2

INVISIBILITY OF JEWS IN THE MILITARY?

When studying anti-Jewish attitudes, the issue of Jews’ invisibility or visibility plays a role. Its dynamics often resemble a dialectical process. Jews may be accused both of being invisible, making them an object of suspicion, and of being too visible, of standing out instead of blending in. Faced with these contradictory accusations, Jewish servicemen and servicewomen behaved as American patriots, exemplifying zeal, boldness, and heroism.¹ It is not surprising that they felt compelled to do more than the average American to convey patriotism and debunk negative stereotypes.

VISIBILITY, INVISIBILITY, AND ANTI-JEWISH ATTITUDES

Antisemitism was on the rise during the war years. American Jews feared for their security and felt vulnerable as hostility toward Jews was clearly reflected in opinion surveys. In November 1942, a poll asked American high school students which of various ethnic groups would be their “last choice as a roommate.” Their responses displayed animosity and distrust against Jews (45 percent) as well as an even higher rejection of African Americans, then called “Negroes” (78 percent), while Irish, Protestants, and Catholics respectively fared the best.² At a time when racism was a strong current in American society, the Marines and Army Air Corps refused to accept African American soldiers into their ranks at the beginning of the war. These soldiers were relegated to noncombat and menial tasks, serving in segregated units. As the war went on, they were allowed to become officers and engage in combat. The Army Air Corps formed its first black combat unit, the Tuskegee Airmen, often highly appreciated by Jewish pilots, who could identify with the rejection and hardships experienced by African Amer-icans in society at large. It is significant to add that Black people were more visible color-wise and yet, socially speaking, more invisible, as illustrated by Ralph Ellison’s aptly titled novel Invisible Man (1952).

No special unit was established for Jewish GIs, who were considered a religious minority, not a racial one. However, they could suddenly become ignored or rejected by others when their religious identity was revealed or discovered. Legendary movie actor Kirk Douglas provided an example. Before he became a GI, his name was Issur Demsky, later changed to Izzy Demsky. In his memoirs, he recalled his sadness and surprise when, on campus, he was abruptly rejected by a group of students with whom he was meant to have dinner: “I went to bed that night with no dinner, not that unusual for me, but completely perplexed. . . . When they found out I was Jewish, they just dropped me. No one even made an attempt to call to say that something had come up, maybe we’d make it some other time—to lie, even. They just ignored me, said nothing. They never made any reference to it. That rejection hurt. I had assumed that a university was above anti-Semitism.”³ Instead of facing social exclusion, was it best to remain incognito? He could pass as a Gentile to gain the social acceptance he wanted.

After graduation, the humiliated youth radically changed his name to Kirk Douglas. That move made it easier for him to join the navy and train as a naval officer at Notre Dame Midshipman School in South Bend, Indiana. However, not being labeled as Jewish the invisibility gained through this change of identity raised his awareness of the pervasive antisemitism of the war years:

“Now that I had a WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] name, I was introduced to another level of anti-Semitism. I’d find myself in a group of people who didn’t know I was Jewish, listening to them say the things that are accepted in large sectors of the non-Jewish population, the things that in their nightmares Jews speculate non-Jews say, and that I found out, they do.”⁴

Douglas also admitted that at the time, his response to anti-Jewish hostility corresponded to a strategy of assimilation: “Years back, I tried to forget I was a Jew. I remember saying, ‘Oh no, I’m half Jewish,’ to minimize the stigma of being a Jew, one hundred per cent.”⁵ Although chaplains were supposed to discourage intermarriage, Kirk Douglas was married as a GI to a Gentile woman by a Jewish chaplain, who made him promise he would bring up his children as Jews. While not denying his Jewish origin, Douglas managed to assimilate by eventually finding a role in the Gentile group he joined. The son of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, he made it clear that from a young age, wherever he was, Yom Kippur was the only time he did fully feel Jewish. “And I fast,” he confessed. “Yes, I’m a Jew. And that feeling lasts me the rest of the year until the next Yom Kippur,” he added wittily. He admitted that he had moved away from observance and ate the foods forbidden to Orthodox Jews.⁶ This example helps understand the multiplicity of self-perception among Jews; Douglas confessed that “coming to grips with what it meant to be a Jew” was not only a theme of several of the films in which he participated but also, in his own words, “a theme of my own life.”⁷ For a number of Jewish youths in the military, the war experiences that transformed them from a civilian into a soldier entailed a desire for social acceptance by non-Jews.

