Blog 3654 – 11.05.2025
The Things Our Father’s Saw
Looking for something to blog about this morning, I saw a book cover about the untold stories of World War II. My own father was a See Bee (CB stood for Construction Battalion) in the Navy and spent most of his enlistment on Midway Island after the fighting there was over building things and so he actually saw no combat, but his younger brother Walter who lied about his age so he could go to war was one of the young men portrayed in the book and HBO series Band of Brothers. He was a member of the Hundred and First Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. At fifteen years of age he joined the Army and later parachuted into Belgium just in time to find himself right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge.
Uncle Walt never spoke of his war experiences to his sons nor his nephews. He did years later share some of the horrific things that he saw and participated in with my dad. Yankee General William Sherman, one of the most hated men in the South for his terror campaign from Atlanta to the sea where he had his men burn a sixty mile wide swath across the states of Georgia and South Carolina is quoted as saying, “War is hell.”
I am a Southern Boy and the Civil War looms large in the Southern psyche and especially the horror of Sherman’s march to the sea and yet I know how stubborn Southerners are and that like the Atomic bombs dropped on Japan it took something awful and tragic to break the will of the Southern generals to fight. They had to be shown equivocally that they were out manned, out gunned, and had no hope of winning. Sherman and Grant showed the Confederate Generals, Lee the best and brightest of them in particular, that all hope of victory was gone, all that remained was surrender or complete annihilation.
Uncle Walt told my dad that the German Army was down to old men and young boys in their last desperate battle to stop the flow of Allied troops into their homeland. They had his unit completely surrounded, it was bitter cold and both sides were running out of food and supplied. He said that they had no food for the prisoners that they captured and so they took them behind the barricades and shot them, hungry boys and old men who had surrendered hoping to get food. Tears welled up in my Uncle’s eyes as he remembered the horrors of war. He was barely more than a boy himself and had known the pangs of hunger growing up poor in a country still recovering from the defeat of a terrible war as those old men and boys had.
I recall a a phrase, a soldiers lament and refrain, from a poem that I wrote and had published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes in 1970, the year I spent in South Vietnam as a soldier. “ Oh, that men did not war…” Like my father, I was fortunate to miss the fighting, but I did miss my loved ones back home. Like him I was spared seeing first hand the horrors of war.
When asked if I saw any “action” in Vietnam I often reply that I saw the movie Patton in the NCO club. I did however also see pictures from the Tet Offensive of 1968 where North Vietnamese soldier had tried to overrun Tan Son Nhut Airbase, where I was stationed.These pictures were not allowed to go back to the States or to be shown to journalists. The were of huge mounds fifteen or twenty foot high of dead Vietnamese. We lost over fifty thousand soldiers in that war the Vietnamese lost upwards of two and one half million. When will we ever learn?
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Where have all the flowers gone -The kingston trio(lyrics)
theencouragingword 