They went to war, and a book makes sure we can't forget
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By A.C. HUTCHISON - Published: January 4, 2009
"We Went To War: New Hampshire Remembers," by Meg Heckman and Mike Pride (Monitor Publishing Co., 2008, 360 pages, $29.95 hardcover)
The idea was a good one. The execution was even better. Now anyone with an interest in World War II can read the book that popular historian Ken Burns describes as "a wonderful, moving collection of memories – the basic DNA of the greatest cataclysm in history."
"We Went To War" is composed of oral histories, as recorded by Meg Heckman and Mike Pride of The Concord Monitor newspaper. The interviews, complemented by maps, charts and photographs, first were published in the newspaper and are assembled in this handsome, high-quality book.
The stories are riveting. Although all those interviewed lived in New Hampshire, their accounts have a universal interest and are similar in nature to those of Vermont veterans published over the past year by the Rutland Herald and The Times Argus.
Warren Priest recounts his unit's arrival in April of 1945 at Buchenwald, perhaps the most notorious of Germany's concentration camps.
"I had the assignment to try to separate the living from the dead bodies lined up on the floor of the barracks," Priest relates. "There were maybe two or three dozen of them. I had a stethoscope on, and I went down the line of litters listening for heartbeats."
Having finished his grim task, he moved on, but a shock awaited him: "There were several litters in a row, and I walked by one, and I felt someone grab my leg. It was one I had assumed was dead. I had been unable to pick up a heartbeat. It was startling. I thought, 'My God, have I missed some others?'"
Edward Mulcahy's story is from the Pacific Theater, where, as the tail gunner in a B-24, he volunteered for a suicide mission (considered as such because it would take the aircraft so far it might have insufficient fuel to return safely).
"We made it, but we just didn't have enough fuel to land," he recalled. "We just pancaked down. It was just tundra, no runway. A meadow, really. When the plane was going down, all I could think was, 'Our Father who art in heaven …'"
This is not a book designed to explain the origins of the conflict, or the tactics and strategies that were used, but to remind us vividly of all of the sufferings, the sacrifices and the experiences of those in our communities who served in the war.
The idea for the project was Pride's. He was editor of The Concord Monitor for 25 years before stepping down in 2007 so he could spend the final year of his career doing what he likes best: writing and reporting.
"I always intended to do a full interview with my father about his war experience, but by the time I finally got around to it, Alzheimer's had destroyed his ability to tell the story," he explained. "I had also read Studs Terkel's 'The Good War' years ago and liked the idea of oral histories constructed from interviews. My dad's death was still fresh in my mind and I was looking for a project. That's where the concept came from. Then I heard Ken Burns was doing 'The War,' and the timing seemed right."
Pride and Heckman also enlisted high school students in their project because "we both also remembered how, in high school history, we never quite made it to World II" and "the main idea was the oldest generation communicating with the youngest."
The book includes an "interview primer" although Pride cautions that "oral history is hard … there's a lot of cutting and pasting involved to create a narrative that is true to the most interesting aspects of the subject's experience and also true to his or her own words. And there is a great deal of fact-checking — and double-checking with subjects — to try to get everything right."
Although he knew a lot about World War II, conducting interviews and editing them for publication was still a learning experience for Pride.
"It is amazing how much of a WORLD war it was," he remarked recently. "The breadth of the experience is astounding even to someone like me who grew up with a veteran father. You'd get the sense reading the popular press that the war was Pearl Harbor, D-Day and the A-bombs. We forget about the guy who slept with rats on Biak, the man shot and bayoneted on Mount Maggiore in Italy and the bomber crew that trekked hundreds of miles across western China after being shot down.
"Doing the series has also made me look differently at all the very old people I see in my community," he continued. "To think that so many of them, for that short stretch 65 years ago, lived such remarkable stories."
But for all their energy and their diligence, some of the stories they were seeking turned out to be beyond Pride's and Heckman's reach. The number of World War II veterans is rapidly dwindling, and soon there will be none.
"Some of the people who lived those stories have died, and when I saw their obits, I groaned," Pride said. "The brief accounts in the obits confirmed for me that their stories deserved full telling. The sense of urgency we felt while collecting these stories has also been confirmed by the death of five of the 50-odd people whose stories we did tell in the newspaper series."
By their very nature, newspapers routinely perform valuable public service. But there's nothing routine about this remarkable book published by a very good small-town paper. It's a keeper.
A.C. Hutchison retired as editor of The Times Argus in 1999.
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