibid., 4.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Ibid., 7–8.
10. Testimony of Bernice Falk Haydu (2000.A.197), oral history, tape one, Museum of Jewish Heritage–Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York.
11. Ibid.
12. Haydu, Letters Home, 16.
13. Ibid., 17.
14. Ibid., 18–19.
15. Ibid., 30 (emphasis mine). This quote reveals an assertion of Jewish identity when an attempt to conceal it for smoother integration into the group of trainees could have been expected. However, there may at times have been an ambivalence, manifested in a desire “to keep quiet,” as Bernice Falk had in her previous jobs.
16. Ibid., 31. In her interview, she also mentioned that the girls talked about religion but that there was no antisemitism. Testimony of Bernice Falk Haydu, tape one.
17. Haydu, Letters Home, 52. Link trainers and simulators are obsolete nowadays.
18. Ibid., 51.
19. Testimony of Bernice Falk Haydu, tape two.
20. Haydu, Letters Home, 52.
21. Ibid., 55.
22. Cole, Women Pilots of World War II, dedication page. The author, a woman pilot, dedicates her book to the memory of Betty Stine, Mary Mitchell Robinson, and Susan Clarke, who belonged to her class (44-W-2). Some of these tragedies, the author highlights, may have resulted from sabotaged aircrafts. On Betty Stine, see ibid., 1, 67, 70. Her parents had to come to the base and retrieve the body of their only child, at their own expense, without military honors, since only in 1977 were the WASP granted retroactive military status.
23. Ibid., 113, quoting the testimony of another woman pilot, Leona Golbinec. On sabotaged planes, see ibid., 41, 45, 107, 113–14, 115–16.
24. Ibid., 69.
25. Testimony of Bernice Falk Haydu, tape two.
26. Haydu, Letters Home, 51.
27. Ibid., 75.
28. Ibid., 86.
29. Ibid., 92.
30. Testimony of Bernice Falk Haydu, tape two. Haydu was asked if WASP were issued dog tags and if hers bore an H for Hebrew. Unlike all her military decorations and gabardine uniform, she did not recall where her dog tags were but assumed they had an H on them. She wore her “good conduct” medal, medals indicating the American theater and victory, and the WASP insignia on her authentic navy-blue uniform with a white shirt and black tie during the video interview.
31. Ibid.
32. Quoted by Haydu, Letters Home, 156.
33. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 561 of 934.
34. Testimony of Selma Cronan, end of tape one and tape 2. Maryse Bastié set numerous international records for female aviators during the thirties. Although her husband, a World War I pilot, was killed in a plane crash, she did aerobatics to make ends meet and continued with dangerous maneuvers to purchase her own aircraft. During World War II, she volunteered for the Croix Rouge. After suffering an arm injury during the war, she could no longer fly as a pilot. She died in 1952 when the aircraft on which she was a passenger crashed during takeoff on her way to attend a conference on aviation in Lyon, France.
35. See photo, Washington Post, June 8, 1990.
36. Major Marc R. Henderson, CAP, “Flying through the Glass Ceiling,” National Historical Journal (July–December 2020): 24–25.
37. See chapter 1 of the present volume.
38. Deb Smith, “Love at First Flight: Former WASP Still Living Life at Full Throttle,” Airport Journals, http://airportjournals.com/love-at-first-flight-former-wasp-still-living-life-at-full-throttle/, accessed May 10, 2020, 2.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 3.
41. Ibid. Another source mentions the waters of the Pacific as the place of the accident.
42. Ibid., 4.
43. Ibid. See also Cole, Women Pilots of World War II, 116.
44. Cole, Women Pilots of World War II, 116.
45. Smith, “Love at First Flight,” 4.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 6. See her interview at the end of the YouTube video about her life and achievements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZN50SIzN0w, accessed May 10, 2020. Rumor has it that records of the WASP were classified for some thirty-five years, but this is difficult to prove.
48. See chapter 5 of this book.
49. “Winged Angels,” https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196161/winged-angels-usaaf-flight-nurses-in-wwii/, accessed May 30, 2023.
50. The US Army Nurse in World War II (1944), War Department, Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps.
51. Ibid.
52. Judith Barger, Beyond the Call of Duty: Army Flight Nursing in World War II (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013). See blurb of the book for this figure. The author served as a flight nurse in the US Air Force on Clark Air Base in the Philippines in the 1970s.
53. “Winged Angels.”
54. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 390 of 934.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. See entry for Etta Moskowitz Rosenthal in https://archive.org/stream/TheStoryOfAirEvacuation/TheStoryOfAirEvacuation_djvu.txt, accessed May 18, 2020.
58. On March 12, 1945, apparently in the same attack, Sergeant John E. Brand, a Jewish radio operator on a B-24 Liberator in the Twenty-Third Bomb Squadron, was declared missing before being listed as killed. He, too, received the Purple Heart. His aircraft, Maiden Montana, was one of six Twenty-Third Bomb Squadron Liberators given the mission of bombing Japanese positions at Mindanao Island. See “Soldiers from New York: Jewish Soldiers” in the New York Times, in “World War II: Sergeant John E. Brand-March 12, 1945,” http://theyweresoldiers.com/index.php/2017/05/14/soldiers-from-new-york-jewish-soldiers-in-the-new-york-times-in-world-war-two-john-e-brand/, accessed May 19, 2020.
59. Gary Zaetz, “Pentagon Has Forgotten America’s Heroic MIA Women of World War Two,” Facebook, November 21, 2017. The author has researched numerous occurrences of air crashes and servicewomen missing in action and details the known circumstances, offering speculations on the possible causes of the crash.
60. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:49.
61. “Beatrice H. Memler,” https://www.honorstates.org/index.php?id=351408, accessed May 18, 2020.
62. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 538–44 of 934.
63. William L. O’Neill, “Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in World War II,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 114.
64. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 132–33.
65. Ibid., 133. As part of the WAC, the daughter of Governor Herbert R. Lehman, Private Hilda Jane De Vadetzki, was on duty in Algiers. The noted governor lost a son, Lieutenant Peter Lehman, who performed fifty-seven combat missions against occupied Europe.
66. Interview with Ellan Levitsky Orkin, GI Jews (film).
4. Confronting Biased Attitudes
1. Solomon Grayzel, “A Chronicle of Our Generation,” in Two Generations in Perspective: Notable Events and Trends 1896–1956, ed. Harry Schneiderman (New York: Monde, 1957), 50.
2. Eliot Blin, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 9, 13.
3. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 127.
4. “Jerry’s Message to America,” Spiritof45.org, http://www.spiritof45.org/jerry_yellin_message_to_america.aspx, accessed June 29, 2020.
5. Michael Rugel, “Remembering Captain Jerry Yellin,” National Museum of American Jewish Military History, January 10, 2018, https://nmajmh.org/2018/01/remembering-captain-jerry-yellin/, accessed July 16, 2020.
6. Don Brown, The Last Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Final Combat Mission of World War II, with forewords by Captain Jerry Yellin and Melanie Stone (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2017), xvii.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., xx–xxi.
9. Ibid., xx.
10. “It was street language, some street language plus some antisemitic remark to me, which resulted, whenever I heard it, into a fight”; Burton Roberts, “Oh, the Great Speckled Bird,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 51.
11. Buchwald, Leaving Home, 174.
12. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 19–20.
13. Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, rev. ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003).
14. David Macarov, “Small Cog: Tales from My Two Wars,” manuscript in possession of the author (Israel, 2014); David Macarov, “Atlantan Led Air Force’s Coded Communications,” Jewish Times, April 12, 2018, https://atlantajewishtimes.timesofisrael.com/atlantan-led-air-forces-coded-communications/, accessed July 10, 2020.
15. See, for instance, “It’s Your Job to Fight: Antisemitic American Cartoon, 1944,” a cartoon aimed at dissuading American soldiers from fighting instead of “the Jews and Wall Street.” Tracts américains antisémites et / ou anti-bolcheviques, T9-D-3, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC), Paris.
16. Macarov, “Small Cog,” 57. Jew hatred was ingrained in the 1920s. A newspaper published by automaker Henry Ford, the Dearborn Independent, was bent on describing an international Jewish conspiracy that originated in the notorious anti-Jewish forgery known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” See Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001). On how Ivy League universities drastically limited the number of Jewish students (and also African Americans, women, and minorities) by using quotas, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).
17. Moore, GI Jews, 134. The author notes the case of two Jewish soldiers who were ordered by their commanding officer to lead the religious ritual of Passover before boarding a troopship heading for the Marianas, as supplies from the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) had been received. This experience implemented and legitimized the “Judeo-Christian Tradition,” emphasizes Moore. It was forced on the two non-Orthodox servicemen, who were reluctant to be singled out to conduct a Passover seder that “would interfere with nightly poker games.”
