Don Heinig gave an interesting presentation on his father's WWII experiences. Don's father, PFC Arthur D. Heinig was born in New Haven in 1918 and was a 1936 graduate of Hillhouse High School. He worked at Seamless Rubber from 1938 until entering military service where he served in
Company A, 101st Engineers, C Battalion in the 26th Infantry (Yankee Division). PFC
Heinig landed in Normandy at Utah Beach, drove for the Redball Express (the supply caravan for Patton’s Army), and continued on across Europe to Czechoslovakia until the end of the war. He endured four Campaigns — Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland, and Central Germany, and was awarded the Bronze Star. After coming home, he returned to working at Seamless rubber.
East Haven resident and Vietnam veteran Jack Stacey will speak on his military experiences, as well as on The Wall That Heals. The Wall That Heals is a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., designed to travel to communities throughout the United States. Jack was instrumental in bringing The Wall that Heals to the East Haven Green in 2005. He has also served as Grand Marshal for East Haven's Memorial Day parade.
Since its dedication, The Wall That Heals has visited more than 400 cities and towns throughout the nation, spreading the Memorial's healing legacy to millions.
Read the 2005 article on The Wall That Heals in East Haven: The Wall That Heals
Everyone is welcome!
Photo from http://www.vvmf.org/twth The Wall That Heals Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund
Many of those who come to the library know Chris Hemingway, who works at the Circulation Desk. The following tribute was written by his dad, Al Hemingway for Al's father- Chris' grandfather, Albert Edward Hemingway, Jr. seen in the photo below.
A salute to my father: a D-Day veteran
By
Al Hemingway
On
June 6, 1944, 5,000 ships, carrying an estimated 160,000 American,
British, and Free French forces were poised off the coast of Normandy,
France to begin the largest amphibious assault in world history. More
than 24,000 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had
already landed behind enemy lines to seize key points preventing the
flow of reinforcements and supplies from moving to the beaches so that
the troops landing there could make their way inland.
The
assault itself was code-named Neptune, part of Operation Overlord. But
most people don’t remember that. They know it as D-Day, the massive
Allied invasion of Western Europe that would ultimately defeat Germany’s
Nazi regime headed by their maniacal leader, Adolf Hitler.
Standing
on one of the troop transports that fateful day and observing the
historic event was a 24-year-old sergeant from New Haven, Conn. who was a
driver with the 3882nd Quartermaster Truck Company.
His
name was Albert Edward Hemingway, Jr. He was my father. And he was
about to embark on the greatest, and the most harrowing adventure of his
entire life.
“I
have never seen so many ships in one place in my life,” he once said to
me. “It was unbelievable, as far as the eye could see. When the
bombardment began, it was deafening.”
Five
beachheads had been selected along the Normandy coastline by Allied
planners. The British, Canadian, and Free French troops would land on
Gold, Juno and Sword; the 1st Infantry and 29th Infantry Divisions, and
nine companies of U.S. Army Rangers, were scheduled to come ashore on
Omaha Beach, and the 4th Infantry Division, the unit my father was
attached to, were slated to disembark onto Utah Beach.
The
slaughter on Omaha Beach was horrific. German defenses had been
better-prepared and hundreds of soldiers were killed or wounded before
they even got off their landing crafts. Omaha had been transformed into a
bloodbath.
Resistance
on Utah, however, was light. A beachhead was quickly established and
reinforcements and equipment began spilling out of the LSTs and
transports.
“Thank God I wasn’t assigned to Omaha,” my Dad once said. “I may not have been here today.”
My
father told me that the trucks were quickly offloaded from the ships
and everyone was sent to a supply point to pick up food, water, and
ammunition to be transported to the front lines.
The
terrain, he told me, was flooded and inundated with hedgerows, thick
vegetation that hid enemy troops, and even deep enough to hide tanks. My
father said that they had to drive with their headlights off at night
so they would not be detected by the Germans. Non-commissioned officers,
like my father, carried a .45 caliber pistol, and everyone was armed
with M-1 carbines, and a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), was always in
the cab of the truck.
“It’s bad enough not knowing where you are going,” he said, “but now you can’t even see where you are going.”
I
recall him telling me how they got lost once at night, but somehow in
the inky blackness they finally found the unit that they were
resupplying. One officer asked what took them so long. My father said
they were lost and described the area where they had been. The officer laughed
and said that they had driven across the enemy’s lines.
“We were lucky that we weren’t killed,” he said. “I don’t know how they didn’t hear us.”