Joining the armed forces provided servicemen and women with different perspectives on antisemitism. A recurring pattern can be illustrated by the case of a Jewish nurse who came across anti-Jewish attitudes. As she stood in a group with four other Jewish nurses, she saw a Gentile girl next to her point to a new doctor and disdainfully call him a “kike.” Only when the Jewish nurses looked at each other did the blaspheming nurse exclaim: “I didn’t know.” Ruth Gottlieb Cohen sadly related that episode, which she bore in mind long after it happened.⁸ Indeed, it sounded incongruous that doctors trained to treat all types of patients, including prisoners of war (POW), should still be looked down on. The four Jewish nurses apparently did not look Jewish; the invisibility of their Jewish identity enabled the free expression of antisemitic slurs, reminiscent of the discrimination faced by civilian physicians in medical schools or hospitals, where quotas limiting admission existed in the 1940s.

Ruth Cohen, who came from an Orthodox home and enlisted along with her elder sister, recalled that she was issued a dog tag stamped with an H for Hebrew. However, others were not supposed to know about that identification. Like all soldiers, whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish men and women entering the American military could choose how to be identified, as they were asked to indicate their religion on their metal dog tags. They could choose to be discreet about their Jewishness if they were not identifiable through Jewish names. Pilot Selma Kantor Cronan, who confessed that she never hid her Jewish identity, felt ambivalent after experiencing rejection by her counterparts on the military base. She consequently wondered whether she should not have been more discreet about her origin and done like the other girls at the base who “were sensible enough not to open their mouths.” In fact, she learned after her service that a bunch of girls were Jewish. In an interview in 2000, she admitted that only later had she understood why she had felt “excluded” from some activities on the base at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas.⁹ Asked if she experienced antisemitism in Texas, she replied that she did not feel it in town, where she rarely went, but did on the base. “At that time,” she went on, “I had no idea that it was directed against me, though.” Only later was she “able to put two and two together” and understand things “that were happening” to her. “Like what?” asked the interviewer. “Being excluded from some things, tending to push me off the base, particularly because I was not identifiable as Jewish.” She analyzed the price she had paid for having carelessly revealed her Jewish identity further: “It came out as an insult to some people, when it did come out, and I was very open about it.”¹⁰ Selma Kantor Cronan did not remember exactly what she had said to trigger such a revelation, because she was by nature spontaneous and “open.” Did she mention her mother, a Jewish immigrant from Russia? Could her sudden appearance as a Jew behind the mask of a woman pilot have caused alarm because of prejudiced misconceptions? What is unknown produces fear. Selma Kantor Cronan was obviously emotionally distressed throughout her service. As in the case of Kirk Douglas, rejection was not voiced by anyone, but the feeling of belonging to a group vanished. It was as if their previous invisibility as Jews became a threat to non-Jews. Selma Kantor Cronan felt the distrust of other servicewomen toward her when she was doing her best to adjust to strict discipline on the base and to various challenges of being a woman pilot. The frustration she expressed years later in her interview stemmed from her awareness of a gap between her being part of a Jewish subcommunity and belonging to the larger American community. It was as if being a member of one group excluded membership in the other. It was painful for the young woman, who had strived to gain the identity of pilot that now defined her. Her example evinces the complexity of the processes at work in self-image development for young Jewish servicewomen and men.

Unlike Kirk Douglas, the then-famous baseball star Hank Greenberg (born Hyman Greenberg) identified strongly as a Jew. His choice not to play on the solemn Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) in September 1934 was welcomed by Jewish Americans. He was one of the most visible Americans of Jewish origin—a beacon of hope and social integration. Born in 1911 in the Bronx to Orthodox Romanian immigrant parents, the American champion recounted in his autobiography how he willingly interrupted his brilliant career to serve in the armed forces.

I was inducted on May 7, 1941, the first outstanding ballplayer to go into the military service. I was stationed at Camp Custer. The All-Star game was held in Detroit that year, I didn’t even get an invitation to come and watch the games or to be an honorary selection to the team since I was in the service. When I came back from the service, just before the All-Star break in 1945, I had no chance to participate in the game. And then, in 1946 I was not invited to Boston to play. That was my whole record in the American League. I only played one full year in 1939. So I often wonder, looking back, why I wasn’t selected more often and why I wasn’t played more often.¹¹

Fig. 2.1 Aircraft pilot and Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) Selma Kantor (Cronan) wearing bulky flight gear at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, 1944. Courtesy of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington, DC.

