Many Americans celebrated Labor Day on September 2, recognizing “the social and economic achievements of American workers,” according to the U.S. Department of Labor. It also t marked the end of summer, back to school, and the unofficial beginning of fall.

The date has another significance—the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, abord the USS Missouri, Japanese officials signed the treaty ending the largest, deadliest war ever fought. Seventy-nine years later, six World War II veterans, family members, and friends, gathered at a ceremony to mark the anniversary of peace, sponsored by the Friends of the National World War II Memorial and the National Mall and Memorial Parks.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, of the 16 million men and women who served in World War II, more than 100,000 are alive, 6,000 of them women. Their average age is 98. Six of those veterans were honored at the ceremony.

Each placed a wreath near the wall of 4,000 stars representing the more than 400,000 members of the U.S. military who died in the war.

These are the veterans who were honored:

Domenic Galilei was a petty officer 3^rd class in the U.S. Navy and a crew member on a TBM Avenger (a torpedo bomber) in several campaigns, including the Battle of Okinawa.

Regina Benson was a U.S. Army nurse, who served in Okinawa and Japan.

Thomas Evans served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, as a radioman at the Submarine Base in Pearl Harbor.

Dixon Hemphill was an executive office in the Navy, who served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, aboard the USS Little Rock and the USS North Carolina. He trained soldiers in Taiwan and China and retired as a lieutenant commander in 1965.

Callan Saffell joined the Navy in 1942 as an electrician’s mate 1^st class. His wooden war ship was responsible for degaussing minesweeper ships to protect them from magnetic mines.

Frank Cohn’s family escaped from Hitler’s Germany to the United States when he was 13 years old. He served in the U.S. Army at the Battle of the Bulge and in the Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns. He was sergeant of the guard of prisoners during the second Nuremberg Trial. He retired as a colonel.

Thousands gathered in May to mark the 80^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that was the beginning of the end of war in Europe a year later. Germany surrendered May 8,1945, leading to celebrations all over the United States. A long three months later, Japan surrendered, and the war was over.

Top image: Dixon Hemphill, Callan Saffell, Frank Cohn.

Bottom image: Domenic Galilei, Reginan Benson, Thomas Evans.

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For the few days, my book is part of the Smashwords sale. If you’ve never heard of Smashwords, it’s a great place to find books in all genres. The sale ends January 1.

To find my book among many that are on sale, use the link below, then search either my name, or the book’s title: Your Loving Son, Ty: A World War II Story of Hope and Horror in the Pacific/

https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/

Feel free to leave a review and share this information with anyone who is interested in World War II or stories about individuals in historic times.

The post On Sale Through Jan. 1 appeared first on Jody Beck.

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/2x99k2su

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/46h999bj

Barns and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/3hpwf88u

Smashwords: https://tinyurl.com/5n6db3fv

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/mvb66b2h

Scrib: https://tinyurl.com/22yy5amx

If you’d rather check it out at your library, ask them to order from Overdrive: https://tinyurl.com/yberazuc

Reviews on this website or the site where you purchased the book are much appreciated.

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Frank Buckles told Maine Corps and Navy recruiters he was 18—he was really 16—when he tried to enlist to fight in World War I. Both turned him down. The Army took him, even though, like the others, the Army recruiter suspected the Missouri native was under age. Buckles died February 27, 2011, at age 110, the last of 4.7 million Americans who fought in World War I.

Sixteen million Americans served in the United States armed forces during World War II. An estimated 167,284 remain alive as of September 30, 2022, according to an annual count by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Twelve years from now, in 2034, fewer than one thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought the imperial Japanese and German Nazis are likely to remain alive.

About a million of the 6.8 million members of the military who fought in the Korean war remained alive in 2020. That number is expected to drop to fewer than 200,000 by 2030, according to VA. Numbers for surviving Vietnam vets are harder to come by, but the 2.7 million service members who fought in that unpopular war are in their 70s or 80s.

I wish I had asked my father more questions about his time in the Army. It wasn’t long. He was discharged after he became too ill to be sent overseas. And I never got a chance to talk to Ty’s parents before they died, although their letters were clear about their love for their only child and how they longed for his return. His letters were full of dreams f0r a post-war life that never happened.

Which brings me to this advice: If there is a veteran in your family, now is the time to record the stories no one else can tell. Famously unwilling to talk about their time at war, World War II veterans are our last witnesses to a war—unlike any other—that was truly a world war.