18. Sergeant Rosen’s letter demonstrates that Jews were aware of the murderous persecution in Germany, which no Jew could ignore in February 1944.
19. Ibid. In the Victory Forest in Palestine, Rosen’s name is linked with “the greatest constructive effort of our time.” An aviation ordnance man, Sergeant Naurice Rosen’s name is not listed (like those of many other Jewish GIs) in Louis Dublin and Samuel Kohs, Isidor Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, vol. II (New York: Dial Press, 1947).
20. “In that sense, my father was very much a 1950s American Jew.” Author’s conversation with Howard Rosen, son of Sergeant Naurice Rosen, Jerusalem, May 27, 2020.
21. Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 4.
22. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps, exhibition catalog (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish Military History, n.d.), 46. Interview with Maurice Paper by Mort Horwitz, March 18, 1992, kindly sent to me by Pamela Elbe, director of archives and exhibits, National Museum of American Jewish History, Washington, DC. See Françoise S. Ouzan, “From Algiers to Dachau: the Special Assignments of an American Jewish Officer Ordered by General Eisenhower, 1942–1945,” Moreshet, Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism 103 (2023), Hebrew, Tel Aviv, published by the Mordechai Anielevich Memorial Holocaust Study and Research Center, 125–41. The English edition of this article is forthcoming in Moreshet Journal (vol. 20).
23. For archival pictures of the destroyer, see http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/674.htm, accessed June 28, 2020.
24. See the preface by Paul N. Shulman to Joseph M. Hochstein and Murray S. Greenfield, The Jews’ Secret Fleet, introduction by Martin Gilbert (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1987), xiii–xiv. After completing his service in the United States Navy, he was asked by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to help the fledgling Israeli state. Although he did not speak Hebrew, Shulman laid the groundwork for the modern Israeli navy, of which he became the first commander at the age of twenty-six. See J. Wandres, The Ablest Navigator: Lieutenant Paul Shulman, USN, Israel’s Volunteer Admiral (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010).
25. On the so-called international Jewry, a misconception ingrained at West Point, see Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 157. On polls, see Charles Herbert Stember et al., Jews in the Mind of America, preface by John Slawson (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 52, 92–93, 98; Louis Barish, ed., Rabbis in Uniform: The Story of the American Jewish Military Chaplain (New York: Jonathan David, 1962), 279–80. See also George S. Patton, The Patton Papers, compiled and edited by Martin Blumenson, vol. 2, 1940–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1974).
26. Penslar, Jews and the Military, 230.
27. Ibid., 231. Penslar pinpoints the fact that Marcus was already a national celebrity before World War II. As a deputy commissioner, he had led a 1934 police raid on a penitentiary run by gangsters with Tammany Hall connections; he had “wrestled one of them, the 210-pound Joey Rao, off a barber chair and onto the floor.”
28. Zipporah Porath, Col. David (Mickey) Marcus: “A Soldier for All Humanity” (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 2010), 19. This booklet, published by the American Veterans of Israel Legacy Corp in cooperation with the American Jewish Historical Society, is based on interviews conducted on the first anniversary of Marcus’s death with those who recruited him and the soldiers who fought alongside him. Zipporah Porath was an American student who came to study at the Hebrew University in 1947 on a one-year program and served as a medic during the siege of Jerusalem and in the fledgling Israel air force. For a biography of Marcus, see Ted Berkman, Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus Who Died to Save Jerusalem (New York: Pocket Books, 1962), and the film by the same title with Kirk Douglas as Marcus.
29. Porath, Col. David (Mickey) Marcus, 19.
30. Ibid., 17.
31. It is significant that American veteran Herman Wouk dedicated his book Sailor and Fiddler both “to the memory of David ‘Mickey’ Marcus, Colonel, United States Army, volunteered and fell in Israel’s War of Independence 1948, interred in West Point Military Cemetery” and to “Ilan Ramon, fighter pilot, Colonel, Israel Defense Forces, volunteer astronaut, United States Space Program, killed in crash of space Shuttle Columbia, 2003.” In this context, it is meaningful to add that Ilan Ramon (born Ilan Wolfermann), whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, was the first Israeli astronaut. He, too, was an example of extreme bravery and a representative of the Jewish people. He is the only non-American citizen to have received (posthumously) the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, which points to the exemplarity and universality of his mission.
32. Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 66–67.
33. GIs Remember, 38. Harry Zaslow, a nineteen-year-old Jewish soldier who served with the 283rd Field Artillery Battalion and participated in the Battle of the Bulge, accounted for his profound shock and confusion on discovering Dachau four hours after the departure of the Germans. Oral history of H. Zaslow, USHMM, Accession Number: 1997.A.0441.125, RG Number: RG-50.462.0125.
34. Morris Eisenstein in ibid., 36. The empathy displayed by non-Jewish soldiers for the plight of Jews during World War II would not last, however. Replacements who had not seen the concentration camps were unaware of what former Jewish inmates had gone through and treated them roughly, sometimes cruelly, as testified in the Harrison Report (July 1945), written by Earl G. Harrison, US representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Investigating the conditions of displaced persons, the American lawyer depicted a grim picture of the deplorable living conditions of Jews in displaced persons camps and of the lack of understanding by soldiers. Another document, Army Talk, issued in 1946, explained to soldiers that “displaced persons are human.” Army Talk 151, War Department, Washington, DC, November 30, 1946, Historical Reference Branch, US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
35. Morris Eisenstein in GIs Remember, 38.
36. Lou Potter, Williams Miles, and Nina Rosenblum, Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), esp. 235 and chaps. 9 and 10. In 1978, under the Carter administration, members of the 761st battalion were presented with the highest military honors.
37. GIs Remember, 207.
38. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 137–38.
39. GI Jews (film).
40. Abraham J. Klausner, Shārit ha-plātah (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 1945). The chaplain published a list of survivors in five volumes. Reprinted in 2021 by Schoen Books, South Deerfield, MA (Five volumes bound in one). See Dalia Ofer, “Holocaust Survivors as Immigrants: The Case of Israel and the Cyprus Detainees,” Modern Judaism 16, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. Several American Jewish soldiers married concentration camp survivors, as did coast guard Murray S. Greenfield. After the war, he volunteered to fight for the right of uprooted displaced persons to reach a home in the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Together with 250 North American veterans, he volunteered to participate in illegal immigration. Conversation with the author, Tel Aviv, August 26, 2018. See Hochstein and Greenfield, Jews’ Secret Fleet: The Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 1988, revised ed., 2010).
41. Abraham J. Klausner, A Letter to My Children from the Edge of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Holocaust Center of Northern California, 2002). In his memoir, the prominent Jewish chaplain argued that the American military failed to realize the survivors’ needs promptly enough. His views are in keeping with the findings of the Harrison Report, published in the Department of State Bulletin on September 30, 1945. See also Grobman, Rekindling the Flame, which paved the way for research on Jewish chaplains and soldiers who helped Jewish displaced persons.
42. Preface by Paul Shulman in Hochstein and Greenfield, Jews’ Secret Fleet, xiv.
43. See Ouzan, “American Jewish Chaplains.”
44. Herman Wouk, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), Kindle ed., 12–13. Sholom Rabinovitch was the real name of Shalom Aleichem, a central figure of Jewish folk humor.
45. Herman Wouk, This Is My God (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), dedication page.
46. Wouk celebrated Israel’s seventh year of independence by dedicating a copy of the Liberty Bell installed in a park in Jerusalem; see Wouk, Sailor and Fiddler, Kindle ed., 98, location 895.
47. Wouk, This Is My God, 123.
48. These will be developed in chapter 6.
49. Moses Kligsberg, “‘American Jewish Soldiers on Jews and Judaism’: A Report of a Contest,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 5 (1950): 256.
50. Ibid., 11n.
51. GI Jews (film).
52. Bendersky, “Jewish Threat,” 38–39.
53. Moore, GI Jews, 152. The author refers on this point to Albert I. Slomovitz, The Fighting Rabbis: Jewish Military Chaplains and American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 100–101. Marc Saperstein, ed., Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800–2001 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 484.
54. Moore, GI Jews, 69.
55. This will be illustrated in the next chapter.
56. Kevin L. Walters, “Beyond the Battle: Religion and American Troops in World War II” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2013), 203.
57. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 28. One consequence of negative perceptions of Jews was that some fliers were not awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross they were entitled to receive for leading a mission. Although this was frustrating, with much regret, many did not complain. By contrast, Arthur Toppston—a technical sergeant with the Eighth Air Force (radio operator and gunner on a B24), in which most navigators were Jewish—did complain to his pilot, who was a captain, about his withheld commendation. The captain confronted the anti-Jewish master sergeant who had held up the commendations, and the Distinguished Flying Cross was restored to the Jewish airman; ibid., 27.
58. Ernest Stock (pseudonym Eliezer), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 29, 7. A month after the “Crystal Night” in November 1938, Ernest Stock’s mother sent him with his younger sister on a Kindertransport to seek refuge in Alsace, France. In June 1940, the teenagers fled before the invading German army and crossed Spain and Portugal. They eventually reached the United States and joined their mother who had immigrated there.
59. Ibid.
60. His Jewishness reemerged with military service: “There is unquestionably a basis to the oft-heard statement that men in the army find refuge in religion, attend the Post Chapel with more enthusiasm and regularity than they ever pilgrimed to their home-town house of prayer,” ibid., 1. Stock, who was drafted into the American Army in May 1943, became an American citizen after basic training.
61. Ibid. Stock was in Frankfort as an American soldier in 1945. The US Army gave him permission to search for his father in Holland.
62. Many Jewish refugees from Germany immigrated in the late 1930s. Eager to enlist in the American military, they saw action in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. See, for example, Lerner, “I Wanted to Get My Own Back.”
63. Isadore Rosen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 19, 13 (emphasis mine).
64. Kohs, “Jewish War Records.”
65. Ernest Stock (pseudonym Eliezer), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 29, 3.
66. Ernest Stock (pseudonym Eliezer), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 29, 7; Ernest Stock (pseudonym Eliezer), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 29, 3.
67. Ibid., 3, 12.
68. Patton, Patton Papers, 2:751, from which I quote this despicable line from General Patton’s diary: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews . . . who are lower than animals.” See Françoise S. Ouzan, “Antisemitism in the US at the End of the War and in Its Aftermath: Attitudes toward Displaced Persons,” Antisemitism Worldwide 2003/2004 (2005): 51–74. During World War II, Patton would not let any Jewish chaplain into his headquarters; see Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 139.
69. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 160.
70. Bendersky, “Jewish Threat,” 42, 38, 307, 157, respectively.
71. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 137. To illustrate the pervasive antisemitism among officers, we may recall that Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I ace and American hero, nurtured prejudiced views toward women (whose place he believed was at home) and African Americans (whom he viewed as “good old darkies”) and, according to his biographer, had “acquired a reputation in some quarters for holding a low opinion of Jews.” See Finis Farr, Rickenbacker’s Luck: An American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979), 247, 296–97.
72. Alum Daniel Gutstein, “A Soldier Fighting for His People,” Ida Crown Jewish Academy, 2, https://www.icja.org/2014/05/a-soldier-fighting-for-his-people/, accessed June 23, 2020.
73. Moore, GI Jews, has a chapter humorously titled “Eating Ham for Uncle Sam.”
74. Gutstein, “A Soldier Fighting for His People.” In relation to kosher foods and antisemitic attitudes, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith,” a short story in his collection Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories, presents the tale of Private Sheldon Grossbart, who is just the opposite of our real infantryman Larry Yellin. His character is manipulative and repulsive when he connives not to be sent to fight in Japan. Grossbart pretends to be an Orthodox Jew but eats nonkosher. He wants to get a pass to attend his aunt’s Passover seder—one month after Passover. In this short and grotesque piece, the noted American Jewish writer both explodes the sacred values of Jewish life and gathers anti-Jewish stereotypes linked to fidelity to the Jewish Law.
75. Larry Yellin, “Passover 1945: A Jewish Soldier’s Story,” Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2016. Yellin was sent to Europe during the Battle of the Bulge in the rugged Ardennes region in southeastern Belgium, the deadliest battle on the western front. The German attack, a massive offensive, took American army units by surprise. After harsh combat in the bitter cold Ardennes Forest—covered with snow in one of the worst winters in decades—from December 16 to December 26, 1944, American forces counterattacked and succeeded in defeating the Wehrmacht. To undermine Allied morale, a German armored unit slaughtered eighty-four American prisoners of war (POWs) at a crossroads near Malmedy, Belgium, on December 17. On both sides, losses were enormous. On January 16, 1945, General Eisenhower estimated that the enemy suffered 120,000 casualties and had “committed all of his remaining reserves.” Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 364–65.
76. Ibid. Around four o’clock in the morning on the first day of Passover, amid a thick fog, the shivering GIs crossed the river on small inflated rubber boats, threatened by German artillery fire, “like a gala fourth of July display, only this was deadly.”
77. The citation accompanying the award of the Distinguished Service Cross to Major General Harris Melasky reads: “Inspiring leadership, personal bravery and zealous devotion to duty exemplify the highest traditions of the military forces of the United States and reflect great credit upon himself, the 86 Infantry Division, and the United States army,” https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/6151, accessed June 30, 2020.
78. Oral testimony of Larry Yellin, Museum of the Jewish Soldier, Latrun, Israel. General Lucius Clay’s compassion for Jewish displaced persons is recorded in his archives at the Harry S. Truman Library and in his oral history, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/clayl, accessed June 30, 2020.
79. Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 66.
80. David S. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 1998), 10.
81. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 32.
82. This fact was pinpointed by the Jacksonville Journal in 1942 and reprinted by the JWB in its booklet In the Nation’s Service: A Compilation of Facts Concerning Jewish Men in the Armed Forces during the First Year of the War, first printing December 1942, second printing February 1943, RG 110, Box 1.
83. Reprinted in In the Nation’s Service.
84. Ibid., 34–35. “Sgt. Meyer Levin, Hero of Pacific Aerial War, Killed off New Guinea,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency 10, no. 42 (February 19, 1943), 4. He was born on June 5, 1916, and died on January 7, 1943.
85. In the Nation’s Service.
86. Congressional Record, proceedings and debates of the Seventy-Seventh Congress, second session, July 1942, Ceremonies in Memory of Louis Schleifer, Extension of Remarks of Hon. Charles L. McNary.
87. In his remarks about the Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw quoted the letter of a Jewish serviceman, Maury Robb, to his mother stating why he would never ask for a transfer to a less dangerous position than a pilot on combat missions: “It is because of the way Dad brought me up. . . . Honor the way the Bible means . . . . Today Honor means Duty.” He was a B-17 pilot who flew thirty missions over Germany. See Tom Brokaw, “Afterword,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 172.
88. Chapters 1 and 2 offer several instances of this crucial issue from various perspectives, especially in reference to Jewish servicewomen.
89. Interview of Dan Nadel by David Geffen in David Geffen, “The Jewish War Veterans of America—Alive and Well in Israel,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, July 3, 2015, 20. Dan Nadel, “who had seen a lot of fighting” during the war, did not take part in the Israeli War of Independence as his American wife wanted, but did immigrate to Israel in 1977.
90. See Aron Heller, “Israeli Recognition, at Last, for Jews Who Fought the Nazis,” May 29, 2015, https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-recognition-at-last-for-jews-who-fought-the-nazis/, accessed July 24, 2020.
91. Ibid. In Israel, too, the contribution of Jewish veterans has been overlooked, as emphasized by former Brigadier General Zvi Kan-Tor, who led the effort to establish the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II in Latrun, Israel: “World War II in our collective memory has been sealed by a single world: Holocaust. We’ve heard about the victimhood—Let’s tell this side too. This is the missing piece. Maybe we can finally tell the full story of the Jewish people.” Quoted by Heller, “Israeli Recognition.”
92. “Famous Veterans: Mel Brooks,” https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/career-advice/military-transition/famous-veterans-mel-brooks.html, accessed July 8, 2020.
93. This rumor was apparently shared even by Jews. In his oral testimony to the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in Latrun, Israel, Larry Yellin seemed to think that Jews were more numerous in the Quartermaster Corps, although examples of extreme bravery and awards attributed to Jews show that many were heroes in infantry units or as airmen. See Kohs, “Jewish War Records.” See also the impressive records of the JWB kept at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, New York, RG 119, Box 1.
94. In the film GI Jews, Jonathan Sarna pinpoints the fact that interfaith services, like enabling the Jewish minority to perform their own religious ceremonies, were in the interest of the military.
5. Operation Torch and Local Jews
1. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 103, 115. See also chapter 7, 116–34. By coincidence, Admiral Darlan, a pillar of the collaborationist Vichy France, was in Algiers visiting his son who lay sick in a hospital when Operation Torch started. On how the British and the Roosevelt administration dealt with the Vichy government, see Michael S. Neiberg, When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
2. Ibid., 115. Estimates of the Anglo-American troops vary. Operation Torch included landings and airborne landings from November 8 to November 15. British troops reached lesser-known ports in Algeria like the Bougie Harbor, on November 11, 1942. The invasion ended on November 16, 1942.