The veteran, whose monthly salary dropped from $55,000 to $21 when he joined the military, was not bitter because “I made up my mind to go when I was called. My country comes first.”¹² However, the passage from his autobiography quoted above shows frustration at feeling excluded. In November 1941, Greenberg was serving as an antitank gunner and was promoted to sergeant. On December 5 of that year, the United States Congress exempted men aged twenty-eight years or older from the draft. Greenberg was honorably discharged two days before the attack against Pearl Harbor. While he could have served as an athletic instructor in the United States, he reenlisted as a sergeant on February 1, 1942, and volunteered for the Army Air Corps. In doing so, he became the first Major League player to enlist. Graduating from officer candidate school and commissioned as an officer, he was promoted to first lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps, where he was assigned to the physical education program. Greenberg was sent to the US Army Special Services School in February 1944; he was promoted to captain and volunteered to go overseas later that year. Serving in the China-Burma-India theater for over six months, his assignment was to look for locations (location scouting) for bases for B-29 bombers, the Superfortress four-engine propeller heavy bombers designed by Boeing and flown by the United States during World War II. In China, he was a special services officer of the Twentieth Bomber Command, whose last assignment was with the Twentieth Air Force based in Okinawa. Greenberg was with that unit when it began fire-bombing Japan on June 15. He returned to New York and to Richmond, Virginia, at the end of 1944, thus accomplishing a term of military service of forty-seven months. No other Major League player served his country out of patriotism for such a long period.¹³

In his uncompleted autobiography, the professional baseball player recounted more occurrences of antisemitism in Major League baseball and in the postwar period than during his time in the military. A secular Jew, he noted that “I didn’t have much contact with the Jewish religion except that I was Jewish.”¹⁴ In the military, he was an outstanding baseball player, excelling in a sport that was a badge of both American identity and masculinity. It helped his integration as a Jewish GI. However, he remained visible as a Jew in the labor market. As such, he felt discriminated against despite his heroic military service and the universal admiration he had earned: “After I came back from the war and worked as a general manager and was known among the owners and the most successful businessmen in the Cleveland community, I was in contact with anti-Semitism. I had the feeling that had I not been Jewish I could have been accepted but instead the door was shut to me.”¹⁵

Greenberg maintained his dignity as a Jew, refusing to play the game of invisibility or “low profile,” as antisemites call it. He recalled: “I’ve been invited to many clubs that were restricted. They let in a token Jew or two, and then think they are liberal. I realized I would be ‘passing’ in that environment, and I never joined any of those clubs.”¹⁶ Reflecting on the effect of antisemitic slurs on his life, Greenberg—who was sometimes nicknamed “The Hebrew Hammer”—admitted that humiliating provocations such as “Come on, you big Jew, can’t you do better than that?” had an impact on him. “It would always hit me like a cold shower,” he confessed. But to him, these anti-Jewish slurs were not the “terrific burden” they were meant to be for Jews in the eyes of Gentiles. On the contrary, he observed: “I found it to be a great help.”¹⁷ Humiliation can be a launching pad for those who have the resilience to rebound. Often, Jewish GIs took insults as a challenge and chose to behave like heroes, defying death in difficult battle assignments that tested both masculinity and courage.

Jews in the military faced a choice about whether to indicate their religion on their dog tags. Some did not want to face antisemitism in training or negative perceptions in the military and changed their names. This was the case with Sergeant Milton Fields, who was born Finkelstein and thought it wise to change his name in January 1942. Although he took this step to avoid anti-Jewish prejudice during training in the Air Corps, he volunteered as a lay leader (or parachaplain) to conduct Jewish services in the Persian Gulf Command, through which he was sent to Iran and Iraq. He joined a local synagogue along with a few GIs in Basra, Iraq. On one occasion, he asked the major for permission to take Jewish men to worship and was met with disapproval. It was not long before the major used the excuse that Fields had gone AWOL (absent from his post) to court-martial him. Fields, who did not intend to desert, was eventually cleared of the charges, while the major was transferred.¹⁸ This example evinces that changing one’s name to be invisible as a Jew during training did not equate to abandoning Judaism or assimilating.

Gideon Lichtman deplored the fact that, as a cadet wishing to become a pilot, he repeatedly heard instructors state that Jews could not make good pilots. When interviewed years later, he said that his instructor had spent much less time instructing him than he had non-Jewish cadets. Lichtman had to solo after only eight hours of flight time, having never been shown required maneuvers such as loops, rolls, Immelmans, and Chandelles. He risked being “washed out” if he did not pass his solo flight. Fortunately, although he did not have the expertise of his fellow cadets, he had listened to them carefully when they spoke in detail about the new maneuvers they had performed with their instructors. He was put into “the washing machine,” an expression meaning that he was put to test to be “washed out” for not meeting requirements.

So I was put into the washing machine. Luckily for me, you got a check by another instructor, and then another—all of whom were civilians, and then the final check before washout was by a second Lieutenant who was a commissioned pilot. The commissioned officer took me up and told me to do a loop. I said “I never learnt how to do a loop.” So he did a loop and said, “Now you do it.” So I did it. And then he [did] the same with the other maneuvers. . . . So he got furious and brought me back to the squadron and chewed the instructor out, and I got another instructor, and I breezed through. . . . Well, let me put it to you this way—I was the only Jew among the six. I’ll put it to you better—they were a lot of Jews who were flying and didn’t tell anybody they were Jewish. They had dog tags with “P” on them for Protestant, because they knew the situation. . . . I’m not saying this because I am bitter, but this was a fact. I had an “H” on my dog tag for Hebrew.¹⁹

Lichtman was bold enough to make his case to the second lieutenant. He knew that good Jewish pilots had been washed out.

