Are you a veteran? Is there a family member, neighbor or friend in your life who served our nation in the armed services? Tell us about him or her here.
Tell us about the veterans in your life
by Greg Reibman | Nov 10, 2016 | Newton | 14 comments
by Greg Reibman | Nov 10, 2016 | Newton | 14 comments
Are you a veteran? Is there a family member, neighbor or friend in your life who served our nation in the armed services? Tell us about him or her here.
September 13, 2023
Men's Crib September 13, 2023 5:20 am
My mom’s 1st cousin at 17 in the South Pacific saw carnage that left him in unspeakable mental pain for over 50 years. My Dad, an Army doctor, was deployed to Fort Dix and also somewhere in the southern US. He caught measles during his enlistment, generally agreed later by his doctors to have led to multiple sclerosis that progressed rapidly until his death at age 60. An uncle of mine also seeved in the army. All World War II veterans.
Military service in my family in America goes back to the Revolutionary War.
My father served as a financial officer in the army during WWII and the Korean War. He also piloted several types of aircraft flying cash payrolls to international bases. He spent a lot of time in South America, mainly Brazil where he was stationed for months.
During the Korean War, as a Major, he was the managing financial officer overseeing and setting up systems on bases in the states. We moved from base to base, Fort Bragg to Shreveport, LA, to Marshall, Texas and on and on until we landed in Muscle Shoals, AL where he retired from the Army. From there we ended up in Lookout Mountain, GA outside Chattanooga, TN, and he went back to being CFO of the Tennessee Valley Authority working with the government to keep it going.
All of my uncles served in WWII. Major James Moore served with General Patton and spent years in Japan during the Korean War. He was wounded and honorably discharged with a back injury. Everyone continued to call him Major Moore and he never missed a reunion.
Charles Purdy took shrapnel at Pear Harbor. He later died from his injuries.
William Purdy was doctor in WWII.
And on and on.
My husband was a naval engineering officer during the Vietnam War, stationed out of Norfolk on the Amphibious Transport (LPA-249), the USS Francis Marion. It carried Marines and amphibious vehicles deploying for 3 to 6 months at a time.
I thank all members of the armed services.
Thank you to all our veterans for your service.
My father served with the US Airforce Reserves – released from active duty in 1963 and honorably discharged in 1966.
Thank you veterans!
My Dad was an officer in the Navy in the 1960s. @Marti he also served on the USS Francis Marion, but before your husband. He was on that ship when it was part of the naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis. He later served as an OCS instructor during the early years of the Vietnam War.
My uncle was a Marine who served in the Pacific during WWII. He was on a heavy machine gun crew and served in some of the bloodiest battles of that theater. When we were kids we would try to get him to tell battle stories, but he never would.
These are fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to write these contributions.
My Dad served stateside during the Korean War. He joined the Navy because, as a teenager, he honestly believed the poster that said he would “see the world” beyond his hometown of Somerville. He got stationed in New Jersey. 🙂 Among other things, he was responsible for catching the tow lines of incoming giant dirigibles. Decades later he opened a book devoted to the war time use of them and saw a photo of himself taken at night holding a line. My Father-in-law was a Sargent in WWII and while stationed in England, met my Mother-in-Law who drove Red Cross truck, sometimes right in the middle of bombings. They got married and came here to live.
Thank you to all our veterans!
My father was in the navy in the Pacific theater during WWII. He didn’t talk too much about it, though he did say his ship was attacked and he woke to the sound of a Japanese plane hurtling past his porthole before crashing into the ocean. His brothers were both in the ETO. One of them (an Army pilot) met his soon-to-be-wife (an Army nurse) after being wounded. My first cousin (other side of the family) was a navy pilot after graduating at the Naval Academy.
I have a friend who is still active duty and many who are retired.
Great idea for a thread, Greg.
Loving this thread. I hope the stories keep coming.
Kathy, small world.
My dad, Harold M. Reibman, was attending Lafayette College in Easton, PA when World War II broke out. He left school to enlist in the Army. After several days and nights in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge his feet became severely frost bitten and was air lifted to a hospital in London. Upon recovery he was assigned a desk job in General Eisenhower’s office in France. He completed his degree at Lafayette after the war.
Dad served in the late 60s. Close HS friend served in recent conflict. They don’t ask for recognition or special treatment but they both did something very special and made a huge sacrifice.
Thanks to all the veterans, and to those posting their great stories.
My father-in-law, Dan Miller is 91 years old. He joined the Army Air Corp shortly after WW2 broke out. He was at various times a gunner, radio operator and bombardier on a B17. After being shot down twice, [once in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge], and crash landing three times, he was the only member of his original crew to survive the war.