3. José Aboulker, La victoire du 8 novembre 1942: La Résistance et le débarquement des Alliés à Alger (Paris: Édition du Félin, 2012).
4. See Gitta Amipaz-Zilber, The Role of the Jewish Underground in the American Landing in Algiers, 1940–1942 (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1992).
5. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 104; Haim Saadoun, “Jewish Leadership in North Africa: The Transformative Implications of World War II,” in The End of 1942: A Turning Point in World War II and in the Comprehension of the Final Solution?, ed. Dina Porat and Dan Michman, with Haim Saadoun (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2017), 170–71.
6. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 103.
7. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:44–45.
8. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 128–29.
9. Prayer Book, Abridged, iii.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 320 (emphasis mine).
12. See the film US Army Operation Torch “At the Front in North Africa,” John Ford, produced by the US Army Signal Corps in Algeria and Tunisia during November and December 1942.
13. Herbert Cohen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 13, 9. Many of the four hundred thousand Jews in North Africa lived in poor quarters, but some belonged to the educated middle class, especially in Oran. A minority of well-off Jews in Algeria engaged in agricultural pursuits. See Michel Abitbol, The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War, trans. Catherine Tihanyi Zentelis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
14. Herbert Cohen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 13, 9. In Oran, the serviceman encountered Jewish refugees from Europe fleeing the Nazis. On Jews in North Africa, see Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
15. Herbert Cohen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 13, 9.
16. Kligsberg, “‘American Jewish Soldiers on Jews and Judaism,’” 261.
17. Harold U. Ribalow (pseudonym Meyer Cherniak), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 7, 6–8. On wartime refugees, see Meredith Hindley, Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017).
18. Harold U. Ribalow (pseudonym Meyer Cherniak), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 7, 1.
19. Ibid., 10. On refugees from Europe deported by the SS in Tunisia, see Les Juifs de Tunisie sous le joug nazi, 9 novembre 1942–8 mai 1943, récits et témoignages rassemblés, présentés, et annotés par Claude Nataf(Paris: Édition le Manuscrit, , 2012), 263n6. The Jews of Tunisia under the Nazi Yoke, collected and annotated testimonies by Claude Nataf (Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, 2012).
20. Herbert Cohen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 13, 10.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 11.
23. Ibid. Passover began on April 20, 1943.
24. “In North Africa, Chaplain Earl Stone, advancing with the liberating Allied armies across Tunisia, paused at every town, as it was freed from the Axis, to arrange with the local rabbi and leading Jews for community seders for Jewish soldiers, leaving matzot and other Passover supplies. Army flour was issued to Jewish bakers who prepared the unleavened bread in the ancient kilns in the manner of our forefathers.” See Philip Goodman, The Passover Anthology (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961), Kindle ed., location 1428 of 8880.
25. Herbert Cohen, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 13, 11.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid. The presence of American GIs and in particular the reports of Jewish chaplains stationed in North Africa enhanced Jewish American solidarity with the Jews of North Africa and encouraged postwar aid provided by the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
28. Jack Solomon, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 2, Folder 33, 6.
29. Sam Appel, Correspondence, 1943–1948, Archives of the National Jewish War Veterans Museum, Washington, A998 041010. Denise Zerah, whose family invited several Jewish GIs and British soldiers in Tunisia, confirmed the existence of lasting relationships between her family and veterans. Interview with Denise Zerah (born Saada), July 12, 2018, Jerusalem.
30. Eliot Blin, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 9, 13. The veteran who authored this essay was assigned to postal duties in the American navy. The two parentheses are his. In some instances, what appeared as a new interest in worship corresponded to a desire for a social outlet.
31. Interview with Emile Moatti, Jerusalem, September 25, 2015.
32. “Le traitement infligé aux soldats français d’origine juive: Le camp de Bedeau,” CCCL XXXV5, Archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC), Paris. On this camp, see Norbert Bel Ange, Quand Vichy internait ses soldats juifs d’Algérie: Bedeau, Sud oranais, 1941–1943 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009).
33. Helyett Ben Amara, Il était une fois là-bas: Algérie, mon pays, comme un feu tu te gaspilles en étincelles (Grenoble: Editions Alzieu, 2000), 127–28.
34. Huguette Lancry, testimony about American soldiers in Oran, February 28, 2008, unpublished, in the author’s archives.
35. Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, “Intermittently French: Jews from Algeria during World War II,” Journal of Contemporary Jewry 37, no. 2 (2017): 221, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12397-017-9230-9.
36. Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 125. On the role of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), see Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist, The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966, introduction by Salo Baron (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 267. The AJC was eager to restore the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which granted French citizenship to the Jews of French Algeria. Cohen explains: “A bare two weeks after American invasion forces landed in North Africa in 1942, Adolph Berle of the State Department informed Jacob Landau, acting for the Committee, that steps to annul the anti-Jewish restrictions imposed by the Vichy government were ‘on the agenda.’”
37. Ibid. Admiral Darlan was assassinated by a French monarchist and replaced by General Giraud as high commissioner.
38. Ibid., 128.
39. Ibid., 124.
40. “Our GIs are having difficulty getting these girls to warm up to them, and they keep a respectful distance.” War diary (classified as confidential) of the 526th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, Eighty-Sixth Fighter-Bomber Group, February 1942–October 1945, 11. The war diary belonged to Sergeant Naurice Rosen, mentioned in the previous chapter. The author is grateful to Howard Rosen for lending his father’s document.
41. Ibid.
42. Eliot Blin, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, RG 110, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Box 1, Folder 9, 17–18.
43. Butler, “Flying Rabbi.”
44. Daniel B. Jorgensen, Air Force Chaplains, vol. 1, The Service of Chaplains to Army Air Units, 1917–1946 (Washington, DC: United States Air Force, Office of the Chief of Chaplains, 1961), 291.
45. Ibid.
46. Numerous Jews volunteered for service in the Free Corps (Corps franc), which included civilians and military men whether attached to an army or not. See Jacob Kaplan, “French Jewry under the Occupation,” American Jewish Year Book 47, no. 5706 (1945–46): 111–18. On the Free Corps and heroism of French Jews fighting in Tunisia, see ibid., 113. Following Chaplain Werfel’s death, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency informed Jewish communities around the world that the chaplain’s request of ten thousand prayer books in French translation had been granted. See “Jewish Chaplain Killed in Line of Duty: Fourth American Rabbi to Lose Life in War,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 9, 1944, https://www.jta.org/1944/01/09/archive/jewish-chaplain-killed-in-line-of-duty-fourth-american-rabbi-to-lose-life-in-war, accessed November 29, 2020.
47. Archives of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, undated, A 993.047.008, collection: Werfel Louis, accession number: 1993.047.
48. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:310.
49. Conversation with Max Benhamou, born in 1930, Tel Aviv, May 17, 2018. Benhamou’s sister dated an American GI in Casablanca for a year. He promised to marry her. When marriage did not materialize, his sister suffered from a lengthy state of depression.
50. Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). The file of wartime photographs and illustrations captures the power of the written word.
51. Henry Torres, Paul Jacob, and Edouard de Rothschild, “Resolution of the French Jewish Representative Committee of the World Jewish Congress,” October 23, 1943, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM, RG 43.144M (1943–47) contains records about the activities of the WJC in North Africa, antisemitism in the French army, and the Crémieux Decree. On the long history of institutional antisemitism in colonial Algeria and the use of antisemitism by European settlers to gain political influence, see Sophie Beth Roberts, Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
52. Eliot Blin, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 9, 7. The veteran wrote “Vive Pétain, mort à la Juive [sic],” instead of the pejorative noun “Juiverie,” referring to Jews as a collective. However, his perception of the omnipresent and virulent antisemitism in Oran is surprisingly accurate.
53. Letter of Captain Max E. Zera to Herman, in Israel E. Rontch, ed., Jewish Youth at War (New York: Martin Press, 1945), 265. In the same book, the letter of Sargent Alex Lang, age twenty-three, born in New York City to Austrian parents, is worth mentioning. Decorated with the Silver Star and the recipient of a Presidential Citation, he saw combat in North Africa and slept in a foxhole for more than four months. He went without water for two days and admitted he had forgotten “the taste of a good big glass of milk.” His unit was the one that invaded Algiers and took Bizerte before pursuing the war with the Italian campaign; ibid., 281.
6. Religiosity in the Pacific and India
1. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:39.