In a dialogue with a woman pilot, Jean Hascall Cole, a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP), recorded the following remark: “I wonder about the Jewish prejudice thing. Because I can remember one instructor saying, those Jewish girls can’t fly. And he was washing them out right and left.”²⁰ WASP Juliette (Julie) Jenner Stege in the class 44–3 did not reveal her Jewish origins. In her memoir, Bernice Falk Haydu mentioned that Juliette Jenner was a Ziegfeld Follies girl and had stage experience before turning test pilot in World War II. Full of joyful energy, Bernice Falk helped Juliette Jenner organize a successful show to boost morale at Avenger Field. Bernice only discovered decades later that more WASP members were of Jewish descent.²¹

The dog tags issued to Jewish service members were stamped with an H for Hebrew (or, more rarely, J for Jewish) and contained useful personal information such as name, serial or service number, date of most recent tetanus shot, and blood type. Discarding dog tags for whatever reason could endanger a person during an emergency and deprive a soldier of being buried according to Jewish ritual. Being identified as a Jew was, of course, more dangerous for soldiers serving in the European theater, who could be taken prisoner, than for soldiers engaged in fighting the Japanese in the Pacific theater.

Private Harold Baumgarten behaved differently than Jewish GIs who obeyed the orders of their commanders and threw away their dog tags to avoid the possibility of being sent to slave labor camps or shot down by the Nazis. A soldier who tried to enlist at age seventeen, Baumgarten was rejected by the army but stayed in a military framework for two years before being drafted in June 1943. His attitude toward the Germans was one of defiance as soon as he landed on Omaha Beach in French Normandy. In the first-wave landing of the 116th Infantry Division on D-Day, June 6, 1944, young “Hal” did not wear the heavy, dark-green canvas jacket with six big pockets he had been issued by the army. An older buddy had warned him that he could drown with such weight on his back. Instead, he wore his field jacket, on the back of which he drew a big Star of David with an Eversharp pen. Underneath the Jewish Star, he wrote: “The Bronx, New York.”²² The nineteen-year-old became a Jewish American GI “fighting Amalek,” a figure that embodies evil in the Hebrew Bible. He had to stand neck-deep in bloody water with his rifle over his head to make it to the beach. Baumgarten saw officers shot down and the man in front of him killed on the ramp. He said his Hebrew prayers. His fellows “were being pulled down by those jackets soaked with 100 pounds of weight. Most drowned. . . . Eighty-five percent casualties in the first fifteen minutes.” Fourteen American amphibious tanks drowned, most of them with the crews. When Baumgarten landed, one remaining tank was firing. The smell of burning flesh stayed with him. Steven Spielberg later told Dr. Baumgarten that he drew inspiration from the veteran’s recorded interviews, using the detailed recollections for the beach combat scenes in the film Saving Private Ryan.²³ Seriously wounded five times, the multidecorated Baumgarten became a medical doctor later in life.

A proud Jew, young Bernard Branson (formerly Abramson) of the US Army Air Corps provides another inspiring example.

We were up at Westover Field, Massachusetts. We’d spend a few days there talking and learning to be together and what about you and what about you? And of course, as soon as I said the name Abramson, they gave me the Abie name—I didn’t change my name till later. And we just got along very well. We liked each other. We got along—it was all first name basis. There were no officers, no enlisted men. It was just a bunch of guys who liked each other. We all learned in phase training how to fly the plane, how to do each other’s part, because it was important if anybody got hit somebody should have to do what you had to do. . . . This was still in 1943, around the end of 1943. . . . Then one time we went to Cuba and flew for ten days out of Cuba, a ten-day antisubmarine patrol, just to keep the crew knowing how the crew works.²⁴

A picture belonging to Branson shows him smiling in the front row with the crew next to their B-24, nicknamed “Flak Happy.” After a six-week course of gunnery during which he proved that “Jesus, that fucking Jewboy, he can’t miss,” Branson was almost ready to fly as a tail gunner on a B-24.

