The Impact of World War II and the Holocaust:
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Most of our class was born in 1949. World War II had ended, and many of our fathers had returned from Europe or the Pacific to start or continue their families and careers. I drew on my own family's experience of my father, Robert Grady Head, MD (1915-2008) serving as a flight surgeon in the US Army Air Corps while stationed at Harmon Field in Guam. I knew that World War II was the defining event of his life.
He entered service as a general practitioner, having completed his internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. According to the story he told many times, he was assigned to the psychiatry department at Wright Air Field in Ohio because they "needed someone who could type." He was sent to the Army's training program for psychiatry in Long Island, and then went to the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field near San Antonio to become a flight surgeon. After the war he served as a public health officer in north Florida, completed a psychiatric residency at the VA in Long Beach, Mississippi, and moved to New Orleans to begin private practice.
I began to wonder how the trauma of the war and the Holocaust affected our parents and subsequently the class of 1967. As I heard about more and more of my classmates' fathers' war experience, I began to have a sense of their immense bravery. Most of them did not talk about their war experience, and most of us did not ask when we had the opportunity. But we can let this discussion be a way to honor their memories and for their stories not to be forgotten.
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For those of you who know very little about your father's activities during the war, you can go to the following website:
https://vetrecs.archives.gov/VeteranRequest/home.html
and request your father's DD214 (discharge papers).
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Two classmates' fathers worked for the OSS, forerunner to the CIA. Sworn to secrecy, they never talked about their work during the war, and their adult children only figured it out much later through their own research. Evangeline Morphos's father, Panos Paul Morphos (Morphopoulos) (1905-1979) told his family that he was in the military as a correspondent for Newsweek. Actually he was an intelligence officer for the OSS and one of the first intelligence officers hired by Bill Donovan. He spoke five languages: Greek, French, English, Italian, and German. Born in Athens, he received a law degree from the Sorbonne and from there went to Johns Hopkins. He went under the code name Egret in a highly charged operation in the Balkans.
Chuck Lambert's father, Tom M. Lamberth, Jr. (1923-2013) left Texas A & M at age 21 to enlist and was sent to officers' training school. He had the rank of First Lieutenant and was a co-pilot on a B24 aircraft in the 801st/492nd Bomb Group. Later he was assigned to a covert operation within the OSS known as the Carpetbaggers. They flew from a secret airfield in England to behind enemy lines, only at night and at very low altitudes to avoid radar detection. They dropped spies, supplies, and literature to support the Resistance fighters battling the Germans. Tom Lamberth flew 21 missions while he was with the Carpetbaggers.
Beryl Godchaux's father, Thomas P. Godchaux, joined the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps after graduating from Newman. After one semester at Lehigh University, he was called up in February 1943 and went to Camp Pickett, Virginia for basic training in the Medical Corps. In March 1944 he was sent to Camp Bowie to join the 1475th Engineer Maintenance. The company sailed in June 1944 from Seattle to le Shima in the Okinawa Islands. On August 14, he and others witnessed a Japanese delegation in "Betty" bombers, painted white with green crosses land on le Shima to transfer to a C-54 to fly to Manila to sign a cease-fire.
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Jan Aronson's father, Bernard Jackie Aronson (1919-1983), was a cartographer in the Pacific during World War II. With his architectural degree and math skills, he worked on making maps. Before he died he told Jan's older brother that he had worked on the map used for the Hiroshima bomb. Larry Rabin's father, Samuel Rabin (1920-1987), was an intelligence officer in the Army Air Corps in India during the war. From 1942 to 1945 there were 2,000,000 American soldiers in India.
In looking at the military experience of our parents, it appears that our fathers participated in almost every major battle of World War II. Charles Wicksrom’s father, Jack K. Wickstrom, MD, who later chaired the Department of Orthopaedics at Tulane, was wounded in 1942 in the First Marine Division in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Charles said that his father often talked about being saved during World War II in order to teach.
David Haspel’s father, Robert Ber Haspel, MD, served as a physician in the US Army Medical Corps during the war and was in the Battle of the Bulge. Ken Faller's father, Harold E. Faller (1924-2000), was a Private First Class in Patton's army and walked behind the tanks to assist in the rescue of the 101st Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge. He participated in the capture of a significant German position while lost behind enemy lines and in the capture of the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's hideaway, at the end of the war in Europe.
Jann Terral’s father, William Carter Terral, MD, (1925-2009) was the only physician in the town of Farmerville, Louisiana before the war. When World War II started, he served in the US Army Medical Corps for two years in France and then completed a pediatric residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Beth Phillips Weiss's father, Benjamin James Phillips, MD (2013-2082) served in the US Army Medical Corps in the Philippines for five years.
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Diane Cohen’s father, Alvin Cohen, MD, (1922-2009) joined the US Army and attended medical school at Tulane during the war, and he completed his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, where Diane was born.
Gus Lorber’s father, J.F.S. Lorber, Jr. (1919-2009) fought in World War II in the Pacific aboard the PCE872 as their navigator. Like my father, Marion Steeg’s father, Moise Steeg, Jr, served in the US Army Air Corps.
Bill Stewart’s father, George A. Stewart, Jr., served as a First Lieutenant in the Marine Corps and participated in the Battles of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.
Click on picture for video of The Battle of Guam.
Susan Blum Klastorin's father, Stanford Kahn Blum, Jr (1920-2004), served as an officer in the Coast Guard (part of the Navy during the war). He was an engineer on the destroyer escort, the USS Joyce, crossing the Atlantic many times and destroying a German submarine that was attempting to attack the US fleet.
Alan Yuspeh's father, Michael Yuspeh (1920-2006), was in the US Army Air Corps as an engineer on a B-24 aircraft. He was a member of the 44th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He flew 35 missions over Europe in 1944 and 1945. Alan estimates that about half the planes were lost. Evan Soule’s father, Evan R. Soule (1924-2006) was in the US Army Air Corps with the “Hell’s Angels,” the 303rd Bomb Group of the 358 Bombardment Squadron, stationed at Molesworth, England. He was a tail gunner on a B-17 and completed 35 missions over Europe during World War II.
Jackie Samuels Gibson's father, George Henry Samuels (1912-1995), served in Panama with the Signal Corps during World War II. The Signal Corps Laboratories were responsible for designing and developing much of the communications equipment used by American forces during WWII.
Major Samuels is third from left.
Although no one in the class was a child of a Holocaust survivor, several members of the class were touched by the Holocaust in different ways and to differing degrees. Relatives of John Menszer, Nathan and Minnie, arrived in New Orleans in 1950 and lived across the street from the Menszer family. Minnie, a survivor of Auschwitz, refused to talk about the experience, but John had the sense from family whispering that something terrible had happened. As a child he thought it was because people ordered the wrong thing on the menu or wore the wrong color clothing and he decided then he would not make those mistakes.
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David Haspel’s father was in the worst of the fighting in the last European battle against the Germans, and when the war was over, he was assigned to provide medical care to the Nazi elite so they could be tried at Nuremberg. Dr. Haspel never talked about his war experiences. Robert Greenberg’s father, who had left Russia to escape pogroms, lost many relatives in the Holocaust. His cousin, Nathan Blackman, MD, was the last living member of that branch of the family. Diane Cohen attended Wilson Elementary School where she had good friends who were children of Holocaust survivors; she said that she saw a tattoo on the wrist of a friend's mother in the second grade but it wasn’t until she was in the sixth grade that she figured out what the numbers meant.