Tom Brokaw Read online

  Van Gorder got out of his confinement when the Germans needed a doctor to operate on a soldier needing an appendectomy. It was almost a fatal mission, however. American planes attacked the German train, not knowing there were Americans aboard. Van Gorder ducked beneath a car to avoid the heavy fire and then told the Germans, “I’m going to let the others out.” He risked his life to race into the line of fire and open the boxcar doors. The Americans poured out and immediately ran to a small hill and formed a human sign: USA POWS. The attacking American planes waggled their wings to indicate they understood, and broke off the attack.

  The German army was fighting a losing battle, retreating deeper and deeper to the east, taking their prisoners with them. Van Gorder and Rodda were taken first to Poland and then to the Russian border. In the confusion, they escaped and started making their way back west, through Poland. Whenever they came upon a Polish hospital they’d stop to do what they could for the patients there, as most of the Polish doctors had been conscripted by the Germans. Finally they made their way back to American lines in the spring of 1945. Their war was over.

  “When I was finally discharged, I had served five years in the war; I was overseas for thirty months straight,” Dr. Van Gorder says without a trace of bitterness. During that time his wife, Helen, a nurse from Nova Scotia he’d met in New Jersey during his residency before the war, gave birth to their first son, Rod. The infant died shortly after birth, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Dr. Van Gorder was in North Africa at the time, a long way from his wife’s side.

  When the war was over, Dr. Van Gorder was headed for New York and a fellowship in reconstructive surgery. No doubt it would have been a high-income, prestigious practice. Before going to New York, however, Van Gorder visited his parents, who had relocated to the North Carolina mountain hamlet of Andrews. It’s tucked into the Smoky Mountains in that corner where North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia come together. It was a logging community, the very essence of backwoods.

  After the turmoil of the war, however, it looked like a little piece of heaven to Dr. Van Gorder. The people were plain and friendly, the village was scenic and tranquil—and there were no doctors. It was the perfect match for a young physician who had experienced enough trauma, turmoil, and uncertainty in five years to last a lifetime. He decided to stay in Andrews and open a practice.

  He called his wartime buddy and fellow surgeon John Rodda and invited him to become a partner. Dr. Rodda made one visit to Andrews and saw immediately what had attracted his friend. He agreed to sign on.

  They opened a small clinic and mini-hospital above a department store. It consisted of an operating room, X-ray facilities, a blood lab, three examining rooms, and twenty-one beds. For the next ten years they were the only physicians in town. They really didn’t intend to stay forever but they quickly came to love their practices, their patients, and their adopted home.

  Dr. Van Gorder’s son, Chuck, remembers his dad being very busy, and some evenings so exhausted he’d fall asleep at the dinner table. “When the clinic closed at five-thirty in the evening,” Chuck recalls, “my mother—who was the nurse—took the names of all the people who were too sick to come to town. We’d all get in the station wagon with our parents and they’d make their nightly rounds of house calls. They did this every night.

  “I don’t think my dad ever left town the same time as Dr. Rodda. Andrews had a tough element and someone was always getting hurt in a fight or getting shot. Even so, some of the people in town at first didn’t trust Dad and Dr. Rodda because they were so young, and folks around here were used to older doctors. So Dad and Dr. Rodda brought in an older doctor from a nearby town to just be in the operating room when they did surgery. In return, they’d operate on that doctor’s patients without charging him.”

  Chuck Van Gorder remains in awe of his father and what he meant to his neighbors. “Even after he retired,” he remembers, “people kept asking for him. A friend of mine was working for the power company when he blew his hands off in an accident. He was delirious. He kept screaming, ‘I want Dr. Van. Dr. Van will make this all right.’ ”

  Other physicians returning from similar combat experiences made their contributions to postwar America in other ways. Dr. William McDermott—another combat surgeon who went ashore in Normandy and operated in frontline tents across France, at the Battle of the Bulge, and into Germany—was a product of Exeter, Harvard, and a one-year residency at Massachusetts General Hospital before the war. He says of his war experiences, “It was horrible, but the salvation was that you were doing something—you weren’t just sitting there and watching the horror. We were always so damn busy and so tired, but I got an enormous amount of experience. It was like running a full-time emergency room twenty-four hours a day.”

  McDermott was involved in the liberation of one of the most notorious concentration camps, Ebensee. “You never in your life could imagine what it was like,” he says. “When I was treating kids in combat I didn’t have time to think, but the concentration camp was different. I went into a barracks and there were two men to every cot. They could barely move, but they got themselves up somehow and saluted me. I just about burst into tears. I stayed there for two weeks treating them, but two hundred died every day.”

  It was an experience that stayed with Dr. McDermott when he returned to the Boston area and began a long, distinguished medical career at Massachusetts General Hospital, Yale, Harvard, and New England Deaconess Hospital. In his eighties, he remains the chairman of the department of surgery at Deaconess and he’s the Cheever Professor of Surgery Emeritus at Harvard Medical School, where he was on the faculty for many years.