Bernard Branson was most likely a good crew member who knew to respond to slurs with an all too familiar “Oh, fuck you.” His looks did not correspond to any Jewish stereotype, and most flight crews got along because they had to in order to work as a team as required by the air force. One thing was clear enough to all, as Branson later emphasized: “If you were hit, you went down as a team. . . . You’d make friends with a crew, and they were gone the next day. And all you knew was that the next day you would check if you were flying.”²⁵ When life and death are at stake, as for soldiers on the battlefield, each soldier is a buddy and tends to be invisible in the sense that he is totally integrated into a group cemented by existential fears. Branson’s words make this argument even more powerful: “Nobody was prepared to fly. You knew you had to do it so you did it. I mean that was all. There was always a fear, a terror inside. When we got there, before we got there, a colonel spoke to us and told us, ‘Look to the right of you, look to the left of you. Take a good look because two out of three of you are not coming back.’”²⁶

Branson confessed that despite the fear he felt deep inside, he really wanted the enemy to know he was fighting Hitler not only as an American but also as a Jew. That decision was an obvious affirmation of a proud Jewish identity strengthened by war experience: “I wanted those sons of bitches to know that the bombs that are dropping, that there’s a Jew up doing it.”²⁷ Yet he had the option to remain totally invisible as a Jew. Within the Air Corps, there was an awareness that the fate of American Jews captured by the Nazis was distinct from the lot of others. This is how Branson accounted for the choice he had to make.

When we got to the base, they asked all the Jewish flyers to stay behind. And there were quite a few of us, officers, and enlisted men. And this Lieutenant Levine came out, he was the Intelligence officer, and he asked all of us to give him our dog tags so that he can change the H on the dog tag from Hebrew to either P or C for Protestant or Catholic. Because he told us point-blank that if we were shot down and they find the H on our dog tags, we will not live, we will not be put in a Stalag. We will either be tortured to death or beaten to death or killed right away or sent if we’re lucky to a concentration camp. And at that point, none of us would do it, none of us.²⁸

The possibility of not dying as a Jew must have loomed in their minds as a betrayal or denial of their mothers and fathers. The Jewish fliers’ attitude described by Branson implies that among them, no Jew could be found who nurtured a fear of being discovered. Every month, wherever they were stationed, chaplains of the three faiths had to prepare a report in which percentages of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish military personnel were estimated. In a classification made official by the dog tags worn by all the military, a fourth category stamped by the letter O was included: “No religious preference of affiliation.” This category must be understood in the context of deep-seated antisemitism accurately delineated by Leonard Dinnerstein. The historian highlights the fact that for the first time in American history, American Jews thought that Jew-haters in the United States might acquire a kind of political influence similar to those in Europe: “American Jews knew of existing antisemitism but before 1933 it had been mainly religious, intellectual, verbal, social, and economic. There had also been sporadic attacks on children and adults in a number of cities in this country. But in the 1930s the intensity of antisemitism, the appeal of hate organizations, and the popularity of demagogues combined with an escalation of serious physical abuse especially in the cities of the northeast and midwest where more than 85 percent of all American Jews dwelled, to have an absolutely chilling effect.”²⁹

Fig. 2.2 Dr. Ralph Tomases’s dog tags, worn during his service in Europe during World War II. Dog tags were used to identify casualties and secure religious burial. The metal tag has an H for Hebrew on its lower corner—Jewish soldiers could be sent into battle against the Nazis with their religious identity clearly indicated. Dr. Tomases became a prisoner of war (POW) of the Nazis. Courtesy of Ruth Joffe and Faith Tomases.

Let us recall the inflammatory radio speeches of the fiercely antisemitic preacher Father Charles Coughlin, those of Gerald L. K. Smith, and the menacing demonstrations of the Silver Shirts, all threatening the social acceptance of American Jews and stirring feelings of vulnerability.³⁰ In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Paul Lippman of Hoboken, New Jersey, wrote: “Jews have served in America’s armed forces in a percentage higher than the percentage of Jews in the American population. As a combat veteran I know that my dog tags and those of many of my Jewish companions were religiously anonymous.”³¹ That remark provides one reason why there are fewer Stars of David than there should be in American military cemeteries. Another reason, offered by veteran Victor B. Geller in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, is that Jewish parents often had the corpses of their loved ones brought to the United States (June 14, 1994).³² The complete destruction of dog tags in plane crashes, explosions, or deaths at sea may also be a reason for this form of Jewish invisibility—the underestimation of the participation of Jews in World War II.

Edward T. Sandrow, a Jewish chaplain in a large replacement center in Fort Riley, Kansas, and overseas in the Alaskan and Aleutian theater of operations, reflected on the self-identification of Jews and their adjustment to army life, which for some meant coming into contact with non-Jews for the first time. As one charged with censoring Yiddish and Hebrew letters, he could decipher their expectations and frustrations. While acknowledging a new interest in worship by both Jews and non-Jews in the military, he delineated three main categories of Jewish servicemen that bear relevance to our emphasis on the dialectics of visibility and invisibility of Jews in the military. This is his analysis of the “observant type”: “While readjustments in the mitzvot, folk habits or religious rites have to be made, this type has an emotional attachment to them and is concerned about clinging to them. . . . Even those from Orthodox or Conservative homes accustom themselves to eating anything and everything, to breaking the sanctity of the Sabbath, etc. If questioned on the subject, they feel badly about having to abrogate these customs due to the stress of military life.”³³

