As the calendar marks the dates for D-Day, Flag Day and on through Independence Day, my thoughts often turn to men I knew in younger years, local men who left their Mendocino County lives and went overseas during World War II. A first cousin, nearly three decades my senior, finished high school then received the call, surviving but learning to smoke and drink along the way. One of my father's closest friends, already beyond the age of thirty was drafted right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought through North Africa, Sicily, and much more of Italy. The impending death of his mother back at the family ranch along the Comptche Road sent him home on leave at an opportune time, just as his company landed on Omaha Beach on the sixth of June, 1944.
Francis Jackson, a young man of Mendocino City wrote home from the European Theater of Operations (ETO) as did Harold Reep, who also made the full U.S. Army tour through North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany from 1942-1945. Many of their correspondences ended up published in their hometown newspaper under the editorship of Auggie Heeser.
Fellow Mendocino resident Al Lemos, also past thirty when he entered the military, survived the Normandy invasion and many other hardships. He had worked at the Mendocino mill fresh out of high school then with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression. He was employed as a psychiatric technician at Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage when the war began. Much of his service was with the Army Medical Corps, crossing France and Germany. He wrote home just before the war in Europe ended and U.S. Army censorship of the mail shipped stateside ceased. “Certainly have seen plenty of Germany since we crossed the Rhine. We are back now in tents but in our previous area we lived in buildings. There were four of us in a large room with beds, hot water, steam heat, and bath with showers. For awhile I thought that I was a civilian once more. What a dream!
“The news continues to sound good. The end can't be very far off. After we crossed the Rhine, the Germans didn't have much to stop us with. They did delay us for a short time in some of their towns and cities, but a terrific price. Those places are now in ruins and it is going to take years for the German people to repair the damage. I have passed through cities that at one time had many thousands of people living in them. Now, they are nothing but ruins for miles. In fact it is hard to try and describe such devastation, one must see it himself. I wonder how many people were killed in their homes, there must have been countless thousands. It may sound strange to say, but I can't feel any pity for the people here. They have asked for it when they followed a man like Hitler.”
As if right on historical cue, Lemos' letter continues in the next paragraph: “Some time ago I was in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. I have seen sad sights since being in the Army but this was the saddest one of them all. I made the tour of the camp with three other fellows and we escorted some 200 German civilians. They are now letting the civilians see what their 'big shots' were doing all these years. The camp was in a wooded area, and very well guarded with an electric fence around the camp. At one time the place had close to some 50,000 people. A good many of the ones I saw were more dead than alive. The dead were stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned in the bake oven. That is where they disposed of the dead. We heard stories of live prisoners being burned along with the dead. The Germans seemed to have had a system of slow starvation for their slaves. The barracks that the prisoners lived in were crowded to the utmost, hundreds where there should only have been about fifty. The terrible stench of such a place was nauseating to say the least.
“The Germans had a place in which they made lampshades, bookbinding and other ornaments from the skin of the Nazi's victims. This isn't propaganda, as I have seen some of the articles. Back home we use animals in the advance of medical science, but here they use human beings instead of rats, rabbits, etc...
“The stories that are heard from the prisoners seem unbelievable, but after witnessing what the Germans did, one can just about believe anything that one hears. One stops and wonders just what kind of people these Germans are. The people whom we escorted through the camp claim they didn't know the conditions inside the prison. Most of the women broke down and cried when they saw the condition of some of the 14-year-old boys, for they had boys of 14 and old men of 80. Of course, the people now claim that all of this was the cause of the Nazis and that they didn't have any part of the horrors that were committed, but one can't help but wonder if they should now place all the blame on their leaders, when for years they have profited from the countries that their leaders had overrun.”
Al Lemos left the U.S. Army a staff sergeant after almost five years of service. He returned to his job at Mendocino State Hospital, retiring in 1971 when the hospital was shut down. He'd put in more than thirty-five years as a psych tech. He died on July 12, 1994, fifty years, one month and six days after the D-Day invasion.
History instructs us that in 1933, Germany's military expenditures accounted for 2% of its economy. By 1941, the military expenditure figure rose to 44% of that country's economy. More than fifty years ago, in the throes of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
(Sometimes absurd, sometimes sad, history stands witness at malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com.)
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