Page 8 - Aerotech News and Review 5-20-16

VE Day and VE Dad — A remembrance
by Dennis Anderson
special to Aerotech News
The recent headline was “The WWII Holiday
in Russia that is practically unknown in Amer-
ica,” and I realized almost immediately that it
must have been VE Day, victory in Europe. It
had to be.
The day that the Allies brought the Nazi regime
to its knees is hardly remembered in America. We
lost nearly 300,000 troops in combat, but the cost
to the Red Army was 8.5 to 10.5 million, accord-
ing to War Department records.
The final and unconditional surrender instru-
ments recorded by the Allies and the Nazi pro-
visional government that were signed following
Adolf Hitler’s suicide in the bunker happened
May 8, 1945, in Berlin. And, those documents
formalized the documents signed a day earlier in
Rheims, France.
In Moscow, during the first week of May it is
marked simply as “Victory Day.” After the 20
million dead of the Soviet Union, it was blessed
relief. And relief for all others who could perhaps
look forward to living their lives out.
So, it was over, my father wrote to my mother,
from the great Allied HQ in London.
Histories of the day note that a million people
turned out in the streets of London. My father
was there, taking photographs, and being photo-
graphed.
Tech. Cpl. Carl Richard Anderson belonged
to a Signal Corps film outfit, the 3908th Picto-
rial Service Unit, that processed most of the still
photography and much of the combat film footage
shot by Americans during the war, according to
the Stars and Stripes.
Tech. Cpl. Anderson was there for the joy,
the relief and the pandemonium of victory and
survival.
The histories also relate that similar celebra-
tions flooded the streets, of course, of Paris, but
also Washington, D.C., Moscow, and even Los
Angeles, my home city where my mother and
grandparents must have been overwhelmed with
that same joy and relief that my father would most
likely make it home in one piece.
My grandmother — my father’s mother —
Hattie Turley, would have experienced the relief,
possibly more acutely than even the other rela-
tives. A woman of sturdy Scots-Irish, plain-spo-
ken Methodist stock, she lost her brother, Joseph
Otto Turley, who lay in a field hospital, his life
bleeding out, as the surrender documents of the
First World War took effect, fatally wounded on
Nov. 11, 1918, and dying a day later.
Our grand uncle Otto died right after the World
War I Armistice plunged similar crowds of revel-
ers into the streets of London, Paris, and yes, even riving for their part in the liberation of Europe just the “war brides.” Also, there were photos of pub
far away Los Angeles. In Hattie Turley Ander-
son’s war-wounded family, her brother Otto was
killed, his brother Tom, was seriously wounded,
and yet a third brother, Jess, was slightly wound-
ed, and marched in to occupy Germany after the
Armistice of World War I.
Hattie’s son, my father, Carl, finished his war
a survivor, and a new father, to return home to
the infant son he had yet to see. It was a G.I.
homecoming.
By the end of World War II in Europe, my dad,
the Signal Corps corporal, experienced in many
ways what the people’s historian, Studs Terkel,
wrote of as “The Good War.” He didn’t weather
the hails of steel and fire on the landing beaches
of D-Day or fight for his life and limbs in the
frozen Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, or
any of the harrowing and terrifying fighting that
came before and after those cataclysmic contests.
The Russians observe Victory ay, as one said,
“like your own Thanksgiving,” because for them
what they knew as “The Great Patriotic War” was
so much more apocalyptic. The estimates are gen-
eral, but where the United States — according to
8
War Department records — lost 291,000 killed
in World War II combat, the Russian people lost
20 to 30 million people (with 8-10.6 million of
them troop deaths).
This happened to the Soviet Union in less than
four years of conflict that erupted when Hitler un-
leashed Operation Barbarossa, sending his legions
east as he had planned, to eradicate Bolshevism
and subjugate vast territories he conceived of as
“lebensraum,” or “living space” for a master race
of “Aryan people” he saw as plantation masters
to the globe. It was a personal psychosis gone
global. In other words, the kind of thing we wor-
ry about today, a time of fear of terrorists, loose
nukes and loose cannon demagogues exporting
hatred of “the other.”
So, my father was one of the survivors, one of
the millions of Americans in uniform who came
home to build the world we know. Carl R. An-
derson was 31 years old when the bombs of the
Empire of Japan fell on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7,
1941. Newlywed to my mother Charlotte, before
being called up, he made himself available to be
drafted, and because he had a high-end techni-
cal skill honed in Hollywood, he was spared the
infantry, and joined others in the special Signal
Corps pictorial unit.
All of this shared family history welled up
before me like old film as I was cleaning out a
garage and came across a dusty box with contents
I did not know existed.