One
unforgettable sight that deeply disturbed my father was seeing the
contorted, twisted bodies of the dead that littered the roadside. Many
times my Dad told me and my sister Lorraine that they stopped to gather
as many as they could and take them to the rear area for a proper
burial.
“We
even picked up dead German soldiers,” he told my sister. “I know they
were the enemy, but it just didn’t seem right leaving them there like
that.”
As
the Allied forces pushed inland, liberating towns as they went, the
French townspeople would run from their homes to welcome the advancing
soldiers.
“Everybody kissed you on both cheeks,” I recall him saying with a big smile, “the men as well as the women.”
Often
times my father would mention the German artillery barrages. I think he
feared them the most – being torn apart by an enemy shell – from a
German 88mm howitzer.
“Those
damn 88s, they were so accurate,” he said. “The shell had a very
distinctive sound. You ran like hell to find cover when they came in.”
My
father ultimately survived D-Day, the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge),
Central Europe, Northern France, and the Rhineland. When he returned
home in October 1945, he burned all his uniforms. I guess the memories
were just too painful.
When
he moved to Arcadia in 1992, I would visit him and sometimes when he
was in the mood we would discuss his experiences in the war. But, when I
pressed him about certain things, he would sit silently and just stare
into space. Even after all those years, there were still some terrible
images that he kept locked away and would not share with anyone.
When
he and my mother relocated to Santa Maria, Calif. in 2002 to be near my
sister, he suffered from dementia. As he became more confused, he would
slip out of the house and wander the streets “looking for his buddies.”
Luckily, my two nephews are police officers in town and before long he
would be located and returned to my sister’s house.
“Dad thinks he’s back in the war,” Lorraine would tell me. “He keeps asking where his buddies are.”
He
would question my sister and ask where they had gone. He told her that
he was supposed to be with them. He was their sergeant. They were his
responsibility.
“I told him that they had shipped out,” she said. “He seemed sad.”
I
received a call on Dec. 20, 2011 from my sister telling me that my
father had passed away. He was 92-years-old. She sat by his hospital bed
most of the day and held his hand. Finally, he gently squeezed it,
smiled, and closed his eyes. When she called to him, he did not answer.
He couldn’t. He was on Utah Beach with his buddies – he had finally
shipped out to be with them.
Janina Nawarskas gave a presentation and book signing of her memoir, A Child Lost at the April 27th WWII Veterans Discussion Group meeting. Janina told how in 1945, as a child in Lithuania, her family fled the oncoming Soviet military. Separated from her father and brothers, she and her mother were placed in a detention center. When Janina's mother died, she was left to fend for herself and wandered through refugee camps. A year after the end of the war, Janina was reunited with her father and brothers through the help of American soldiers and moved to the U.S. Janina thanks America 'the greatest country in the world.'
Author, Charles Young (above) gave the February, 2016 presentation of the WWII Veterans Discussion Group.The cover of his book can be seen in the photograph above. Letters From The Attic is a compilation of WWII era letters written to and by Mr. Young. The Youngs "rediscovered" these letters in their attic many years later, as Mr. Young's mother had saved them and placed them in a box. The sub-title of Mr. Young's book is Save the Last Dance for Me and he gave a moving recitation of words at the meeting. His talk focused on the time he spent as a marine at Guadalcanal.
Above: Mary and Charles Young
We were glad to have reporter/columnist Randall Beech, attend the meeting as well as playwright, Catherine Ladnier whose play The Apron Strings was read at the November meeting.
Below left: Flier for the meeting. Below right: Catherine Ladnier speaking with Mr. Young at the November meeting.
________Below: The Column by Randall Beach______
Randall Beach: From Okinawa’s killing fields to state’s dance halls
Author Charles Young speaks about his World War II experience at the Hagaman Memorial Library in East Haven Wednesday.
PETER HVIZDAK — NEW HAVEN REGISTER
Randall Beach
Charles Young began his talk to a group of veterans last week by
describing the horrors he witnessed on the Japanese island of Okinawa
during World War II, and he ended by reciting the words to “Save the
Last Dance for Me.”
Young, now 90, and his wife, Mary, had driven from their home in
Madison Wednesday afternoon in heavy rain so he could speak to the World
War II Veterans Discussion Group at the Hagaman Memorial Library in
East Haven.
Sitting at a table at the head of the basement room, Young looked
out at the two dozen in attendance and wondered aloud if any of them
might be his former students. “I spent 11 years teaching English in the
high school here in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he told us.
