In honor of tomorrow, Dec. 7
Leonard Funk was a soldier in the war. Barely over 5 feet tall, Funk was as fierce a fighter as the U.S. Army produced during World War II.
I mention Funk, a Western Pennsylvanian and a winner of the Medal of Honor, because I interviewed him in the long ago. He’s dead now. And because tomorrow is Dec. 7, the anniversary of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
It seems a good time to remember Funk and the others – the millions of others, both military and civilian – who served their country then. Some people scoff at the notion of the Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw’s shorthand for the serviceable young men and women born roughly between, oh, 1915 and 1925.
But don’t be so quick to sneer.
If you were born in 1920, say, you were really in for it. Ten years old or so when the Great Depression struck, you probably learned to made do with very little. You may have grown up scrawny and underdeveloped physically. Maybe you dropped out of school in order to bring home a meager paycheck.
Then along came Hitler and the Nazis and their buddies the Japanese.
And you thought the Great Depression was rough! First, you were drafted. Then you boarded a train for basic training at some flea-bitten, God-forsaken Army fort in Dixie.
There, sergeants barked at you, marched and ran your raggedy rear end from one end of the countryside to another, handed you a rifle, taught you to shoot.
All of this was in preparation for people shooting at you. And for sure, the people shooting at you meant to kill you.
“The graves of young Americans surround the globe.” You were liable to die on a sandy beach, a muddy hole, a cold blustery plain, a steaming jungle, a rocky sea, a bay, a farm house or barn, in a village, a small town, a city, behind a clump of trees, beside a hedgerow, atop a hill, at the bottom of a ravine, in the air – anywhere bullets were flying and mortar shells were whizzing by.
If the enemy didn’t get you, maybe friendly fire did. Thousands died in training exercises.
Maybe you weren’t killed, but wounded. Maybe you weren’t wounded, but your psyche was all smashed up. You were “shell-shocked,” your brain and soul were scrambled.
Maybe you survived it all, came home, went to work, raised a family. Millions did.
The young men who fought the war are either now dead or very, very old. In photographs from that earlier period they are young and strong, many bristling with bravado and joy. Straight of back, their young heads are bushy brown and black and blond; their eyes are clear.
Not a few were also bewildered and sad and scared.
World War II was not for sissies, either “over there” or here at home. For some, the war was a boondoggle; for most, it was a grind, lonely and forlorn.
There was so much that needed to be done during the war. As a people, the war brought us together. In all of our national life, we were probably never so united. The war lit a fuse, there was a “great exuberance of the spirit.” Fighting and winning on fronts stretching from the Aleutians through Europe to islands in the Pacific, supplying our allies and ourselves with the instruments of war, it seemed there was nothing we could not do. The United States, with its democratic ethos, never stood taller.
“What is America to me? … A certain word, democracy.” Partisanship didn’t take flight during the war. As maddening and petty as it sometimes is, democratic politics, the encapsulation and manifestation of a free people, was a mainstay, a given. You cannot love America and hate democracy.
To many of us who came along later, the war is a motion picture or black-and-white newsreels. It’s our fathers, our grandfathers. It’s Arlington, it’s crosses row on row, it’s granite memorials, it’s books, histories and novels and picture books. It’s travel catalogues for a place called Normandy.
It’s a guy named Bill or Vince, Leroy or Bobby, Wally or Herbie. It’s Leonard … Leonard Funk.
“Funk (was) one of the war’s most decorated paratroopers,” the Pentagon website says.
“After jumping into Normandy … with the 82nd Airborne Division, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross during Operation Market Garden. His Medal of Honor was earned … when he led the capture of a German garrison during the Battle of the Bulge.”
After presenting Funk with the Medal of Honor, Harry Truman told him, “I’d rather have this than be president.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His recent book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached atdick.l.robbins@gmail.com/.