A Soldier Strips the Romance Out of Life at War - Page 4

JCFalkenbergIII · #76 (**permalink**) October 5th, 2008, 08:28 PM

Thanks for the additional photos guys. Nothing like seeing the horrors in actuality.

JCFalkenbergIII · #77 (**permalink**) October 5th, 2008, 08:36 PM

JCFalkenbergIII · #78 (**permalink**) October 5th, 2008, 10:45 PM

The chilling photograph of the execution of Sergeant Len Siffleet, leader of the “Whiting” party in Dutch New Guinea, has been widely circulated. Less well known is this image of his companion Private Reharin, an Indonesian soldier of the KNIL, shown suffering the same brutal fate.

NEFIS

Slipdigit · #79 (**permalink**) October 6th, 2008, 12:12 AM

I don't think this man is seeing any romance right now, either.

JCFalkenbergIII · #80 (**permalink**) October 6th, 2008, 03:27 AM

JCFalkenbergIII · #81 (**permalink**) October 6th, 2008, 07:44 PM

And after it is all over some still can't forget what they went through.

"His first year home from combat in World War II, Jimmie Franck never had a night of sleep not disturbed by a war dream."

JCFalkenbergIII · #82 (**permalink**) October 7th, 2008, 01:00 AM

JCFalkenbergIII · #83 (**permalink**) October 7th, 2008, 03:14 AM

JCFalkenbergIII · #84 (**permalink**) October 7th, 2008, 05:09 AM

Slipdigit · #85 (**permalink**) October 7th, 2008, 09:51 PM

Here's a good part of war.

Dad Surprises Son at School | I Am Bored

JCFalkenbergIII · #86 (**permalink**) October 7th, 2008, 10:01 PM

World War II veteran shares horrors of war with students
'I try to make it real to them'

By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

MOUNT WASHINGTON - Clifford Park decided a long time ago there was no point bottling up the memories of the horrors he saw nearly 60 years ago as a 19-year-old soldier in the waning months of the war against Nazi Germany.

WWII veteran Clifford Park holds a photograph of himself from his early US Army days.
(Michael E. Keating photo)
He saw fellow soldiers - friends and comrades - die in agony. He saw the walking skeletons of those who survived a Nazi death camp, and the lifeless bodies of those who did not survive stacked like cordwood by the hundreds inside the prison gates. Towns blasted into rubble, and endless processions of refugees trying to escape the violence.
It was a lot for one young man from Cincinnati, only a year removed from a classroom at Withrow High School.
"My world changed very quickly," says the 78-year-old Mount Washington man, who next month will go to Washington, D.C., to join tens of thousands of his fellow World War II veterans for the dedication of a national memorial to the 16 million who served and the 400,000 who lost their lives.
Unlike many World War II veterans who only reluctantly summon up the most disturbing memories of their service 60 years ago, Park talks frequently about his experiences and those of the unit in which he served - the 104th Infantry Division, known as the Timberwolf Division.
But it's who he talks to that, to Park, is most important - young people, high school and college students young enough to be his grandchildren.
Retired now, he is a frequent guest speaker at area high schools and college classrooms, a piece of living history for young people. At Hebrew Union College's Center for Holocaust & Humanity Education, he is one of the concentration camp liberators called on from time to time to talk to groups of students touring the Mapping Our Tears exhibit that chronicles the stories of European Jews oppressed by the Nazi regime.
"I try to make it real to them; I try to tell them what it was like," Park says. Sitting in the living room of his apartment, he flips through a file folder full of photos from Mittelbau Dora, the concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, that the Timberwolf soldiers liberated in April 1945.
Thousands died at Mittelbau Dora, many of them Russian and Polish slave laborers, Jewish and non-Jewish, who toiled underground digging tunnels for the Nazis' secret rocket program.
"They know about Iraq, they know what happened with Saddam Hussein," Park says, "but they have no idea the magnitude of what happened in World War II. They have nothing to compare it to."
In late 1944, when he was just 18, Park was not unlike those young people he talks to today. He had two older brothers already in the service - one serving as an Army officer in France and the other in the Army Air Corps in Italy - and he, too, enlisted soon after high school graduation.
By early 1945, he found himself among the thousands of replacement troops rushed to Europe after Allied forces were decimated by the Battle of the Bulge. He pushed across France and Holland and into Germany with the Timberwolves.
Palm Sunday 1945 was a day he will never forget. The young corporal's squad had taken over a house in a small German village, sending the old man who lived there and his granddaughter into the basement.
Early that morning, the old man got out of the basement and grabbed a bazooka lying next to some still dozing soldiers and fired. The grenade tore the house apart, killing two of the soldiers instantly and wounding Park in the leg and head.
"The room was filled with plaster falling; I remember getting up and seeing one guy laying in the front of the room, with his leg way over on the other side of the room," Park says. "It was pretty bad."
Park ended up being evacuated to an Army hospital south of Paris to recuperate. He rejoined his unit at Nordhausen in April, just after the Timberwolves had liberated the camp, finding about 5,000 corpses and many prisoners who were nearly starved to death.
"They looked like little kids playing dress-up, the way their clothes just hung off of them," Park said of the camp survivors he encountered at Nordhausen. "They were nothing but skin and bones. Grown men who weighed 75, 80 pounds. Seeing men in that condition sticks with you."
Today, Park tells these stories and more to young people. Often, he said, they ask if war is like what they see in the movies.
"I tell them it's nothing like that," Park says. "It's not John Wayne standing up firing 150 rounds at once and walking away without a scratch. First of all, you don't stand up in combat. If you do, you're dead."
At 78, Park is among the youngest of those who served in World War II; most are well into their 80s now. "I am going to do this as long as I can, as long as I can get up and get around," Park says of his work with young people. "It's a story that needs to be told."

