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A salute at a War Bond and Victory rally
THE GREATEST GENERATION REMEMBERS
The year was 1944 and the courageous navigator of that B-17 bomber out of Foggia, Italy, was a 20-year-old New Jersey native and recent graduate of West Orange High School. After briefly attending Seton Hall University, the young man enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals, and attaining the rank of lieutenant. Brendan Byrne later became Governor Byrne, serving his home state for two terms. Governor Byrne's memory of that dramatic mission is just one of countless narratives. Others have been included in New York War Stories, a local documentary premiering this month along with New York Goes to War, which looks at New York City's place in World War II and its unique contributions to the war effort.
Brendan Byrne later became Governor Byrne, serving his home state for two terms. Governor Byrne's memory of that dramatic mission is just one of countless World War II stories that live on in the hearts and minds of Americans. Governor Byrne shared his story, as did many others, after Thirteen and WLIW21 invited tri-state-area residents to participate in the stations' New York War Stories initiative, a major, multimedia event built around the epic PBS series The War - A Ken Burns Film, premiering this month.
Shapiro came to Thirteen in February, just in time to lead the local campaign to connect New York-area residents to The War. Like Burns' series, the New York War Stories initiative focuses on the personal experiences of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
Many of the stories sent in by Thirteen and WLIW viewers have been posted online as part of a public television archive of video interviews and written narratives. Others have been included in New York War Stories, a local documentary premiering this month along with New York Goes to War, which looks at New York City's place in World War II and its unique contributions to the war effort.
"One of the most important things public television stations need to do, and can and should do, is make stronger ties with their communities," Shapiro said. For him, New York War Stories offered the perfect opportunity to do something unprecedented.
"I was looking for an innovative way to tell a story, that would involve a lot of community outreach and would touch our viewers, either the ones who participated or the ones who just watched," Shapiro said. "Because one of the things about the World War II generation is that they didn't really share their feelings. So, this is a chance for them to open up and for the younger generation to hear their stories."
STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINES
Neal Shapiro's father, Sumner Shapiro, was one of those reticent veterans. After serving as a corporal in the U.S. Army and surviving the Battle of the Bulge, he returned home, studied engineering on the G.I. Bill and started a family, rarely speaking about his war experiences. But when his son asked to interview him for the New York War Stories project, he agreed.
"I think it's important for individuals to tell the story," Sumner Shapiro said.
"History is the chronicle of the victors and it's written by the professionals who represent those interests. History is also, and more importantly I think, the experience of individuals, and to capture those stories is a worthwhile project."
As a young corporal, Shapiro witnessed every horror of war, including the death of a friend and fellow soldier who was crossing the swift and frigid Saar River in Luxembourg to get to Germany and the Siegfried Line. He hopes that public television's examination of World War II - through the eyes of people who were touched by it - will remind viewers of a crucial fact about all wars, including the current one in Iraq.
"War is fought by people who pay in little numbers, who pay with their lives and their bodies, one by one. We have to be sensitive to that and we have to think about that when we exercise our military power," he said. "The diplomats and the generals may have the headlines, but the coffins that are brought back, they don't contain the generals and the politicians."
In the 1940s while war was being waged against fascism overseas, another battle was fomenting in the United States - one against racism and bigotry, particularly in the Jim Crow South. Even as African Americans were fighting for basic rights and equal treatment at home, they were bravely and selflessly serving their country in a bloody conflict thousands of miles away. More than one million African Americans fought for their country during World War II after a long history of segregation in the military. James E. Jackson helped found the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an early civil rights organization. In 1943, soon after getting married and having a daughter, he was drafted into the Army. His wife, Esther, 89, shared his story and her memories.
"During three years in the Army - basic training in North Carolina, Tuskegee, Alabama, and Kearns, Utah, he was stationed with an engineering battalion on the Ledo Road in the China-India-Burma theater of war," she said. "For his entire time in the Army (with white officers over black soldiers), he wrote daily letters."
Esther did, too, and today they have hundreds of letters. An archive of a young couple's first years together, separated by international calamity, it contains poetry, drawings for their daughter, Harriet - named after Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave and leader of the Underground Railroad - and commentary on world events.
"He believed that the war against fascism was a war against racism - that victory would not only end the Axis tyranny but hopefully help to end white supremacist terrorism in the U.S. South," Esther Jackson explained.
Esther and James Jackson, now 92, ultimately found their way to Brooklyn, where they live today. They both hold master's degrees and have been married for 65 years.
THE HOME FIRES BURNING
Letters from home can be a lifeline for troops fighting in foreign lands. During World War II, support from home had a major impact on the war's outcome. From volunteers who brought comfort to the troops through organizations like the U.S.O. to women who riveted fighter planes in America's factories, civilians and enlisted personnel supported the war effort with hard work and sacrifice.