Speaking without notes, Young spent the next 45 minutes recalling
his experiences as a medic with the U.S. Marine Corps. His memory has
continued to preserve vivid details.
“What bothers me,” he began, “is that when you see these series
about World War II on TV and they get to the war in the Pacific, they
spend a lot of time on Iwo Jima, then they skip to the atomic bomb. They
say very little about Okinawa, the biggest and costliest battle of the
Pacific.” (Historical accounts estimate 12,000 to 14,000 U.S. troops
died and that more than 150,000 Japanese, many of them civilians, were
killed.)
Young talked about the months spent on the island of Guadalcanal,
waiting to be sent into battle. “We had no idea what we were being
groomed for. Every time you went to the head (bathroom) you heard
another story: ‘We’re going to Formosa! We’re going to the Japanese
mainland!’”
Finally, in the third week of March 1945, they were told to move
out. “That was when we heard the word ‘Okinawa.’ We were told the
southern quarter of the island was where over 100,000 Japanese troops
were stationed.”
“People always ask me: ‘Were you afraid?’ I can’t remember ever
being afraid.” He compared a young soldier’s state of mind to “youths
tearing down a highway on flat tires, thinking you’re going to live
forever.”
But Young did tell us of one man, Joe, who was so nervous the
night before they went into action that he overdosed on pills. He was
buried at sea.
Although Young remembers Okinawa as beautiful country with deep
ravines, pine trees and rice fields, when the rainy days came the
soldiers and their equipment got bogged down in the mud.
“The whole area became a killing field,” he said. “If there was
an enemy body nearby, you were allowed to put dirt on top of it. But the
American dead had to be left, gathered up by graves registration and
taken back for a proper burial.”
Young said when he is asked what was “the worst thing” about the
war, “I think of flies and the bodies. The flies came out everywhere.
The smell was horrendous.”
Even after American forces won control of Okinawa, Young and the
others braced themselves for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. But
then came the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s
surrender.
In the weeks afterward, Young was in Tokyo and visited the
surrounding hills. “We went into the caves, all lit by electricity. They
had hospitals, machine shops, everything in there. We realized that if
we’d had to attack Japan, it would have cost a million American and
Japanese lives.”
Young had a second part of his story to tell us. “Three or four
years ago, after I’d been teaching in Greece, we moved back to
Connecticut (initially to his childhood family home in New Britain). My
wife went up in the attic to store her knitting and came down to tell
me, ‘There’s a box up there.’”
When he asked her what was in the box, she said: “Letters.”
“My mother was a real pack rat,” he told us. “She saved everything. I told my wife, ‘We’ll have to pitch all that.’”
But she told him the letters were from the 1940s. And so he looked through the box.
“I saw a letter from an old girlfriend (Launa Darcy) who I’d had a
wild crush on in the eighth grade. I thought, ‘Oh, these are teenage
love letters. I ought to get them back up to the attic.’
“But my curiosity got the best of me and I started to read. I
couldn’t believe the voices: my mother, my sister, half a dozen girls,
half a dozen guys. My wife said, ‘Why don’t you put them on the
computer?’”
He spent the next three months doing it. The result was the
publication of his most recent book, “Letters from the Attic: Save the
Last Dance for Me.”
If you read the many passionate letters Darcy wrote to Young
throughout the war (and his letters back to her), you would think the
subtitle referred to her. But they broke up after he finally got back
home; she broke his heart by marrying another man. Young dedicated the
book “to the memory of my sister Betty, who after 84 years saved the
last dance for me.”
Sitting at that table in the library’s basement, Young recited
the lyrics: “You can dance every dance with the guy who gives you the
eye, let him hold you tight...”
He flawlessly continued, verse after verse, then ended: “Don’t
forget who’s takin’ you home and in whose arms you’re gonna be. So
darling, save the last dance for me.”
The group applauded; some of the women sighed. Young smiled and said: “Any questions?”
A Vietnam War veteran asked him about current military conflicts
and drone warfare. Young replied, “It’s such a mess, when you look at
Syria. There’s just no solution to it.”
“I feel sorry for these kids today — all these drugs,” Young
added. “We had it all so good in this country for so many years after
World War II. We had it so good here.”
Then Young returned to what his wife found in the attic and how
that box couldn’t contain everything. “I wish I had all the letters I
wrote during those years. People tell me they were so funny. Going
through life, humor is the most important thing.” Contact Randall Beach at rbeach@nhregister.com or 203-680-9345.