World War II veteran shares horrors of war with students

JCFalkenbergIII · #87 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 12:33 AM

JCFalkenbergIII · #88 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 03:08 AM

"Six decades are nothing. Not for the kind of memories Hap Halloran carries. A 37-millimeter cannon shell piercing the skin of his silver B-29 bomber over Tokyo. His parachute opening in the freezing January air at 27,000 feet. The mob of civilians waiting for him on the ground with sticks and hard shoes, beating him bloody. Sixty-seven days alone in a cold, dark cell at Kempei Tai prison. More beatings. Lice, bed bugs, fleas, running sores. Then the zoo. Stripped naked, hands and feet chained to the bars of an empty tiger cage, put on display for Japanese visitors. Then four months in a POW camp, his 6-foot-2-inch body dwindling to 115 pounds.

Halloran remembers all the details, mostly because they inhabited his dreams for decades, driving him out of bed and into his quiet suburban street, yelling and smashing windows to escape the butts of his captors' rifles and the fire that threatened to burn him alive night after night.
"You get those memories in there, and there's no eraser to get rid of them,'' Halloran says. He is an 82-year-old widower who lives by himself in Menlo Park, having retired as an executive after 37 years with Consolidated Freightways. He has told his story many times as a motivational speaker and in an autobiography. Yet it has lost none of its power in the retellings because every generation needs to learn about war anew. And this is the lesson of Halloran's story: Wars don't end when the fighting stops."

WWII veteran purges nightmares of combat / His message: War goes on after fighting stops

Mr. V · #89 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 04:32 AM

Let the young men romanticize war.

We need soldiers.

If they *really* knew what it was like, who would fight?

JCFalkenbergIII · #90 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 05:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr. V

Let the young men romanticize war.

We need soldiers.

If they *really* knew what it was like, who would fight?

JCFalkenbergIII · #91 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 05:15 AM

JCFalkenbergIII · #92 (**permalink**) October 8th, 2008, 11:47 PM

Vet haunted by horror of war

Montebello man still trying to forget
By Tania Chatila, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 09/05/2007 02:57:57 PM PDT

MONTEBELLO - It's a time in his life Fernando Sarabia wishes he could forget - the invasion France during World War II.
"I remember it, but I don't want to remember it," the 83-year-old said. "It took me years to get over it. ... Thousands of people were killed. We were walking over dead soldiers."
It was the first time Sarabia had ever seen such carnage - an introduction of sorts for what was to come.
He had enlisted in the Army in 1942 with three other friends in the hopes they would serve side-by-side.
But the four were separated and, after two months of training, Sarabia was assigned to the 36th Infantry Division as a private first class.
In 1944, he was shipped out to Europe and eventually followed Gen. George S. Patton through France toward Berlin.
"I can tell you, he was one big, tough general," Sarabia said. "They threw us into his tanks. ... If you couldn't keep up, he left you behind. He wouldn't wait for you." By the end of the European battle, Sarabia was put on a ship for reassignment in the South Pacific.

News of the war's end came shortly after and a relieved Sarabia returned home in 1946 - four years after enlisting as a way to help feed his family.
Sarabia grew up impoverished in East Los Angeles among six siblings and a single mother to support them all.
So when the war started, the then-18-year-old saw the Army as a steady paycheck.
"My mother was alone with seven kids," Sarabia said. "I went into the service because my mother needed money."
But things were not the same when he came out.
Of the three friends he enlisted with, only Sarabia and one other made it out alive.
One was killed and the other went missing in action and was declared dead. To this day, his body has not been found.
Sarabia waves a small, black flag for prisoners of war and the missing next to an American flag in his front yard.
Above the wooden plank that holds them up, Sarabia displays his old, rusty World War II helmet.
"It's been hard," said Dolores Sarabia, Fernando's wife of more than 60 years.
The childhood sweethearts married months after Fernando Sarabia returned home.
They had their only son within a year.
"When he came back from the service, he didn't believe in God," Dolores Sarabia said.
The young, handsome Mexican American she knew as a young child growing up was suddenly different.
And he continues to be.
Fernando Sarabia's memories of World War II coupled with those from more service in the Korean War have nearly broken him.
Thoughts of the friend who went missing in action - who was also named Fernando - bring tears to his eyes.
"How would you like to see 20, 30 guys with their heads chopped off and their arms gone," he said. "It's not easy."
Years of tormenting dreams and panic attacks continue to plague Sarabia.
"When my son was about 5, I was asleep and he came running into the room, yelling `Daddy, daddy,"' he said. "I picked him up and threw him against the wall. I almost killed him."
The dreams and attacks got so bad that at one point, a doctor warned Sarabia about sleeping in the same bed with his wife.
"One night, I woke up and he was standing (in the living room) giving orders like a sergeant," Dolores Sarabia said. "And it's not the first time."
The retired car salesman spends his days at home or with friends at the American Legion.
When asked if he would relive his war days again, the veteran quickly answers, "No." "Look how many years he's been out of the service and things haven't changed," Dolores Sarabia said. "I guess they are never the same."

Vet haunted by horror of war - SGVTribune.com