Pearl E. Silverfine, 83, a retired postal worker living in Manhattan, served in the Women's Army Corps (WACs) from September 1944 to July 1946. Even before joining the WACs, she was working on behalf of America's troops at Wright Aeronautical in New Jersey. "I loved the job," she wrote in her vividly detailed autobiography, which she submitted to the New York War Stories project. "We precision-ground small parts for Cyclone Engines that powered B-24s for the war effort."
According to Silverfine, working in a war plant was an education. "For the first time in my life I heard vulgar language and dirty jokes," she said. For America, the period represented a permanent shift in society. Women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, taking jobs that were vacated by young men going off to war. But the novelty wasn't appreciated by everyone, she said. "On one occasion a visiting man in uniform came on the floor and announced to one and all, 'When I come back I don't want to see no damned woman on my machine.'"
After two years at Wright, Silverfine joined the WACs, where she was trained to operate an early IBM computer for the Air Transport Command. Her journey would take her from the ethnically and culturally diverse New York metropolitan area, where she was raised, to cities and towns throughout the United States. Her education would continue, but every now and then, she would be the teacher. Chow time at a camp in Orlando, Florida, offered one such opportunity. "I particularly remember a conversation with a soldier in the mess hall," she wrote. "He asked me why Jews were sympathetic to blacks. I would have thought the answer was self-evident, but I told him, 'Because we both suffer from discrimination.'"
THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD
Even children supported the war effort, helping to plant victory gardens or collecting stamps to buy war bonds, as young Gil Weinstein did, growing up in Brooklyn. He also kept a diary, which he shared with the New York War Stories project. His words, written from the perspective of innocence and inexperience during some of the darkest days of the war, offer a sense of immediacy and urgency - of being in the moment.
"On Sunday mornings the big kids, I mean the guys that are about 18 years old, play stickball on our block," Weinstein wrote. "When Manny Squadron came home with one leg missing, people made a party for him and tried to be polite and not mention his leg. He was smiling and crying. We were sad because he was a great ball player."
Weinstein's diary entry for June 6, 1944 - D- Day - is particularly poignant, reminding us that III war time, no one escapes completely unscathed:
"My father in a low and serious voice tells us that this is a day in the war we have all been expecting and planning for. ...There will be a lot of people dying on this day. Some of them will be wounded too and some will be people from our block that we know. .. .We know this is all very important, because it could end the war. I wonder what it would be like without the war. It's been going on since I was 6. I'm 8-years-old now.
"I know it will take a while to figure out. I wonder if when I'm grown up, I will remember this night and the war and if I will understand what the war and the dying is all about."
The year was 1944 and the courageous navigator of that B-17 bomber out of Foggia, Italy, was a 20-year-old New Jersey native and recent graduate of West Orange High School. After briefly attending Seton Hall University, the young man enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals, and attaining the rank of lieutenant. Brendan Byrne later became Governor Byrne, serving his home state for two terms. Governor Byrne's memory of that dramatic mission is just one of countless narratives. Others have been included in New York War Stories, a local documentary premiering this month along with New York Goes to War, which looks at New York City's place in World War II and its unique contributions to the war effort.
Brendan Byrne later became Governor Byrne, serving his home state for two terms. Governor Byrne's memory of that dramatic mission is just one of countless World War II stories that live on in the hearts and minds of Americans. Governor Byrne shared his story, as did many others, after Thirteen and WLIW21 invited tri-state-area residents to participate in the stations' New York War Stories initiative, a major, multimedia event built around the epic PBS series The War - A Ken Burns Film, premiering this month.
"I remember one mission where my bombardier passed out (lost oxygen) and I had to revive him while over our target. Revive him, reattach his oxygen, put on his flack suit and toggle his bombs. I saved his life and saved our mission. He called me fifty years later and thanked me."
"One of the great things TV can do is transmit experience," said Thirteen's president, Neal Shapiro. "With its incredible images and testimonials - the power of people telling their stories - Ken Burns' series may be the closest we can ever come to actually bringing ourselves back to the World War II era."- Brendan T. Byrne
Shapiro came to Thirteen in February, just in time to lead the local campaign to connect New York-area residents to The War. Like Burns' series, the New York War Stories initiative focuses on the personal experiences of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
Many of the stories sent in by Thirteen and WLIW viewers have been posted online as part of a public television archive of video interviews and written narratives. Others have been included in New York War Stories, a local documentary premiering this month along with New York Goes to War, which looks at New York City's place in World War II and its unique contributions to the war effort.
"One of the most important things public television stations need to do, and can and should do, is make stronger ties with their communities," Shapiro said. For him, New York War Stories offered the perfect opportunity to do something unprecedented.
"I was looking for an innovative way to tell a story, that would involve a lot of community outreach and would touch our viewers, either the ones who participated or the ones who just watched," Shapiro said. "Because one of the things about the World War II generation is that they didn't really share their feelings. So, this is a chance for them to open up and for the younger generation to hear their stories."
STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINES
Neal Shapiro's father, Sumner Shapiro, was one of those reticent veterans. After serving as a corporal in the U.S. Army and surviving the Battle of the Bulge, he returned home, studied engineering on the G.I. Bill and started a family, rarely speaking about his war experiences. But when his son asked to interview him for the New York War Stories project, he agreed.
"I think it's important for individuals to tell the story," Sumner Shapiro said.
"History is the chronicle of the victors and it's written by the professionals who represent those interests. History is also, and more importantly I think, the experience of individuals, and to capture those stories is a worthwhile project."
As a young corporal, Shapiro witnessed every horror of war, including the death of a friend and fellow soldier who was crossing the swift and frigid Saar River in Luxembourg to get to Germany and the Siegfried Line. He hopes that public television's examination of World War II - through the eyes of people who were touched by it - will remind viewers of a crucial fact about all wars, including the current one in Iraq.
"War is fought by people who pay in little numbers, who pay with their lives and their bodies, one by one. We have to be sensitive to that and we have to think about that when we exercise our military power," he said. "The diplomats and the generals may have the headlines, but the coffins that are brought back, they don't contain the generals and the politicians."
In the 1940s while war was being waged against fascism overseas, another battle was fomenting in the United States - one against racism and bigotry, particularly in the Jim Crow South. Even as African Americans were fighting for basic rights and equal treatment at home, they were bravely and selflessly serving their country in a bloody conflict thousands of miles away. More than one million African Americans fought for their country during World War II after a long history of segregation in the military. James E. Jackson helped found the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an early civil rights organization. In 1943, soon after getting married and having a daughter, he was drafted into the Army. His wife, Esther, 89, shared his story and her memories.
"During three years in the Army - basic training in North Carolina, Tuskegee, Alabama, and Kearns, Utah, he was stationed with an engineering battalion on the Ledo Road in the China-India-Burma theater of war," she said. "For his entire time in the Army (with white officers over black soldiers), he wrote daily letters."
Soldiers observe gas mask manufacturing.
"He believed that the war against fascism was a war against racism - that victory would not only end the Axis tyranny but hopefully help to end white supremacist terrorism in the U.S. South," Esther Jackson explained.
Esther and James Jackson, now 92, ultimately found their way to Brooklyn, where they live today. They both hold master's degrees and have been married for 65 years.
THE HOME FIRES BURNING
Letters from home can be a lifeline for troops fighting in foreign lands. During World War II, support from home had a major impact on the war's outcome. From volunteers who brought comfort to the troops through organizations like the U.S.O. to women who riveted fighter planes in America's factories, civilians and enlisted personnel supported the war effort with hard work and sacrifice.
Pearl E. Silverfine, 83, a retired postal worker living in Manhattan, served in the Women's Army Corps (WACs) from September 1944 to July 1946. Even before joining the WACs, she was working on behalf of America's troops at Wright Aeronautical in New Jersey. "I loved the job," she wrote in her vividly detailed autobiography, which she submitted to the New York War Stories project. "We precision-ground small parts for Cyclone Engines that powered B-24s for the war effort."
According to Silverfine, working in a war plant was an education. "For the first time in my life I heard vulgar language and dirty jokes," she said. For America, the period represented a permanent shift in society. Women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, taking jobs that were vacated by young men going off to war. But the novelty wasn't appreciated by everyone, she said. "On one occasion a visiting man in uniform came on the floor and announced to one and all, 'When I come back I don't want to see no damned woman on my machine.'"
After two years at Wright, Silverfine joined the WACs, where she was trained to operate an early IBM computer for the Air Transport Command. Her journey would take her from the ethnically and culturally diverse New York metropolitan area, where she was raised, to cities and towns throughout the United States. Her education would continue, but every now and then, she would be the teacher. Chow time at a camp in Orlando, Florida, offered one such opportunity. "I particularly remember a conversation with a soldier in the mess hall," she wrote. "He asked me why Jews were sympathetic to blacks. I would have thought the answer was self-evident, but I told him, 'Because we both suffer from discrimination.'"
THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD
On V-J Day, New York celebrated.
"On Sunday mornings the big kids, I mean the guys that are about 18 years old, play stickball on our block," Weinstein wrote. "When Manny Squadron came home with one leg missing, people made a party for him and tried to be polite and not mention his leg. He was smiling and crying. We were sad because he was a great ball player."
Weinstein's diary entry for June 6, 1944 - D- Day - is particularly poignant, reminding us that III war time, no one escapes completely unscathed:
"My father in a low and serious voice tells us that this is a day in the war we have all been expecting and planning for. ...There will be a lot of people dying on this day. Some of them will be wounded too and some will be people from our block that we know. .. .We know this is all very important, because it could end the war. I wonder what it would be like without the war. It's been going on since I was 6. I'm 8-years-old now.
"I know it will take a while to figure out. I wonder if when I'm grown up, I will remember this night and the war and if I will understand what the war and the dying is all about."