7588: WWII Vets Share Their Stories.

From The Times-Picayune…

Veterans Speak Out After Decades of Silence

By Sarah Carr, The Times-Picayune

Decades after the war was won, the two veterans battled historical ignorance, racial exclusion and the numbing power of silence.

World War II veterans Charles Norman Shay and William Holloman challenged those forces during a moving panel discussion Saturday in New Orleans on the final day of the National World War II Museum’s latest international conference on the conflict.

The two men, one an American Indian and the other African-American, described their wartime and life experiences in a session titled “People of Color in a White Man’s Army.”

Shay, a former combat medic who is now an elder in Maine’s Penobscot tribe, said he returned home to a country that would not let him vote and seemed oblivious to the fact that thousands of American Indians had served their country. He did not speak of his experiences in World War II for 60 years.

Holloman, a Tuskegee Airman and one of the first black pilots to serve in the Army Air Forces, fought for the right to fight for his country, as he put it.

Prisoner of war
Shay grew up during the Depression on the Penobscot reservation in Maine. When the war came, many of his peers — and all three of his brothers — served, some because of patriotism, others because of poverty. He trained to become a combat medic in England, not fully understanding the dangers of the job.

He was among the first Americans to wade ashore on D-Day, and he went on to fight throughout Europe, including at the Battle of the Bulge. German forces captured Shay in 1945, just weeks before the Allied victory. When freed, he somehow found a ship bound for Boston, where he pleasantly surprised his mother, a Navy shipyard worker whose last news of her son had been that he was missing in action.

“I do not remember much of what I saw or experienced,” said Shay who, like Holloman, is now in his mid-80s. He never spoke of the war with his fellow tribesmen or even his three brothers.

“Certainly, no one asked us to make a record of our experiences. So we just forgot,” he said. “And the country forgot as well.”

The forgetting stopped three years ago. Shay grew weary of the exclusion of Indians from the narrative of World War II — including the 60th anniversary celebrations of D-Day and a book on Maine veterans. He wondered: “Is it racism? Or is it ignorance?”

“In this last season of my life, I realized I have an obligation to educate the American public about our contributions and sacrifices for American freedom,” he said.

Entering the war late
Holloman, a native of St. Louis, was 17 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. He immediately tried to enlist. “They told me to go home until I grew up,” he said.

Holloman entered the war late, not long after Congress forced the Army Air Forces to form an all-black combat unit. In his group of 22 pilots, the average age was 20. “We thought there was nothing like us, and that when Adolf Hitler heard about us, he quit,” Holloman said of the war’s last days.

As some of the U.S. military’s first African-American pilots, the young men also felt intense pressure to perform. “We were very careful of our conduct,” Holloman said. “We were brainwashed to the point of not making mistakes.”

Holloman went on to serve as the first black helicopter pilot in the Air Force, and to fly in Korea and later in Vietnam.

He, too, would later encounter histories, books and popular opinion that ignored or twisted the role minorities played in fighting the war.

“Historians, I believe, write history for themselves,” he said, adding that “this country was built on the backs of the Native Americans and black slaves.”

But Shay and Holloman said they encountered little to no discrimination while in the military. When traveling as a captain in the late 1940s, “people treated me like I was white because I was a captain,” Holloman said.

One woman asked him: “Captain, someone told me that you are colored. Are you colored?”

And once Shay decided to speak out about his experiences, he rediscovered an unspoken understanding with his fellow veterans. “There is a unique feeling of shared history,” he said. “We did not need to exchange stories. We know more than words could ever express.”