2. Ibid., 40.
3. Jewish Chaplain, February 1943.
4. Bernstein, Rabbis at War, 25.
5. Courtesy of Sandra Fenichel Asher; the photo is too faded for reproduction.
6. Electronic correspondence with Dr. Fenichel’s daughter, Sandra Fenichel Asher, February 27, 2020.
7. Kohs, “Jewish War Records,” 166.
8. David Geffen, “Days of Awe in the Pacific,” Jerusalem Post, September 8, 2010.
9. Newspaper clipping with photo and article about Marine Captain Sidney J. Altman conducting services; Altman, Sidney J. Archival number: A 994.087.001, National Museum of Jewish Military History, Washington, DC. Altman remained in the Marines all his life. He became a full colonel, fought in the Korean War, where he led a counterattack against the Chinese, and retired after the Vietnam War.
10. Geffen, “Days of Awe in the Pacific.”
11. Psychology for the Fighting Man: What You Should Know about Yourself and Others (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal, 1943), 289–300.
12. Ibid., 292.
13. Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), Kindle ed. The war reporter recounted with emotion the stories of the men he lived with and conveyed the human meaning of the battle. He expressed his gratefulness at being alive.
14. Goodman, Passover Anthology, Kindle ed., location 1458 of 8880.
15. Ibid., locations 1459, 1465.
16. Isaac Toubin, “D-Day for the Soul,” Jewish Veteran 13–14 (September 1944): 4–5. Toubin quotes large passages from the letter written by Captain Elliot Davis after the Jewish New Year service.
17. “From the Island of Munda,” Jewish Chaplain, November 1943.
18. Ibid.
19. Photo Archives of the Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington, DC; see in particular Officers at Seder at Munda Including Admiral Kinkaid, accession number: 1986.001, catalog number: P986.001.062.
20. See chapter 4.
21. Moore, GI Jews, 135.
22. “Passover in the Philippines,” The Letter Box, American Hebrew, May 11, 1945. In 1945, Rabbi David I. Cedarbaum helped conduct the seder in Guam. It was held for 2,700 servicemen. Photos of that event were taken by combat photographer Emmanuel Weinstock and found recently by his grandson.
23. Ibid.
24. Ben Magdovitz (pseudonym Cook), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 4, 2.
25. Ibid., 13.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 14–15.
28. Ibid., 16.
29. Ibid., 17. See also American Jewish Distribution Committee, New York, Philippines General, II-VIII. 1945, 706630; NY AR 194554, 4/60/1/726. February–August 1945. Correspondence on conditions of local Jewish community. Cables regarding fundraising by US Service members to rebuild the Manila synagogue.
30. Ibid., 18.
31. Jerry Yellin, Of War and Weddings: A Legacy of Two Fathers (Fairfield, IA: Sunstar, 1995), 130–31.
32. Ibid., 130.
33. George Ammerman, American Hebrew, May 11, 1945, 4.
34. Conversation with Noam Zion, son of Chaplain Moshe Sachs, Jerusalem, May 26, 2020.
35. Jewish Oiy Kinawan, no. 4 (24 Tammuz 5706), a document kindly handed to me by his son, Noam Sachs Zion, contains the following: “The holiday must teach us to respond constructively, even militantly to the Jewish tragedy. . . . Not only to mourn but to determine to build a secure homeland for the ‘remnant.’” In 1947, a few months after termination of his military service, Sachs and his wife joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force in Palestine. Another example of renewal is captured in a photograph showing “the first Jewish wedding on Okinawa” in September 1945 in the Chapel of Peace. General Joseph Stilwell gave away the bride. The groom was Captain Edward Siegel. The bride was Captain Gretchen Ruth Boody, a Methodist nurse whose wedding dress was made from a parachute. The chaplain was Hershel Lyman. American Hebrew, November 1945, 25.
36. Marshall Wolke, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 28; Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 24.
37. Srinath Raghavan, The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia (Haryana: Penguin Random House, 2018).
38. Marshall Wolke, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 28, 19–20.
39. Ibid., 27, 29–30.
40. Ibid., 6.
41. Ibid., 19–20.
42. David Macarov (pseudonym Ben Zion), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 11, 5. An interview with his widow, Frieda, in Jerusalem in 2020 made it clear that he was openly Jewish in the military and often offered to assist chaplains.
43. Ibid., 9.
44. Letters of David Macarov to his parents excerpted in ibid., 19–23.
45. Ibid., 19.
46. David Macarov, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 11, 23. Macarov went to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem after the war on the GI Bill. He settled in Palestine/Israel and became a noted scholar. Involved in the underground, Macarov employed various methods to acquire ships that brought Jewish displaced persons from camps to Palestine in the years 1946–1947 and was instrumental in helping the President Warfield, renamed Exodus 1947, get official documents to sail.
47. Moore, GI Jews, 114.
48. Conversation with Hebe Solomon Benjamin, December 12, 2020.
49. Macarov, “A Small Cog,” 72–73. These lines placed as a foreword to this memoir sum up his commitments: “I have had the infinite honor, great pleasure, and good luck to be a very small cog in two major historical events—the Allies’ victory in WWII, and the emergence of the State of Israel. These are some unpublished episodes of the first—which saved the world from slavery; and the second—which changed the Jewish people and the world at large.”
50. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:345.
51. Ibid., 1:325.
52. Joshua Louis Goldberg, interview, From Centuries of Service: Military Chaplains—UNCW, William Randall Library Digital collections, 1980.
53. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 641–43.
54. Franklin Roosevelt ensured that every serviceman and servicewoman received a text in which these lines reinforce the faith of every American in God, and therefore in the belief that good will triumph over evil: “Yours is a God Fearing, proud, courageous people, which, throughout its history, has put its freedom under God before all purposes.” “The Star-Spangled Banner” is reproduced in Prayer Book, Abridged, 331 in the 1943 edition, published in one hundred thousand copies in its fifth impression.
7. Prisoners of War of the Japanese
1. Alfred A. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon: A Prisoner of War in Japan (Atlanta: Deeds, 1975; first edition, 1948), 14.
2. Clifford G. Holderness and Jeffrey Pontiff, “Hierarchies and the Survival of Prisoners of War during World War II,” Management Science 58 (2012): 1875.
3. William E. Dyess, “Statement of Major William E. Dyess, Air Corps, Concerning Experiences and Observations as Prisoner of War in the Philippines—9 April 1942 to 4 April 1943,” RG 18, National Archives, quoted by Stanley L. Falk, “Introduction,” in William E. Dyess, Bataan Death March: A Survivor’s Account, ed. with a biographical introduction by Charles Leavelle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002; first edition by Marajen Stevick Dyess, 1944).
4. Ibid. See, for example, Stephen M. Mellnik, Philippine Diary, 1939–1945 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969).
5. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 13.
6. Ibid., 18; Alfred A. Weinstein, “I Made My Peace with Japanese War Criminals,” Quan, September 18, 1963.
7. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 18.
8. Weinstein’s papers are kept by Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library, Atlanta, Georgia. See also Alfred A. Weinstein, “Yom Kippur in Cabanatuan,” B’nai B’rith National Jewish Monthly, September 1947.
9. Ibid., 9; Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 15.
10. Roger Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble (New York: Knopf, 2005), chap. 4, esp. 88–89. The author quotes the testimony of Edward Charles Mayer of the 106th Infantry Division given to war crime investigators in relation to the segregation of Jewish POWs, in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1929: “About January 15th, 1945, at Stalag IX-B, the Germans told us that all Jewish prisoners of war had to go to special barracks, which had a fence around.” Cohen makes it clear that the investigation of that segregation did not lead to prosecution of those responsible among the Germans (89).
11. Archival film footage “Know Your Enemy: Japan” (1945), War Department Orientation film, produced by Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps. Some parts included film captured from the Japanese. In his important book about Jewish POWs and internees from Commonwealth and Dutch forces, Martin Sugarman discerns a few cases in which Jews—both refugees and Allied military personnel—were singled out as Jews. He indicates that in 1944, an interpreter was asked by the Japanese to identify Jewish officers; see Sugarman, Under the Heels of Bushido, 6.
12. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 139. GIs who were caught trading belongings for food with Filipinos through barbed wire were tied to stakes and left for forty-eight hours without water or food. Then they were executed. Other prisoners were left with the painful task of burying them; ibid., 147.
13. Ibid., 142.
14. Ibid., 59.
15. See previous chapter.
16. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 200–201.
17. Ibid., 201.
18. Prayer Book: New Year and Day of Atonement, Abridged for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States (New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1943), 146.