I recently met a remarkable World War II veteran named Richard Newell Silverman. He is and was a Newton resident who enrolled in the Army early in the War from Providence Rhode Island where he was attending Brown University. The Newton Draft Board finally tracked him down in Normandy where he had landed on D-Day plus eight. He told them where he was if they wanted to come and enroll him. He served as crytopgrapher sending messages to the Air Force in England on what they could do to hamper the German Army without harming the U.S. troops as they advanced across Europe. He and four other Sergeants from his unit were able to celebrate the liberation of Paris with the French people. After the War and army sponsored study at the Sorbonne, he returned home to a successful career in manufacturing and to fundraising for Brown University and other worthy causes. His autobiography “From GI to CEO” is available from the Harvard Bookstore press, and it contains some fascinating details about life in the Ward School area before the War and his manufacturing career.
My family history echoes many of the accounts above.. Despite having lost an eye in a childhood accident, my father Edmund J. Yates, joined the Army and was stationed in a medical base helping to treat the injured. I gather his role was similar to that played by Tony Curtis in the film version of “Captain Newman, MD” , a novel by Leo Rosten.
My uncles also serve in World War II/. Paul Richardson of Worcester was in Guam and other stations preparing the B-17’s and B-24’s to attack Japan. Bill Terry of Upper Falls started as a Military Police Officer guarding the labs at MIT. Eventually he joined the U.S. Forces in Europe. He ran into Stephen Walker of Upper Falls, who took on a wild ride through the streets of Paris on his Jeep. Jack Wittock of Iron Mountain, Michigan who like my father had lost an eye in his youth stayed stateside. He was assigned to Fort Devens in Massachusetts. He met and fell in love with my aunt Marian Richardson of Worcester. After they married, they returned to the Upper Pennisula of Michigan where my Uncle Jack ran his family’s plumbing supply business where he and my aunt raised my two cousins.
Things get murkier further back. My Great-Uncle Francis Yates served as a machine gunner in World War I. In a letter home, he described the murderous toll of “the Great War”. After a battle, Americans could across a field so thick with the bodies of dead Germans that their feet didn’t need to touch the ground. In the battle of the Ardennes
Forest, my Great Uncle Frank made the supreme sacrifice. He is buried in one of the Graveyards where the French people commemorated those who had come to their shore to return the service of LaFayette in our Revolution.
I believe two of my ancestors served in the Civil War. One was strikten with dysentery and discharged. The other, Samuel Cory Richardson of Newton Corner, served in the 40th Massachusetts Mounted Infantry. He was wounded in the Battle of Olustee,
Florida. His daughter, Eleanor Richardson of Needham, remembered him as walking with a limp though she was never clear as to whether or not it was a war wound.
The 54th Regiment (the subject of the film “Glory”) covered the Union retreat at Olustee and probably saved my grandfather from being killed or captured and sent to the horrible Confederate Prisoner of War camp where a wounded Yank would have probably perished. At the rededication of the Monument to the 54th Regiment across from the State House, I thanked the descendent of winner of the Medal of Honor Sergeant Carney who took the Flag from a wounded comrade and told his fellow warriors “that Old Flag never touched the ground boys.”
This War to Free the Slaves and Save the Union is still very personal to me which is why I was so affronted that some students chose to brandish the Confederate Flag only a few blocks from where the contributions of the people of Newton raised a monument to the Civil War soldiers and why I worked on the repair and rededication of the monument. The most charitable thing I can say about the perpetrators is that they must be extremely ignorant of the causes and conduct of the Civil War. My great grandfather’s grave is in the Civil War memorial section of the Needham Cemetary since he lived in that town after returning from the War.
His Great grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War is buried in the South Burying Ground.. I was proud to support funding for the restoration of his and other graves there and I look forward to the restoration of the fence and removal of brush at that burying ground. I’ hope to do more to keep the memories of our Veterans fresh in the minds of the current residents of the City.
City Councilor Brian Yates
Not in the US armed forces, but my father Donald Welbourn served during WW2 in the Royal Air Force, stationed at the Air Training School in Bulawayo, Rhodesia. Apparently he first met my mother, Barbara Fearnley*, while he was stationed at a local airbase in north Yorkshire, where she was the local pub landlord’s youngest daughter. During the war she was also in the RAF, repairing radio equipment. The pub landlord’s eldest daughter, my aunt Eileen, married an RAF officer. The middle daughter, my aunt Joan, was in the civil defence forces, a spotter for an anti-aircraft battery in east Yorkshire near the town of Hull. The pub landlord’s son, my uncle Harold, fought in the British 8th Army in north Africa, against General Rommel’s forces.
One of my mother’s cousins, William Charlesworth, a tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber, was lost when his aircraft was shot down during a raid over the Netherlands.
My late father-in-law, Al Fantuzzi, served in the US Navy during WW2.
Further back, my father’s eldest brother Tom was killed in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium. He was 22. Two of his cousins were also killed during the Great War, and another severely wounded. It is sobering to realize that out of some six million British soldiers mobilized during the war, over 800,000 died. Anyone who studies family history can see the huge impact the war had on life during and after the war.
*As a family historian, I can tell you never to use your mother’s maiden name in a security question for any website.
World War II Veteran Richard Silverman is included in the list of people interviewed for the Newton Speaks Program of the Newton Free Library. His interviewed can be accessed via the Library website.
City Councilor Brian Yates