The box and its contents moved to my over- London Town. They were all the more terrify- unit’s progress from basic training, “across the
stuffed garage from my parents’ belongings more ing because people did not know what they were, water,” to England, and then to the Continent.
than 20 years ago following their deaths. My fa- or how they arrived. Real estate simply blew He was honorably discharged on Oct. 17, 1945,
ther’s box served as a reminder that men, and up. Their existence was a military secret whose awarded the American Campaign, Europe-Middle
women, in our family, served in some ways in knowledge was denied to the general public sub- East-Africa Campaign, and Good Conduct med-
most of the wars America fought since the Revo- jected to their lethality. My father and his friends als, “a good war.” The cartoons showed humor-
lution. Few of us ever served more than a single in the Signal Corps film unit divined a little more ous moments in camp, the convoy overseas “with
hitch. Drafted or enlisted as volunteers, we have because they processed the films gathered for the 185 men packed in space for 35,” and had visual
been the cardinal citizen soldiers, fulfilling some bomb damage assessment teams. My father’s only jokes about his best Army buddy, Paul Tryantof-
period of duty, and returning to civilian life in the personal photo showing battle damage was from foulos, a massive Greek-American of such girth
event we survived. a V-bomb, not sure whether it was V-1 or V-2. that two G.I.s were photographed, each standing
in one leg of Paul’s empty G.I. trousers. The man
The box, which was stuffed with black-and- I simply forgot about my father’s early Army was as big as a bear, with legs the size of a tree.
white still photographs, newspapers and corre- photographs, basic training, marksmanship, the How did he get through basic? The Army must
spondence, also offered up pieces of my father’s dreaded “KP,” kitchen police — scouring pots have wanted Paul’s skill set badly. His unofficial
semi-secret history of his part in history’s greatest and pans. Of his still photographs in Europe dur- role in the 3908th was listed as “Diplomat Ex-
conflict. ing the war, I knew little or nothing. I knew more traordinaire.”
about his 16 mm films. He had been culled from
Tech. Cpl. Anderson played a small part, but the ranks of Columbia Pictures, the fiefdom run So, adventures, pubs, good food and drink, and
his preserved record yielded the puzzle pieces by Hollywood’s most parsimonious and least- a continuous work tempo processing hundreds of
of fact about the extreme dangers and hazards loved mogul, Harry Cohn. At Christmas 1944, a thousands of combat photographs.
of uniformed service in any era of conflict. The short, typed note signed by Cohn noted at “Ev-
box and its contents also contained the correspon- eryone at Columbia was thinking about him.” My father sent my mother V-Mail on VE Day
dence and yearning of a gentle man who loved his Cohn, about 15 years later, would end my father’s — one of his skilled illustrations — the sun rising
wife, and a baby boy he had yet to see, my older Hollywood employment a few months short of triumphantly over a cartooned globe circled by a
brother who was born on Dec. 25, Christmas Day. pension. triumphant B-17 Flying Fortress and the outsize
letters “V-E Day.”
My father faced some of the hazards experi- As a child, I saw the film my father shot per-
enced by all the other G.I.s of Tom Brokaw’s sonally in wartime England and Wales. None of The V-Mail process itself was extraordinary,
described “Greatest Generation.” He shipped to it focused on war, damage, or lethality. He said American technology accelerating to what would
Europe in convoy in seas that remained a hunting he was not interested in such things. In his hun- eventually be known as our present “digital age.”
ground for Nazi U-boats. But he made it safely dreds of stills there were pictures of weddings, his Millions of postcards were reduced to tiny mi-
ashore with hundreds of thousands of troops ar- younger unit buddies marrying fair English girls, crofiche to reduce the bulk of G.I. mail coming
home, then re-enlarged upon arrival in CONUS,
as the D-Day invasion launched. evenings, and a trip to Aberdeen, Scotland, where Continental United States.
he donned tartan and kilt.
When my father and the other members of his My father’s V-E Day V-mail to my mother,
unit arrived in southern England on June 7, a day His ancillary role in the 3908th was “official with his deft cartooning and the note, “Dear
into the D-Day landings, the Allied headquarters unit cartoonist,” and his cartoons recorded the ‘Charlie,’ (his pet name for my mother), We’re
city of London was again menaced from the skies
by Nazi attack. See DAD, Page 10
It was called the “Second Blitz,” and some- May 20, 2016
times “The Baby Blitz,” because the damage and
death was less than the Luftwaffe bomb tonnage
dropped nearly four years earlier during the Battle
of Britain in 1940.
But the Second Blitz, like the first one, was
lethal and unnerving — the hail of explosives
from the sky delivered by the so-called “Ven-
geance Weapons,” the V-1 “Buzz Bombs,” and
the much more dangerous V-2s, the world’s first
ballistic missiles. The V-2s, a rocket-powered
flying bomb, sometimes called a “Doodle Bug,”
were essentially the world’s first cruise missiles.
The V-2s could destroy an entire block of
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