19. “The Soul Thou Hast Given Me Is Pure,” excerpt from K. Kohler, 1904, in A Book of Jewish Thoughts, Selected and Arranged by Dr. J. H. Hertz, Office of the Chief Rabbi (London: Henderson and Spalding, 1942), 178. This revised edition for Jewish sailors, soldiers, and airmen, distributed to military chaplains and servicemen, contains reflections on Judaism by noted Jews and non-Jews such as Einstein, Pope Pius XI, General Smuts, Churchill, and President Roosevelt.
20. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 202.
21. Ibid., 200.
22. “The Soul Thou Hast Given Me Is Pure” (note 19 above). In relation to the idea of “reverting to manliness,” Kohler notes an important characteristic: “Judaism rejects the idea of an inherent impurity of the flesh or in matter opposed to spirit. Nor does Judaism accept the doctrine of Original Sin.” A POW of the Germans for five years, Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas began his fruitful reflection on Jewish identity in captivity. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “Écrits sur la captivité et Hommage à Bergson,” in Carnets de captivité et autres inédits (1940–1945), ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 199–219.
23. Chaim Nussbaum, Chaplain on the River Kwai: Story of a Prisoner of War (New York: Shapolsky, 1988), 190. His book comprises letters sent to his wife and is dedicated to “those who perished in resignation and those who survived and remember.”
24. Weinstein, Barbed-Wire Surgeon, 203.
25. It is interesting to note Weinstein’s reiteration of the fact that in every prison in the Philippines, “Filipinos rallied to our cry for help” and “Philippine women took over the job of keeping us alive”; ibid., 139. See also the documentary film An Open Door, Jewish Rescue in the Philippines, Noel Izon and Sharon Delmendo, 2012.
26. Box 1, Folder 6, Mss 387, Gordon Family Papers, Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History, William Breman Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Georgia.
27. Ibid., Box 2, Folder 16. It must be emphasized that the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention on POWs, and the information they gave the Red Cross was scant and often unreliable. Besides, the Japanese military did its best to hide the number of prisoners who lost their lives in POW camps. It is therefore impossible to know the number of Allied POWs, whether Jews or non-Jews, who died on transport to Japan or were executed, starved, beaten, or worked to death. Lack of prisoner information was meant to impede the task of war crimes investigators; see Sugarman, Under the Heels of Bushido, 3.
28. Ibid., Box 4, Folder 11, Gordon Jack, West Point, 1939. See also Box 5, Folder 1, Gordon Jack, West Point, undated.
29. Ibid., Box 2, File 4, Correspondence Samuel Gordon and Jack Gordon, 1941–1942, undated, 17/26.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 18/26.
32. Ibid., Box 4, Folder 6. Gordon Jack, Naval Academy Memorial Chair, 1941–1999, undated, 20/60. On J. Gordon “Hero and Patriot,” correspondence of S. Gordon with Captain Seymour, see ibid.
33. Ashley Halsey, “Ancestral Gray Cloud over Patton: General George S. Patton’s Time-Tested Military Bloodline,” American History Illustrated 19 (March 1984): 48. I am thankful to Colonel J. N. Hawthorne for drawing my attention to this article while at the United States West Point Military Academy in March 1992.
34. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers,’” Atlantic, September 3, 2020, https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/615997/, accessed October 9, 2020.
35. Lee A. Gladwin, “American POWs on Japanese Ships Take a Voyage into Hell,” Prologue Magazine 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/winter/hell-ships-1.html, accessed August 31, 2020.
36. Ibid.
37. Box 4, Folder 6, Mss 387, 8–9/60 (PDF). Gordon Family Papers, Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History, William Berman Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Georgia.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., Box 1, Folder 11.
40. Access to Archival Databases, National Archives, Records of World War II Prisoners of War, 1942–1947, Record Group 389. https://aad.archives.gov/aad/record-detail.jsp?dt=3159&mtch=4&cat=all&tf=F&q=Gordon+Jack&bc=sd&rpp=10&pg=1&rid=125617&rlst=92544,97982,92543,125617, accessed June 5, 2023.
41. On the plight of POWs under the Japanese, see the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on activities during the Second World War, I:451; see also https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/57jnwq.htm, accessed June 11, 2023.
42. Some American veterans wrote in their wills that they wished to be cremated and their ashes scattered in the Pacific. Such was the case of renowned film star William Holden, a former first lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces (First Motion Picture Unit, 1942–1945).
43. Sadie Gordon did hear from Sam in Guam; he sent her a V mail Passover Card together with a letter on March 23, 1945, and a Rosh Hashanah Card at the end of August of the same year. Box 2, Folder 6, Passover Card; Box 2; Folder 7 Rosh Hashanah Card, Mss 387, Gordon Family Papers, Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History, William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Georgia.
44. Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, All This Hell: U.S. Nurses Imprisoned by the Japanese (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), ix. Quoted in Joanna Kolosov, “Tribute to World War II POW 2nd Lt. Magdalena Eckmann Hewlett,” Sonoma County Library, https://sonomalibrary.org/blogs/history/tribute-to-world-war-ii-pow-2nd-lt-magdalena-eckmann-hewlett-by-joanna-kolosov-mlis-0, accessed September 30, 2020. After the 1980s, the emerging field of women’s history gradually began shedding light on the personal stories of women who were not previously part of history. Laura Margolis, sent by the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to Shanghai, where tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution found refuge, was also held in an internment camp for three years as an enemy alien. The Japanese, who occupied Shanghai after the United States entered the war, released her three years later in a prisoner exchange. As a JDC representative, she managed to convince the Japanese to keep soup kitchens open to feed the refugees. See Sara Kadosh, “Laura Margolis Jarblum,” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jarblum-laura-margolis, accessed October 5, 2021.
45. Emmet F. Pearson, “Morbidity and Mortality in Santo Tomas, 28–29,” in The Japanese Story, American Ex-POW National Medical Research Committee, Packet 10, https://www.axpow.org/medsearch/packet10converted.pdf, accessed September 30, 2020.
46. Thomas H. Hewlett, “Di Ju Nana Bijnshyo-Nightmare-Revisited,” in The Japanese Story, December 1978.
47. Ron Langer, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Former POWs,” in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Handbook for Clinicians, ed. T. Williams (Cincinnati: Disabled American Veterans, 1987), 35–50.
48. Kolosov, “Tribute to World War II POW 2nd Lt. Magdalena Eckmann Hewlett.”
49. Scott Prater, “Former POW Details Inspiring Survival Story,” US Army, https://www.army.mil/article/143124/former_pow_details_inspiring_survival_story, accessed October 2, 2020.
50. Weinstein, “I Made My Peace.”
51. Ibid. In Japanese, “San” is a title of respect added to a name, both male and female.
52. Ibid. In a postface to the third edition of Barbed-Wire Surgeon, S. Delmendo indicates that Weinstein did not attend war crime trials against Japanese officials; ibid., 378.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Cyrulnik discusses the notion of revenge in a French documentary film about Holocaust survivors entitled Vivre après la Shoah by Francis Gillery, 2009.
56. Louis Zamperini, hero of the movie Unbroken (adapted from the book of the same title by Laura Hillenbrand), was an American veteran and a former Olympic distance runner of the Catholic faith. His life story and experiences as a POW of the Japanese were related in his memoirs: Louis Zamperini with David Rensin, Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian’s Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
57. See Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:346.
58. For examples of Jewish observance among British POWs, see Sugarman, Under the Heels of Bushido.
59. Aben S. Caplan, “Memoir,” Experiencing War: Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, 1939–1945, 3. Caplan wrote letters to his wife and son in the last two months of the war.
60. Weinstein, “I Made My Peace.”
8. Camaraderie beyond Prejudice
1. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 436 of 934. On Lieutenant Slanger, a Jewish servicewoman, see ibid., location 903 of 934.
2. L. Roy Blumenthal et al., Fighting for America: A Record of the Participation of Jewish Men and Women in the Armed Forces during 1944 (New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1945), 57.
3. “I Ran to Enlist and I Ran to Get Out,” West Point Center for Oral History, West Point Department of History, https://www.westpointcoh.org/interviews/i-ran-to-enlist-and-i-ran-to-get-out-a-wwii-pow-recounts-his-experience, accessed November 4, 2020. Harvey Horn emphasized the fact that he saw a number of good pilots wash out. He, too, was almost washed out as a pilot bombardier, but the colonel said, “You’re fine,” confirming what is noted in chapter 4 about anti-Jewish attitudes. Harvey Horn served in the 772nd Bomber Squadron, 463rd Bomber Group, Fifteenth Air Force.