SELF-IDENTIFICATION AND EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT

Harold Ribalow’s religious experience in North Africa in December 1943 illustrates the emotional attachment described above by Chaplain Sandrow. The first Sabbath service he attended since leaving the United States, in Casablanca, reminded him of the atmosphere of home. He was accompanied by an Italian American buddy. Later, on a ship to India, Ribalow described his experience in a literary fashion: “And it was the Sabbath. Sabbath on the Red Sea, the body of water so prominent in Biblical lore.” The soldier described his “adjustment” to the existing conditions. The group of Jewish GIs was greeted by two chaplains, a Protestant and a Catholic, since there was no Jewish chaplain on board. Nevertheless, Jewish servicemen volunteered to help the chaplains: “To my ears praying in English was a false note, for I had been reared to serve God in Hebrew. But the voices were young and bold; the words were sharply uttered. Sincerity triumphed over whatever off-color note the English-speaking prayers evoked.”³⁴ It is as if the soldier discovered another type of psycho-religious experience, enriched by the diversity of non-Jews and Jews from all over the United States: “A boy with a South Carolina drawl uttered the prayers in a loud voice. There was also heard the distinctive New York manner of speech. But no accent predominated. This was a unified gathering of Jews from everywhere.”³⁵

The visibility of Orthodox and Conservative Jews on board the ship seemed to blur as Jews and non-Jews worshiped together.

Following a rousing Ain Kelohaynu, which brought smiles to the chaplain’s lips, Father Kelly was introduced. The spectacle of a Catholic priest addressing Jewish soldiers in an area so intimate with Jewish history was unusual, and the extraordinary nature of the event was recognized by a large part of the audience. . . . His statements were trite, but he spoke with grace and sincerity; and when he spoke of the meaning of the Sh’ma, the idea of the Oneness of God, he forged a chain of sympathy and respect which tied his listeners to him. . . . He told us that our conception of one God was a great contribution to religion and let it go at that.³⁶

By showing respect for the Jewish religion in their sermons, the two non-Jewish chaplains provided an anchor for the Jewish servicemen on board, endowing legitimacy to the celebration of the Sabbath. By voicing a sympathetic attitude to basic Jewish precepts, these chaplains enabled Jews to blend without feeling self-conscious. In the microcosm of a ship, such a show of respect was a meaningful act in accordance with the regulations of the American military. In that light, it is not surprising that soldiers who encountered such sympathetic chaplains found less antisemitism in the military than in civilian life.

The need to conceal one’s Jewishness while in a foxhole triggered new, creative ways of observing rites alone in difficult conditions. Jack Scharf was an infantryman who studied at a Jewish educational institution (Yeshiva) in the Bronx. He confessed that in spite of his background, he “didn’t take to Orthodoxy or anything like that.”³⁷ Sharf served in the Forty-Second “Rainbow” Infantry Division in France. Homesick and lonely, he reconnected to the ritual observed at home.

So you do crazy things. Like on Friday night, I dig a foxhole, and then I dig a hole into the side, all the way in. So what I do is . . . My mother, she used to send me wine. Now, it was illegal to send wine. So she went to the doctor and got a medicine bottle for cough medicine. And she’d take the cough medicine, spill it out, put in the wine, mail it to me and also mail me a salami. And she made me a candle. She told me to light the Sabbath candles. So I kept this in my grenade bag. In other words, let’s say you can’t fit in four grenades. I threw out two and kept the salami, the wine bottle—the medicine bottle—and a candle. And what I did was, on Friday, I would take my canteen, throw it in the snow over there, and I would take my wine bottle. I just knew the initial blessing. I really didn’t know the whole blessing. But I did know the first part of it. It’s called “borei pri hagofen.” And I’d make that thing, but you’re not allowed to light a fire. Because if you light a fire they can see you, and you can get killed. One of my friends got killed that way. So what I did was, I dug in, took a C ration can, put the candle in there, put it like two feet in, and lit the candle. I took my salami and I had my sabbath meal on Friday night.³⁸

One day, a military order came for him to leave his freezing foxhole. Without more information, he was put in a jeep heading for Dahn, Germany. He was scared because he knew the Germans stretched wires so that soldiers would be decapitated as they rode through wires. Finally, he was told he was going to attend the first Passover in Germany with all the self-identified Jewish soldiers around. Why? General Eisenhower had made a point of assuring that the approximately fifteen hundred Jewish soldiers would celebrate Passover and that wounded soldiers would receive unleavened bread and wine at the hospitals overseas. Celebrating the first Passover on German soil was particularly meaningful, symbolic of the defeat of Nazi evil and of Allied victory. On March 28, 1945, Chaplain Elie Bohnen, a Conservative rabbi from Rhode Island, pointed out the historic significance of Hitler’s defeat and the meaning of freedom after the capture of the town in southwest Germany. Just as Pharaoh’s Jewish slaves were freed at last, concentration camp inmates in Dachau would be liberated on April 29, 1945. Sharf and the servicemen of the Forty-Second Infantry also discovered a major Dachau subcamp.³⁹

