Archived Editorial for 05/21/06

Discovering Your Parents
by Rebecca Brown

Editor: a remarkable labor of love recently came in the mail: a daughter's recording of her father's stint in the Army Air Corps during WWII. He was one of those invisible soldiers who kept communications between theaters of war humming.
     Because so many children of WWII Veterans are now aging Baby Boomers, & because our parents simply put the war behind them & got on with their lives -- do check out my Writing Your Memoirs Part I & Part II -- I offer an edited version of Karen's press release to urge you to help preserve these memories, & at the end I list the many wartime memoirs & histories we've reviewed:

“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.” -- William Makepeace Thackeray

What did your parents do during The War?
Karen Sladek, like so many others whose parents & grandparents were caught up in World War II, grew up knowing little about the era & even less about the vital roles her relatives played. She took her legacy & her freedom completely for granted.

Like so many American families back then who took on the enormous task of preserving our coveted freedom & the millions of Veterans who were subjected to peril, the Sladek family never so much as uttered a word about Karen's father's World War II odyssey.

The house she grew up in was a collector's dream. The Egyptian tapestry depicting the Nile & three Pyramids hung on a wall in the living room. She loved to caress the ivory carvings from India which adorned her parent's bedroom, & the mountain goat carved of apple wood from the Isle of Capri mesmerized her. Taking her cue from her father & family, Karen never thought to ask about them or how they got there.

Like so many American families & Veterans back then they packed their memories away along with their military uniforms, & their trials & tribulations.

“Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable.” -- Anthony Trollop

From Farm to Fantastic
Like most Americans back then, the Sladeks were a farm family daily coping with the Great Depression when, an ocean away, Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939.

In the fall of 1941 at age 17, Lyle Sladek, the third of five children & the second of two sons, discovered the beautiful world of mathematics and set off for Brookings, South Dakota to enroll in engineering at the State College. He had barely cracked open his freshman textbooks when the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor changed the course of his life.

A year later, Congress lowered the draft age to 18 & Lyle became subject to being called up. While considering his options, he came across a brochure about how the Army Air Corps was looking for college students with a background in physics & mathematics. Lured by the excitement & glamor of airplanes & the thought of travel & adventure, Lyle applied. His first stop, in what would become an odyssey of circling the globe by land, sea & air, was the Assam Province of India to an air base camp in the jungle of Misamari.

“I... write a book, or a short story, at least three times -— once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” -- Bernard Malamud, Author of The Natural.

Lt. Sladek Cracks the Code
Merely twenty years old, as a military intelligence officer, Lyle commanded an Army Airways Communications System (AACS) station. The AACS operated a global network; any breach of security at a single station jeopardized cryptographic security throughout the entire world.

Code rooms had double sets of locked doors, no windows, & incendiary devices. Only cryptographic personnel with FBI clearance could enter that secret domain. Coded messages were sent & received via Morse code. A miscue on the part of a German cryptographer helped the Allies figure out the workings of the Enigma Machine.

Seeing the World
The mind-boggling thing about Lt. Sladek's military service is that the Army Air Corps had him globetrotting to Shanghai, Wiesbaden, Athens, in order to keep communication stations operating. Unattached to any unit, he traveled on any military plane that happened to be going his way: there were no reservations, no seats, no heat, & no pressurized cabins. He was to touch down in 35 states, 5 continents & 3 theaters of war: CBI (China-Burma-India), ETO (European) & MTO (Mediterranean).

Hollywood vs Reality
Four out of five GIs in World War II never set foot in the “trenches”. Although movies & later TV mini-series tell only a fraction of the story or present fictionalizations, the majority of our Heroes provided the bricks, mortar & glue that held the Allied forces together & enabled them to prevail against two mighty foes.

Like a Precious Diamond
Their stories have been stored inside them for too long. & now that firsthand, personal history is fading away, forever lost as The Greatest Generation age & die. These are the ordinary men & women who made the necessary sacrifices & paid the price for freedom & were the nuts & bolts, the cogs & sprockets that made our military soar a superpower in just four years.

A Father's Lost Stories
Until a daughter, then 48, made a startling discovery one hot August night in 1999. While rummaging though her parent's home, Karen opened a closet door in her father's den, searching for some files & discovered a discolored, rectangular carton tied with twine. Karen opened the box & unearthed a store of old letters & black & white snapshots.

Her father had faithfully mailed hundreds of letters back home to his parents, & in doing so inadvertently chronicled his entire journey around the world & home again. Karen had found a gold mine of personal relics, memorabilia, accounts, & legends that led to a million questions, a groundswell of emotions, & many long talks with her dad, now 82, about a war, a generation & an epic era. More importantly, it opened up a heretofore unfathomed depth to the father-daughter bond.

A Book Is Born
Their in-depth exchanges culminated a in bird's eye view of the quintessential event of the twentieth century Lucky Stars and Gold Bars: A World War II Odyssey, which won a 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award.

Books we've reviewed, in no particular order:
WWII
Where the Birds Never Sing
A Corporal's War
Duty
Faith of My Fathers
Abandoned on Bataan
After The Liberators
Songa's Story

Vietnam War
Highest Tradition
My American Journey
American Soldier

War on Terrorism, in Iraq & Afghanistan
American Soldier
Strong of Heart
In the Red Zone
Your Neighbor Went to War

Non-military Memoirs
Pursuit of Freedom
Izzy's Fire
Memories of World War II
The Children of Willesden Lane
Laughter Wasn't Rationed
Sleeping On Potatoes
She Was Eighteen and a Half
The Orphans of Normandy
Girl In Movement
When the Emperor Was Divine A fictional account of the writer's Japanese-American parents' incarceration.
The Sandscrapers: The fictionalized life & times of the unsung heroes of the LSMs serving in the Pacific during WWII written by one who was there.

War Histories:
Echoes of Armageddon 1914-1918
We Band of Angels
Day Of Infamy
The American St. Nick
Lost in Tibet
We Were There
Brave Men Gentle Heroes
Not Yet At Ease
A Question of Honor

Rebecca