4. Interview with Milton Zaslow, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
5. See Roger Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Drawing, among other sources, on George F. Kennan’s lectures on “American Diplomacy, 1900–1950,” the historian shows that through acts of discrimination against the Japanese over the years, the “progressive movement” in American immigration policy “helped to poison relations between the United States and Japan,” ibid., 107.
6. Stember et al., Jews in the Mind of America, 128. The survey was about “nationality, religious or racial groups” considered “a menace to America.” Jews were identified as a threat to Americans by 15 percent of respondents. In June 1945, 58 percent of the American population agreed that “Jews have too much power in the United States”; see “Polls on Anti-Semitism,” Commentary, 1 (April 1946): 83, quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 146.
7. Interview with Milton Zaslow, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
8. Ibid. Zaslow recalled working on captured material, examining weather-beaten documents “with scorpions running, walking all over my hands,” he added in the interview, noting that it was “part of the job.”
9. About six thousand Japanese Americans were involved in the Military Intelligence Service attached to the Allied Translator Interpreter Section, filling noncombatant roles. Some encountered former friends in combat zones, under the risk of dying under friendly fire. See Kelli Y. Nakamura, “Military Intelligence Service,” Densho Encyclopedia, http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Service/, accessed October 18, 2020.
10. Interview with Milton Zaslow, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
11. Calev Ben-David, “My Father, the Soldier of Occupation,” Jerusalem Post, August 4, 2016. Corporal David Mandell later joined the American troops in the postwar occupation of Japan.
12. Quoted in David G. McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 395.
13. Ibid. Henry Lewis Stimson (1867–1950), who served as secretary of war under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, was one of the chief defenders of the bomb decision.
14. Figures presented in ibid.
15. Interview with Milton Zaslow, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
16. Ibid. On the Nisei Soldier Regiment, see for instance U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, documentary film in cooperation with the National Cemetery Administration and San Francisco University, 2018.
17. Such was the case of Yaiye Furutani’s mother as recounted in Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee, A Few Good Women: America’s Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: Knopf, 2010), Kindle ed., location 213 of 456. It should be added that Furutani’s father, on the other hand, was proud of his daughter’s service.
18. This conclusive experiment led to desegregation in the military in 1948 during the Truman presidency. Eleanor Roosevelt’s empathy for the underdog was expressed several times during the Second World War and in its aftermath, especially in relation to European displaced persons.
19. Milton Norman, “‘For You the War Is Over’: A Jewish U.S. Army Soldier in a German POW Camp,” West Point Center for Oral History, West Point Department of History, August 29, 2015, https://www.westpointcoh.org/interviews/for-you-the-war-is-over-a-jewish-u-s-army-soldier-in-a-german-pow-camp, accessed November 4, 2020.
20. The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), 45 min., War Department, directed by William Wyler, Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps, distributed by Paramount. See also Five Came Back, documentary on five Hollywood filmmakers who enlisted in the armed forces to document World War II, 2017, second episode: S1, E2, “Combat Zones.” Their stories are told by five contemporary directors, among them Steven Spielberg, who commented on Wyler’s exceptional mastery in documenting this episode in the war and his personal implication as a Jew of a European family and ancestry.
21. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 157.
22. Ibid., 158.
23. Ibid., 159.
24. Ibid., 159–60.
25. Prayer Book, Abridged, iii.
26. Blumenthal et al., Fighting for America, “All Roads Lead to Tokyo,” photo section in the middle of the book.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 61.
29. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 183.
30. “Admiral Ben Moreell, CEC, USN,” Seabee Museum and Memorial Park, Davisville, Rhode Island.
31. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 191. See also the exhibition “Major General Julius Klein, His Life and Work.” Klein was the recipient of many distinctions, including Citation for Heroism, the Philippine Distinguished Service Star, Legion of Merit with two clusters, Bronze Star, Commendation Ribbon with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Ribbon of Honor.
32. See chapter 4 of this book; see also Moore, GI Jews, 83–84.
33. See chapter 2.
34. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 239. To a lesser extent, Brigadier General Julius Klein’s life story also touches on that of the Jewish state. On April 4, 1948, as national commander of the Jewish War Veterans (JWV), Klein organized an impressive show of strength in favor of the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. The JWV paraded along New York’s Fifth Avenue. Jewish solidarity and compassion were also expressed for Holocaust survivors.
35. Ibid., 129.
36. The Hall of Valor Project, Barney D. Ross, https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/38497, accessed November 15, 2020.
37. Douglas Century, Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), Kindle ed., location 250 of 2495. See also Barney Ross and Martin Abramson, No Man Stands Alone: The True Story of Barney Ross (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1957), 8 and esp. 211. Contrary to the myth of Jewish wealth prevalent in the forties, most Jews, like Ross’s parents, were barely middle class at best. When Ross’s father was murdered, his siblings had to find foster homes.
38. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:40, 272.
39. Samantha Dorn, “Captain Ben Salomon,” National Museum of the United States Army, Army Historical Foundation, https://armyhistory.org/captain-ben-solomon/, accessed December 6, 2020. Several recommendations had been made from the 1950s to give Salomon the medal, but it was only during the Bush presidency in 1998, when Dr. Robert West of the USC School of Dentistry submitted his recommendation, that Congress waived the time limitation for the award.
40. “Ben L. Salomon,” National Museum of American Jewish Military History, https://nmajmh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/hall-of-heroes/world-war-ii/866-2/, accessed November 15, 2020.
41. Julie Calohan, “Journalist Brings to Life Story of Jewish-American Army Nurse,” US Army, April 12, 2010, https://www.army.mil/article/37256/journalist_brings_to_life_story_of_jewish_american_army_nurse_corps_nurse, accessed November 29, 2020.
42. Blumenthal et al., Fighting for America, 53.
43. On Frances Y. Slanger, see Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 271–75. Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “A D’var Torah by Rabbi Sacks on Vayikra and the Coronavirus Pandemic,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZ_Qcj9rB4&ab_channel=TheOfficeofRabbiSacks, accessed November 11, 2020.
44. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., location 495 of 934. The recipient of many awards, Anita Gold was buried with full military honors in March 1994.
45. Ibid., location 355 of 934. See also Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 332–33.
46. Zamaloff Dworkin, “I Am Not Going to Stand By,” 39–40. On Jeanne Zamaloff, see chapter 1 in this book.
47. Cohen, Women in the Military, Kindle ed., 634–41 of 934.
48. Jay M. Eidelman, “Jewish GIs and the War against the Nazis,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 15. See also Moore, GI Jews, 134–38; 145–49; 257–58. Moore rightly notes that “ecumenical observance of a Passover seder under military auspices transformed an intimate Jewish home ritual into a public performance,” ibid., 135, as exemplified in chapter 6 by a seder on the island of Munda that included high-ranking officers.
49. Letter of Ralph Tomases to his mother and grandparents on Passover 1945. The document was kindly sent electronically to the author by Tomases’s daughter, Ruth Joffe, October 16, 2020. Before his capture, Tomases was attached to the 106th division.
50. Examples of camaraderie between Christians and Jews occurred—for instance, when Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the 422nd Infantry Regiment and a participant in the landings of the American forces in Europe, was taken prisoner by the Germans. He opposed their requirement to separate Jewish prisoners from the rest. Aware of the great risk to their survival, he declared: “We are all Jews.”
51. Letter of Ralph Tomases to his wife and parents, Passover 1945. El Male Neeman is a Hebrew phrase meaning “Faithful King.” The officer’s letter thus ends with an affirmation of faith reinforced by the Shma yisrael (Hear O’ Israel), the emotional cry and sign of belonging of Jews.
52. Harold Ribalow (pseudonym Meyer Cherniak), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 7, 8.
53. Ibid. Commenting on Ribalow’s war experiences, Deborah Dash Moore notes that Hollywood preferred to stage Jews joining Christian services, pointing to the film adaptation of Guadalcanal Diaries (by the same title) that set the ecumenical mood for wartime cinema. See Moore, GI Jews, 143n64, 298.
54. Letter of Captain Max E. Zera to Herman, August 19, 1943, in Rontch, ed., Jewish Youth at War, 263.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ernie Pyle’s War: A Documentary on Ernie Pyle, World War II Correspondent, DVD, 30 min., produced by Todd Gould, WFYI Productions and the Indiana Historical Society, 2005.
58. Letter of Sam Solomon, in Rontch, ed., Jewish Youth at War, 197.
59. For a sense of the camaraderie in Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment during World War II, see Ian Gardner, Airborne: The Combat Story of Ed Shames of Easy Company (Oxford: Osprey, 2015). A first lieutenant when awarded three Purple Hearts, Colonel Edward Shames deplored the anti-Jewish treatment in the portrayal of his character in the miniseries Band of Brothers, based on Stephen Ambrose’s book by the same title. Born to Orthodox parents in 1922 in Virginia Beach, Colonel Shames’s father died when Shames was five years old. He became “tough,” as he confessed in an interview conducted by the American Veterans Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0w46KHDJGs&ab_channel=AmericanVeteransCenter, accessed December 20, 2020.