It can be as simple as turning on your phone. Ask vets for letters, medals, uniforms, and diaries.  Looking at objects can trigger memories.

Then figure out how to share the recording—and perhaps the objects. Look through those boxes in the attic. Your family may want to hold onto objects and papers. If so, invest in acid-free boxes or folders. State history societies or museums—local or national—may be interested.

When my aunt decided she no longer wanted to store Ty’s letters and diaries, we researched several options. She chose the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. It tells the stories of individual veterans from 1912 to the present. https://www.loc.gov/vets/

Story Corps is collecting veterans’ stories in partnership with local public radio stations and the VHP. You can download the app on your phone. The directions are on its website: https://storycorps.org/participate/storycorps-app/

We are lucky to have Frank Buckles’ stories of World War I and World War II, where, like Ty, he was stationed in the Philippines and became a prisoner of war. Freed in 1945, he returned home and ran a cattle ranch.

(Defense Department photo of Frank Buckles, Now at the Veterans History Project)

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Leo J. Beck Jr. finished his first semester at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he played junior varsity football. He was drafted in spring 1943. After two bouts of rheumatic fever, the Army discharged him for medical reasons in October 1944. He helped train new recruits before his discharge, but he never went overseas. Other friends’ fathers who fought in Europe or the Pacific, said little about their lives as soldiers and sailors. They focused on their careers and their families.

It was later in life before I learned that the father of one of my friends was the pilot of one of the planes in the famous Doolittle Raid. Sixteen Mitchell B-25s bombed Tokyo on April 18, 1942. While the raid did little physical damage, it startled the Japanese public and government. The United States, which Japan believed to be unprepared and unwilling to defend itself, had attacked the enemy’s capital. Americans, still reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, were buoyed by news of the raid.

It was more than three years before Americans returned to Tokyo in a fleet of 374 ships to accept Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. My mother started classes at the University of Nebraska that fall. She and dad met in 1946 or 1947 and were married a week after he graduated, June 12, 1948.

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I have two brothers (one of whom died in 2021) and two sisters, all younger than me. We are all Boomers. The next generation are my nine wonderful Millennial nieces and nephews and the first baby of the next generation born in early 2022. She joins Generation Alpha.

Mostly, I thought of my nieces and nephews. I did not survey them or any of their friends systematically. But I did occasionally ask people if they could name three things that happened during World War II in the Pacific.

Usually, whoever I had put on the spot just stared at me. After a suitable pause, I said, “Pearl Harbor?” Sometimes that unlocked other answers, and sometimes it didn’t. They could seem a little crestfallen that they hadn’t thought of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the battles of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, where Marines were captured in photographs raising the stars and stripes.

A few had heard about Americans fighting in the Philippines and the Bataan Death March. Some had studied it in detail, either in high school or college. But most had never heard of the cruel event when Filipino and American soldiers were marched 60 miles in high heat with little food or water. Thousands of them died. I hope my millennial relatives and their friends, and perhaps others, will become my audience, the readers of one soldier’s story of hope and horror in World War II.

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The story captivated me, and I wanted to learn more. But in the midst of a career in the news business, I had no time to research and write a book about something I knew relatively little about. As a Baby Boomer, my generation’s war was in Vietnam. My parents’ generation spoke little about their own war and got on with their lives. We barely reached World War II history in high school.

In 2015, a year before I retired, I visited my mother’s sister, Janet, a genealogist, and my uncle, Normal L. Sothan, a retired U.S. Navy aviator, at their home outside Denver, Colorado. Norm, who died in 2018, had thought about writing Ty’s story, but a busy military and post-military career had occupied his time. When I asked for a copy of the diary so I could begin work on the book, they said yes.

Although I knew Ty’s parents, Hans and Shy Kokjer, who occasionally visited my family, they never talked about Ty in front of me. Both died while I was in college. After their deaths, Janet inherited the diary and other family keepsakes.

There was much more than Ty’s war diary in that cache. A brown leather suitcase stored for 40 years in their cool, dry basement contained more than 400 letters, two scrapbooks full of family photos, and other memorabilia, including Ty’s water-damaged wallet. Most of the letters were Ty’s near-daily reports from pilot training. But more than three dozen were letters his parents, sent to Ty in the Philippines. They came back after the war started. Janet, Norm, and I sat at their dining room table 75 years later and opened them. Their hopeful words brought tears to our eyes.

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