  Dr. McDermott has written several books, including a war memoir called A Surgeon in Combat, which recounts his experiences at Ebensee. That, in turn, led to a Boston meeting with a survivor of the camp, Morris Hollander, a Czech Jew. They may have met in the camp, although they couldn’t be sure. They did share the same lessons, however. One a Jewish inmate, the other a Roman Catholic doctor, they had both come to understand something about God and man in the barbarity of Ebensee.

  In a Boston Globe account of their meeting, Dr. McDermott said, “God is a God of necessity. He sets the morals. If people break them, that’s their issue, not God’s.” Hollander responded, “Exactly. . . . Every nation has the ability to do as Germany did.”

  Dr. McDermott says he remembers the horror of Ebensee to this day, but it remains for him primarily an intensely personal experience. “No,” he says, “I didn’t share this much with my medical students; I was a little restrained, but if the war came up during discussions, I would remind them of the levels to which humans can sink. It’s important for medical students to know those imperfections of the human race.”

  He also isn’t interested in returning to Germany. On one occasion after the war, he had to change planes in the Frankfurt airport, and he got involved in a typical reservations foul-up. In exasperation he said, “Listen, fifteen years ago we had a helluva lot easier time taking Frankfurt than I’m having getting out of Frankfurt now.” Dr. McDermott remembers with a short laugh that he got a first-class ticket back to Boston almost immediately.

  IN NORTH CAROLINA Dr. Van Gorder applied the lessons of his war experiences to his family of patients, and his philosophy was shared by his wife, Helen. After the death of their firstborn, Helen continued working as a nurse even as the family was wracked by the war. Her two brothers, Canadians, volunteered for the American forces and both were killed. Her husband was always in the thick of battle until he became a prisoner of war. Later the Van Gorders’son, Chuck, would be wounded in Vietnam while serving with his father’s old outfit, the 101st Airborne. When Chuck asked his mother how she managed all of that emotional turmoil she answered, “Since I was a little girl I’ve had trust in the Lord. I had faith it would all work out.”

  It did work out for the Van Gorders because they did keep their faith in their God, in each other, and in the belief that life is
about helping others. They passed that along to their two daughters and their surviving son. That’s another legacy of the World War II generation, the strong commitment to family values and community. They were mature beyond their years in their twenties, and when they married and began families it was not a matter of thinking “Well, let’s see how this works out . . .”

  They applied the same values to their professional lives; they never stopped thinking about how they could improve health care for their community. While they were building their practice, Van Gorder and Rodda realized Andrews deserved more than their modest clinic, so they set out to build a hospital. Dr. Van Gorder became a regular visitor to the state capital in Raleigh, lobbying the governor to apply for federal Hill-Burton funds to build a hospital in Andrews. He succeeded. When the hospital was completed in 1956 it was a community triumph. Local residents working in the mills contributed through a payroll deduction program, sometimes as little as a nickel a week, or through bank contribution programs.

  Today the hospital has sixty beds and a full range of medical services, from X rays to surgery. It is being expanded to accommodate sixteen more doctors, in a community that had none when the war ended.

  As they steadily expanded the health care services available to the rural logging community, they kept up with the advances in medical technology and they were impressed with the progress in patient care. But Dr. Van Gorder laments the bureaucratic and commercial nature of modern medicine.

  “The war taught me the importance of integrity in dealing with people,” he says. “I worked with some fine surgeons and we helped each other. Medicine was more altruistic. I just wanted to help people. Kids start out now thinking ‘How much money can I make?’ not ‘What can I do, how much can I help?’ ”

  In the early days of his Andrews practice, his patients often paid with produce from their gardens or with freshly killed game. When that gave way to distant bureaucrats rejecting claims because a code was entered improperly or dictating care instructions, Dr. Van Gorder’s enthusiasm for what he loved began to fade. A man who began his medical career operating behind the lines and in the line of fire, a physician who learned more in a week of combat than an insurance clerk could know in a lifetime of paper shuffling, had little patience for the system that was overrunning his love of medicine.

  In a small town, physicians are often more than the healers. They are the first citizens in every sense of the phrase. Dr. Van Gorder was a member of the Andrews board of education for twenty years; he was president of the Andrews Lions Club, and he was the grand potentate of the Shrine Temple in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a life of service that hundreds of thousands of other World War II veterans were living in their hometowns across America.

  In Dr. Van Gorder’s family, one daughter, Katherine, is a librarian in South Carolina; Suzanne is a nurse and a commander in the Naval Reserve in Florida; son Chuck, who when he returned from Vietnam worked for a time as a nurse, is in the real estate business near Andrews.

  Van Gorder’s friend and partner, Dr. Rodda, died six years ago, and Van Gorder has been struggling with his own health problems—he suffered a small stroke in 1997—but he’s still cheerful and grateful for a full life.

  His war experiences, however, now more than fifty years in his past, live on in his memory. “I have flashbacks of the war every day. You can’t get it out of your mind. D-Day, all those boys being slaughtered. When I was working in our hospital I thought about it a lot. I thought about how the war taught us to handle things. We learned a lot.

  “The thing I am most proud of is that hospital,” he says. “If I had my life to do all over again, I’d do it the same way—go somewhere small where people have a need, contribute something to people who need it; help people.”

