Insight: ‘Illusion-grams’ and utter nonsense

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently saw a post on a popular social media platform mentioning that American soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II were misguided and it wasn’t all that bad, in fact it was merely a tool concocted to help lift Americans out of the poverty of the Great Depression.

Ed Pierce, Sr. graduated from
high school in 1943 and was 
drafted into the U.S. Army,
serving in combat in North
Africa and Italy during
World War II.
COURTESY PHOTO 

The person posting that nonsense has no idea what he is talking about and is certainly a good reason for me to stay off social media. My father, who would have turned 100 this year if he was still alive, would have refuted that post and would shake his head at some of the misinformation and untruths which pop up often on social media these days.

Yes, my father and his family did experience abject poverty in the Great Depression. He was the youngest of nine children and over the years, he related to me what it was like to be poor and how it shaped his life growing up.

While other students at Fairport High School outside of Rochester, New York were playing sports or participating in other after-school activities, my father worked two jobs. On Saturday mornings he received a penny for every bowling pin he placed upright on a lane as a pinspotter at a bowling alley. When classes in school finished on weekdays, he then went to his job at a company that made tin cans for businesses and paid him just 13 cents an hour.

There wasn’t money for anyone in the family to go to the movies, buy new clothes, or purchase groceries regularly. No one in his family owned a car, and he walked six miles into town for school and then back home again every single day.

My father had thought about attending college after high school but wondered how he could ever pay for it. On the same day that he graduated from Fairport High School, his draft notice arrived in the mail and those plans were put on hold. He trained as an infantryman at Camp Fannin in Texas and soon thereafter he departed the U.S. on a troop ship bound for Libya in North Africa.

He told me that although he considered his family to be poor, he witnessed seeing real extreme poverty in Libya as families would raid the soldiers’ trash dump and convert discarded burlap bags into clothing worn by their children. In Morocco, he saw residents scrounging for potato peelings from the Army dump to make a meal.

Leaving North Africa, my father was part of the U.S. contingent of troops landing at Anzio Beach, Italy in January 1944. In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with Nazi troops holding the high ground overlooking the landing beach. He watched many of his friends die as Germans rained down machine gun fire and launched deadly mortars upon Americans on the beach.

A few months later, as my father’s unit was advancing on the town of Cisterna in Italy, he was shot in the back by a sniper while trying to repair a broken communications line. He survived his wounds and was discharged from his military service in 1946. He enrolled at Manhattan College in New York City and used the GI Bill to study mechanical engineering, finishing his degree after transferring to the Rochester Institute of Technology and working a series of part-time jobs in addition to his college studies to pay for his textbooks.

I constantly would ask my father to tell me about his wartime experiences. We would watch a television show called “Combat” in the 1960s and he told me that program came close to what it was like to serve on the front lines during the war. He eventually shared a few stories with me when I was in high school and they were gruesome and disturbing.

He told me about being part of an exploratory mission in Italy after surviving the landing at Anzio Beach and stopping to rest briefly under a tree with several other soldiers. They heard rifle shots and suddenly, two soldiers that were sitting next to my father keeled over dead having been shot in the head. On another occasion, my father said he witnessed the remnants of a German unit in Italy who were burned alive in a bunker after being torched by an American flamethrower.

More than 30 years later, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and saw the results of World War II in Europe for myself. There was still extensive damage to some buildings and infrastructure in Germany and cemeteries were filled with soldiers killed in the war.

In the Frankfurt, Germany town square, I saw a memorial dedicated to Jewish residents who were rounded up in that city and taken to concentration camps or sent for extermination in Nazi gas chambers. I spoke with German and Dutch families who lost loved ones in the war and never recovered afterward.

To say that World War II wasn’t all that bad and was nothing more than a tool to lift Americans out of Great Depression era poverty is ludicrous and a propagation of misinformation.

As Phineas T. Barnum is known for saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” <

Insight: Quest for a Purple Heart

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

I recently listened to a story on NPR about an active-duty U.S. Navy corpsman who turned down a Purple Heart medal for being wounded by an enemy mortar shell in Afghanistan because he didn’t think his wounds were “severe enough.” 

While I commend that sailor for standing up for his convictions, it also reminded me of how valuable that Purple Heart medal can be for some and a story of a veteran who desperately sought one and died without ever obtaining it.

George Nichols grew up in Boston and was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II and trained as a medic. His job was to retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield and bring them to the Army aid station for treatment.

While on his 19^th trip onto the beach to rescue wounded servicemen during the American landing at Anzio in Italy in 1944, a German mortar shell exploded nearby, sending shrapnel into his right knee. He completed that mission and Army physicians stitched up his wound, bandaged it and then sent him back to the front lines.

George’s first sergeant told him that he was going to put him in for the Purple Heart medal for being wounded in action. Being just 19 at the time, George said he was more concerned about surviving the war than the medal, so six months later when the war was over, he was discharged without ever receiving the Purple Heart.

He got a job working in the shipyard in Boston, got married, bought a home, and raised two daughters. After retiring, he and his wife moved to Contoocook, New Hampshire to be closer to where their daughters and grandchildren lived. George joined the VFW and some of his veteran buddies asked why if he had been wounded that he didn’t have a Purple Heart.

At age 65, George asked his wife to help him complete the paperwork for the medal and they applied to the VA to receive it. A few months later a letter arrived denying his request. They reapplied and received yet another denial letter and over the course of the next 20 years, the VA denied George’s request a total of 14 times.

His wife died and George’s physical condition required more care than his family could provide, so he eventually moved to the New Hampshire Veterans Home. He had cancer, was on oxygen and was in a wheelchair when he told me his story and asked if I could write about his plight and convince some politician or the VA to do the right thing and award him the medal.

George was by then 89 years old, and he told me all he wanted to do before he died was to receive the Purple Heart that he had fought so hard for.

Of all the military medals, the VA strictly enforces the rules for the Purple Heart more than any other because of the importance it holds and the physical injuries that military members endure in combat to be awarded it.  In George’s case, he was denied for reasons beyond his control.

On July 12, 1973, a devastating fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri destroyed somewhere between 16 and 18 million Official Military Personnel Files documenting the service and medical histories of former military personnel discharged between 1912 and 1964, including those of George Nichols.  

Since the VA requires documentation of medical wounds from each combat injury to award the Purple Heart and without those records lost in the fire, the only way George could receive his medal would be to produce three affidavits of soldiers who physically saw his wounds more than 70 years before in 1944.

He had his discharge papers from the Army, but not his medical records and it was impossible to find soldiers from the battlefield at Anzio who could attest that George had been wounded, even though his knee still bore the shrapnel scars decades later.

When the story appeared in the newspaper, numerous veterans wrote or called the veteran’s home and offered to give George their own Purple Heart medals that they had earned in combat in different wars. He thanked them, but politely turned down their offers, holding steadfast to the belief that VA should give him his own Purple Heart and he would accept nothing less than that.

No matter who tried to intervene on his behalf, the VA could not waive the rules in his case and his quest for the medal was futile. George Nichols passed away in 2015 without receiving the Purple Heart and it broke my heart to know that nothing could be done to help this genuine American hero obtain what he justly deserved.

Therefore, the recent NPR story about the sailor rejecting his medal was rather ironic when compared to that of George Nichols.

We should all be appreciative for the service of both these men and in my opinion, they both deserve the Purple Heart and our respect. <