Chaplain Edward Sandrow delineated a second category of Jewish servicemen: the “quasi-observant” Jews, who came from Yiddish-speaking homes but were brought up in a completely American environment. Many Orthodox soldiers belonged to this group, some of them from Jewish working-class families. Drawing on his experience and close contact with soldiers both in a replacement center in Kansas and overseas in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, Sandrow noticed that among these Jews, there was no “inner urge for prayer.” Instead, there existed “a warm attachment to K’lal Israel, the Jewish people.” These GIs were generally “sympathetic to the idea of Palestine as a homeland.”⁴⁰ Morris Rubin, a soldier in the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment of the Eighth Infantry Division, illustrates this case. Born in 1915 in New York to immigrant parents who spoke only Yiddish with him during his youth, the infantryman inherited from his father, a tailor from Lodz, Poland, “his ideas of a Socialist world”: “What my parents fought for became part of me and I began to realize my place was with the toiler, the worker, and farmer. I began to dream of that world of peace, of freedom, liberty, and happiness. . . . I became interested in the Workmen Circle at the age of 18 and devoted all my spare time to [the] English speaking section of the Workmen Circle, . . . the only organization that engrossed the broad sphere of Jewish thought. Within the Workmen Circle all, regardless of political affiliation could express themselves.”⁴¹

But in 1941, Morris was “under suspicion for subversive activity” by the military as he freely discussed his views about the world with other soldiers. In his memoir, he complained that he received no help from the Jewish chaplain. In the eyes of the military rabbi, Morris was a communist because he belonged to the Workmen Circle. A Protestant chaplain investigated the matter, and Morris was eventually cleared.⁴² In his personal narrative, Morris deplored that the Jewish men who accounted for about 20 to 30 percent of his company (composed of 185 men) showed no interest in Jewish life. He noted that most of them came from New York State and pinpointed the large percentage of Jews among the following divisions: “The 77th, 26th, 27th, and 44th.” The soldiers in his company “never denied the fact they were Jewish,” and “the great majority were Zionist at heart mainly due to the influence at home.” However, they were at a loss to make the case for a Jewish homeland. When their infantry division did not have a chaplain, a soldier would volunteer to lead religious services. This proves that some had a religious background or traditions that linked them to their parents and their homes.⁴³

Chaplain Sandrow noticed that a lot of Jews in the service “did not know where they stood.” Those who feared being discovered, he noted, formed “a third type,” which included those who declared “no religious affiliation.” Thus, the letter O was stamped on their dog tags. The choice of assimilation involved taking on the traits of American culture. It was facilitated by an absence of identification with the Jewish people. Chaplain Sandrow offered his views on this choice: “Officers are the majority in this escapist category. Personal ambition, psychological fear, social aspirations are causes of this attempt at folk suicide.”⁴⁴ He voiced his disapproval of those who assimilated to the point of obliterating all traces of their religious or cultural heritage.

Also reflecting on the attempt to assimilate, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg wrote about the illusion of complete assimilation in his noted autobiography. To him, blotting out one’s ethnic belonging is hardly feasible: “The Jew who tries to assimilate is abandoning his own identity in the hope that those who speak for the majority culture will welcome him, or her, and pronounce Jews to be acceptable in their society. But I knew from my own life that this seldom happened.”⁴⁵ This was part of the war experiences of some soldiers, as noted in further chapters.

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Most prejudiced soldiers were more concerned with the negative image of the Jew than with his Jewishness. A decorated infantryman, Marty Silverman endured humiliation in his rifle company: “We caught every lousy detail and all the abuse one could take. But on the other hand, it kind of strengthened us, kept us together—number one and number two—we knew we had to survive this. There was no other way. So we suffered the indignities, we suffered being called a kike, Jew bastard, and all the good things these guys who came up from the South, these redneck, never-saw-a-Jew-before guys called us.”⁴⁶ Silverman did not consider himself a religious Jew, although his mother lit the Sabbath candles, and they attended services on Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Earlier in his testimony, he recounted that in Troy, the Catholic town in which he grew up, “they used to teach the kids in Sunday school that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Every Monday, we had to either fight or run. . . . I think more than anything else the Catholics made a Jew out of me. If they’d left me alone, I don’t know if I’d be so sensitive about being Jewish.”⁴⁷

Significantly, no Jew can truly escape his Jewishness. Even if he is tempted to assimilate or convert, he remains a Jew according to Jewish law—and often, too, in the eyes of non-Jews, even if not in his own eyes. This may be called the inescapability of the Jewish condition, a concept developed by French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, who was in captivity as a French soldier. For servicemen and women who were victims of antisemitism, being Jewish became, at least momentarily, a source of malaise, distress, or unhappiness within a group that did not accept them. As noted in many essays written by veterans in 1946, the shock of rejection was more important and unexpected for those whose Jewishness was not a meaningful facet of their lives. A service member firmly rooted in his or her Jewishness by family ties or emotional ties to other Jews experienced less of a shock. Therefore, Jews tended to stick together, the better to buffer the shock of rejection.