60. Barbara Feinberg, comp., Your Loving Husband and Father: A Soldier’s Story during World War II from the Letters of George Bader (Jerusalem: Barbara Feinberg, 2018), 187. Bader added humorously: “He thought I was remarkable in being able to conduct the services.” Interestingly, Bader’s grandson, who did not know his grandfather, typed the letters.
61. Cindy Mindell, “On Memorial Day . . . Honoring the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America,” CT Jewish Ledger, May 22, 2013.
62. Truman, Memoirs, 1:67. Rosenthal sensed that it was “an uplifting scene for all Americans.” Interview of Joe Rosenthal on August 15, 1997, about the story behind the photo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-nVMnr-Fo&ab_channel=NBCNews, accessed December 20, 2020.
63. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 227. The courage of the American forces on the Japanese volcano island—epitomized by the raising of the flag—is memorialized in the impressive Marine Corps Monument in Washington, DC.
64. McCullough, Truman, 395.
65. Murray Williamson and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 513.
66. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1955); Corporal Harold P. Keller, one of the six soldiers who held the flag in Rosenthal’s photograph, was mistaken for seventeen years for Private First Class René Gagnon of Manchester, New Hampshire, who was invited to the president’s office.
67. Roland B. Gittelsohn, “Brothers All?,” Reconstructionist 12 (February 7, 1947): 10; For a detailed commentary on Gittelsohn’s eulogy, see Moore, GI Jews, 148–53.
68. Gittelsohn, “Brothers All?,” 10.
69. Moore, GI Jews, 119–23, emphasizes that Goode was upset by the segregation of African Americans in Washington, DC, and championed equality. See also Alex J. Goldman, Giants of Faith: Great American Rabbis (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 313, which stresses that Goode was the “Jewish representative on this rendez-vous with destiny.”
70. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 267. Kaufman, American Jews in World War II, 1:308. Major David I. Cedarbaum, the chaplain of the Twentieth Air Force stationed in Guam between March and October 1945, was also spreading the spirit of tolerance. The chaplain’s sense of fellowship extended to non-Jewish members of that unit who helped build a Torah ark for improvised religious services; ibid., 1:326.
71. Let There Be Light (1946), War Department, directed by John Huston, Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps, housed at the Library of Congress. See also the movie The Best Years of Our Lives.
72. Blumenthal et al., Fighting for America, 52–53.
73. The Official Website of Captain Jerry Yellin, https://captainjerryyellin.com/people-wwii-fighter-pilot-finds-family-with-japanese-kamikaze-pilot-after-their-kids-fall-in-love-we-are-all-human/, accessed November 26, 2020. See Yellin, Of War and Weddings. Yellin’s memoir is about the process of healing the wounds of war, especially through links between the Yellin and Yamakawa families.
74. It is significant that the memoir of Harvey S. Horn, a former Jewish POW of the Germans, is dedicated “To All POWs of All Wars, To All Veterans of All Wars.” See Harvey S. Horn, Goldfish, Silver Boot: The Story of a World War II Prisoner of War (Jacksonville, FL: Fortis), 2010.
75. Harry Corre Collection (AFC/2001/001/60510), American Folklife Center, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress. See also US Department of War Affairs, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, https://www.losangeles.va.gov/LOSANGELES/features/Harry_Corre_Former_POW_and_GLA_Patient_Advocate_Who_Understands.asp, accessed November 20, 2020.
76. Robert M. Morgenthau, “Introduction,” in Eidelman, Ours to Fight For, 9–10.
77. See Françoise S. Ouzan, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, the United States, and Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), esp. 109, 245, 253, 256.
78. See chapter 6 of this volume.
79. Wolk, Jewish Aviators in World War II, 170–71. Seriously wounded, Reichart received a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart.
80. Ibid. After his retirement, a prestigious award, funded in perpetuity, was founded and named after him: the Stuart Reichart Award for the air force’s outstanding attorney.
Conclusion
1. The House I Live In (1945), 11 min. RKO Radio Pictures, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
2. Goodman, Passover Anthology, Kindle ed., location 1458 of 8880.
3. Oral Interview with Harry Zaslow, Accession Number: 1997.A.0441.125, RG Number: RG 50.462.0125, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, gift of the Gratz College Hebrew Education Society.
4. Electronic correspondence with Ruth Joffe and Faith Tomases about their father, Ralph Tomases, October 5, 2021.
5. See Bernstein, Rabbis at War, 33; Preface, 1.
6. Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 239, 129.
7. Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (London: Tauris, 2004), 151.
8. Women from all over the British Empire also assisted the British war effort. On January 25, 1942, the first group of sixty Jewish women from the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, joined the British military to train as officers for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s branch of the British army. They were followed by women joining the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) on May 25, 1943. Altogether, 4,350 Jewish women from Mandatory Palestine volunteered to join the British armed forces during World War II. See Esther Herlitz, “ATS and WAAF in World War II,” Jewish Women’s Archives, The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ats-and-waaf-in-world-war-ii, accessed October 6, 2021.
9. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 132–33.
10. The governor’s eldest son, First Lieutenant Peter Gerald Lehman, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in September 1941 after being turned down by the United States Air Force because he was married with a child. In 1943, he was transferred to the US Air Force. Assigned to the 306th Fighter Squadron based in England, he performed fifty-seven combat missions flying Thunderbolts and Mustangs over Europe before he was killed in England in 1944. Lehman was awarded the Air Medal with five clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1944, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/rbml/lehman/pdfs/0538/ldpd_leh_0538_0215.pdf, accessed September 22, 2021.
11. Testimony of Selma Cronan, (2000.A.116), oral history, tape one, Museum of Jewish Heritage–Living Memorial to the Holocaust, August 2000. She realized that other Jewish women on the base “were sensible enough to keep their mouths shut” and hide their Jewish origin.
12. Ernest Stock (pseudonym Eliezer), Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 29, 12. In August 1945, before the Japanese surrender, the army publication Yank asked GIs to state what changes they would like to see in postwar America. Most of the respondents mentioned “the need for wiping out racial and religious discrimination.” See Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 151.
13. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Festival of Insecurity—A Message for Sukkot,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, https://rabbisacks.org/festival-insecurity-message-sukkot/, accessed September 26, 2021.
14. “Sydney J. Altman,” The Hall of Valor Project, https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/35065, accessed December 20, 2020.
15. “First Broadcast of Jewish Religious Service from Nazi Germany under the Auspices of the American Jewish Committee,” October 29, 1944, 1. American forces fought fiercely in Aachen, the first German city to be captured by Allied forces.
16. Irving Goldberg, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, folder 24, 13. See Françoise S. Ouzan, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, the United States, and Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), esp. 23, 215, 20, 59, 75, 128, 158.
17. “Gertrude Shapiro in Hiroshima Circa 1945,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/discover/infocus/military/nurses/shapiro, accessed June 8, 2023.
18. In the aftermath of World War II, veterans—men and women—continued to assert their rights as American Jewish citizens in the country that shaped them and that they, in turn, helped transform.
19. See Irving Ungar, ed., Arthur Szyk, Soldier in Art (Burlingame, California: Historicana, 2017), especially “World War II Non-Aryan Supermen,” 154–55. The differences of Jewish self-representation in Szyk’s drawings before and after the United States entered the war are striking. For a discussion of Jewish servicemen and servicewomen from Mandatory Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish Brigade within the British forces in September 1944, see Penslar, Jews and the Military, 217–24. “Jewish War Heroes,” a comic booklet from 1944 published by the Canadian Jewish Congress, also highlights the mighty contribution of Allied soldiers to the war effort.
20. The House I Live In. The eleven-minute American film released by RKO Radio Pictures was intended to combat anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination.
21. Photo Archives of the Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington, DC; see Officers at Seder at Munda Including Admiral Kinkaid, accession number: 1986.001, catalog number: P986.001.062.
22. Irving Goldberg, Memoirs of American Jewish Soldiers, 1944–1946, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 110, Box 1, Folder 24, 13. In terms of comradeship, the example of veteran Ralph Tomases is telling: he included the name of Christian fellow POWs in his synagogue’s Yizkor book in Wilmington, Delaware. Normally, synagogues publish these books annually to record those who died—friends and family members for whom the Kaddish is recited on Yom Kippur.
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