  WESLEY KO

  “In the war I learned to be self-sufficient. . . . I learned to be a leader. When my business failed I was able to move on, whereas my wife was devastated by the loss.”

  A SENSE OF personal responsibility and a commitment to honesty is characteristic of this generation. Those were values bred into the young men and women coming of age at the time the war broke out. It’s how they were raised. There are always exceptions to the common bonds of any generation, but in talking to the men and women whose stories make up this book I was struck by the connective cords of their lives, wherever they lived or in whatever circumstances.

  One after another they volunteered how in their families and in their communities they were expected to be responsible for their behavior, how honesty was assumed to be the rule, not the exception. They also talked matter-of-factly about a sense of duty to their country, a sentiment not much in fashion anymore.

  Moreover, in their communities there were always monitors outside their own families to remind them of the ethos of their family and community. I’ve often said I was raised by the strict standards of my mother and father, and also of the parents of my friends, my teachers, my coaches, my ministers, and by the local businessmen who didn’t hesitate to remind me “that’s not how you were raised.”

  Those qualities didn’t show up in a statistical survey of America’s strengths as the country steeled itself for what seemed an unavoidable war, but they were critical to the nation’s preparations, for success depended as much on personal resolve as it did on tanks and planes and ships and guns.

  Wesley Ko, June 1944

  The idea of personal responsibility is such a defining characteristic of the World War II generation that when the rules changed later, these men and women were appalled.

  Wesley Ko is one of them. In 1988, at the age of seventy, his printing business failed, in part because of government regulations and in part because a relocation deal was seriously flawed. Ko was left with a debt of $1.3 million, a loan he’d personally guaranteed. It never occurred to him to declare personal bankruptcy. Ko had learned early in life the meaning of responsibility and self-sufficiency.

  Ko grew up in the Philadelphia area, the son of a Chinese man brought to this country by an American missionary. His father was educated at Princeton and at Temple University and became pastor of a Methodist church for Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia. His mother was the daughter of a Chinese coolie brought to America to work on the railroads, one of the laborers who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were subjected to the same vicious racial discrimination that African Americans suffered. They were treated like an alien and subhuman population, restricted to the backbreaking work on the railroad, or to hand laundries in their own well-defined ghettos.

  Ko’s father hoped to escape that with his education, but the Great Depression was especially hard on preachers, who were dependent on their congregations for financial support. Wesley’s father was just able to hold on to the family residence by opening a small laundry. Wesley, a bright young man, had hoped to go to college, but it was out of the question in those difficult times.

  He went to work in a printing company, and when the war broke out his boss offered to get him a deferment, but Wesley’s buddies were all signing up and he wanted to volunteer as well. He was assigned to the officers’ training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and after ninety days he was a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne.

  “I was apprehensive,” he says, “being the only Oriental in the 82nd. I think the 82nd was apprehensive too; I wasn’t assigned right away. I guess they thought Orientals couldn’t be leaders. I didn’t make an issue of it. I was born and raised in this country and I didn’t think I was any different.” Asian complexions were real burdens for American citizens when their country was at war with Japan; too many of their fellow citizens made no distinction between the enemy and the Asian Americans in their midst. In the end, the Army did recognize Wesley Ko’s qualities and installed him as a platoon leader in a new outfit: the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment.

  It was the daredevil and dangerous new way to transport troops, including Dr. Van Gorder and his medical unit, when D-Day was launched. A pilot
and a copilot steered the glider to what was a controlled crash landing in difficult terrain, ferrying thirteen troops and their equipment at a time.

  In the spring of 1942 Ko and his outfit sailed for North Africa, for more training sessions in the demanding conditions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. “It was very, very hot,” he recalls, “a hundred twenty degrees. We had to run for twenty minutes with our packs, then walk twenty minutes. At one point the whole regiment had dysentery. We lost more men training in Africa than in our first combat.”

  It was the beginning of a three-year ordeal for Wesley Ko. After training in Africa he was almost constantly in combat—first in Sicily on Mount Saint Angelo de Cava, then during the occupation of Naples with steady shelling from Germany’s big guns. After Italy, it was more hard-core training, this time in Ireland and England, for the Normandy invasion. Ko was promoted to first lieutenant and given command of a mortar platoon.

  On June 7, D-Day plus one, he was in a flight of 250 gliders headed for the north coast of France, where the fighting was very heavy. “When we arrived over Normandy,” he says, “we started receiving machine-gun fire. We sat on our flak jackets to give us a little more protection, we were flying so low.”

  Ko was well trained. “I just didn’t think of the danger,” he says now. “I guess I was too young, too naive. But it turns out we lost twenty percent of our gliders—they never got into battle. They were either shot down or made a bad landing.”

  As soon as Ko scrambled from his glider, he was in the thick of the fighting. His regiment began fighting its way from village to village, losing many men along the way. Ko had some very close calls in the hellish ten days following D-Day. “I was standing next to one of the operations officers when he was shot and killed. I remember another time taking my binoculars from their case and shrapnel had blown out a lens.” Another time, “for the river crossing, the engineers had set up a bridge and we just ran across. We received tremendous fire but you had to keep pushing forward. Different fellows were hit and you had to keep jumping over their bodies.”