Jewish servicemen who yearned to be officers, aware of the discrimination practiced against them, understandably hid their Jewishness by changing their name. This was the case of Sergeant Milton Fields, who managed to avoid antisemitism in training but kept attending and even conducting Jewish services. Though soldiers like him were not considered as Jews in the first phase of their military service, they were later identified as Jews by their peers.

Jews negotiated their own identities depending on the environment, the phase of their existence, and their war experiences. Since service members were free to restrict their Jewishness to an island in their personal space, Jewishness could be invisible to others if the serviceman or servicewoman’s name did not sound Jewish. The scope of Jewishness was narrowed if the GI suppressed such activities as attendance at collective religious services. Conversely, if Jewishness was linked to certain Jewish activities, the soldier could express religiosity as a Jew in the American military. Religiousness also served as a crutch apt to strengthen the soldier in times of danger. The abridged prayer book published by the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) offered moral support to service members. Over one million copies were distributed. The small size (thirteen centimeter in length) volume was “designed to be used where the exigencies of life in the army or the navy do not permit attendance at regular synagogue services.” Yet when it fell in the hands of the Nazis, it became a dangerous sign of Jewishness.⁴⁸

In view of the high percentage of Jews in the American military during World War II, the scarcity of Stars of David in cemeteries—particularly in D-Day cemeteries—needs to be addressed. In the final draft of a report to the Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities (CANRA) of the JWB completed at the end of 1945, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, who served as Executive Director of CANRA, expanded on this issue, providing historians and sociologists with a precious primary source that is now in the American Jewish Historical Society. In a paragraph entitled “Recording the Dead,” Bernstein broached this complex subject with its tragic overtones.

Despite the detailed regulations, it was early noted that a large percentage of the Jewish dead were not buried under the Star of David. This was due a variety of reasons. . . . There was undoubtedly some loss through carelessness and incompetence.

These factors combined to present CANRA with a tragic situation: probably no more than half of the Jewish dead were buried under the Star of David. Information possessed by the JWB (The National Jewish Welfare Board) War Records Bureau, based largely on authentic reports from local communities and families was far more complete than that in the possession of the War Department. Sample studies of War Department files thus led to the sad conclusion that nearly 45% of the authenticated Jewish dead were not so recorded in the official records.⁴⁹

Following the steps taken by CANRA, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall required that every military commander in each theater of war give Jewish chaplains the possibility of visiting the cemeteries in their command. The aim, in cooperation with the War Department, was to provide the opportunity, whenever and wherever possible, to ensure that “a Jewish marker be placed on every grave and Jewish memorial services be conducted.”⁵⁰ As many soldiers noted in their testimonies, the real heroes were those who did not come back: those who returned to dust with utter humility, embodying the paragon of humanity. When Rabbi Bernstein published his report, first written in 1945, he wrote a preface in December 1970: “Over six hundred thousand Jews served in the U.S. armed forces, the largest number in uniform of all Jewish history.”⁵¹

Heroism may be seen as a selfless response from those who experienced social invisibility as Jews. Jewish soldiers fought on several fronts: for the United States and for Jews all over the world, waging a personal war against anti-Jewish hostility in the American military.⁵² Servicemen conducted several Jewish services of worship on German soil after American troops entered Germany on September 11, 1944. But one particular service remains in history. With the sound of artillery guns interfering, the first broadcast of a Jewish religious service from Nazi Germany to the world took place on October 29, 1944, near Aachen, not far from the French line. It exemplified the triumph of Jewish faith over Nazi tyranny, bent on the systematic destruction of the Jewish people and religion. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the American Jewish Committee offered “a special broadcast of historic significance.” Under the direction of Chaplain Sydney Lefkowitz of the United States First Army, a choir of over fifty American soldiers evinced their eagerness to pray and demonstrate religious freedom. “May the Lord bless thee and keep thee,” they chanted, while artillery fire sounded in the background.⁵³ The words spoken by Chaplain Edward Waters on behalf of the Catholic faith and those of Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Henry on behalf of the Protestants acknowledged the legitimacy and visibility of the Jewish religion as an American faith.

Jewish servicewomen were visible on two fronts: as courageous American women ahead of their time and as Jews. The next chapter offers an exploration of the challenges faced by the daring “flying women,” both as pilots and nurses.⁵⁴