He spent two days picking up bodies, and parts of bodies, from the beach in Normandy. Bill Carriel, 83, of Belleville, landed on the beach three days after D-Day with the Army's 32nd Medical Depot Co. based out of Fort Knox, Ky. "There were bodies all over the place," he said. "You didn't have time to stop and cry."
More than 500 yellowing, handwritten letters in a box chronicle the two years a Belleville woman and her husband spent apart during World War II. LaToura Heck and Warren Heck, a Navy SeaBee assigned to the Pacific during the war, married on her 19th birthday, two days before Warren left for basic training.
With her can-do attitude, Gloria Stumbaugh didn't mind working 16-hour days when she was a teenager, laundering bed linens from Scott Air Force Base Hospital and inspecting cans to hold mortars. The summer after her freshman year at East St. Louis Senior High School, Stumbaugh, then Gloria Banghart, lied about her age to get a job.
Doris Alberts was a senior in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She remembers the eerie quiet of the school hallways. "A lot of my classmates we didn't see again after graduation," she said. Alberts, now 83, graduated from Belleville Township High School in the spring of 1942 -- the middle of World War II.
Without quartermasters the war couldn't have been won. "Whatever the infantry needed, we handled," said former Army Pvt. Timothy Hatter, 84, of East St. Louis.
Bethel Chapman was doing his job at the dock that day, operating a crane to unload supplies from a ship, when he noticed something "special." It wasn't until a few days later that Chapman realized how special what he had witnessed at the dock that day was.
A last minute change of orders may have saved Carl Hagler's life. "We were scheduled to go with them on D-Day to land in France," the Belleville man said. "But they changed plans and we landed on D-Day plus six. Another battalion went instead of us and they were completely wiped out."
Every Monday, Walter Berry travels to Jefferson Barracks Veterans Hospital to cope with a 26-day portion of his life from 63 years ago. Berry was an 18-year-old buck private in the U.S. Marine Corps when his first combat experience came on Feb. 19, 1945. He was in the first assault wave on Iwo Jima. Berry's platoon of about 40 men was reduced to half by the end of that day.
In 1941, George Yost was working the fields and tending cattle on the family farm near Bennington, Kan., when the United States entered World War II.
A Japanese kamikaze pilot attacked the USS Ommaney Bay on Jan. 4, 1945. Clarence Engle of Swansea was an 18-year-old Navy draftee tasked with refueling and maintaining the aircraft aboard the ship. He had just fueled up his assigned planes when the suicide pilot flew in and dropped his payload.
Fresh from The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., in 1941, Jack Giannini knew war was coming. Not enthusiastic about the idea of getting shot at as an infantryman or the prospects of having a ship torpedoed from beneath him, Giannini decided to become a fighter pilot.
They call him Bud now. As a 24-year-old Marine in World War II, he was Pop. "I was three or four years older than the kids I was with," said Clarence C. "Bud" Voellinger, of Swansea. "I had a lot of 17s -- and 16-year-olds who lied.
On Sept. 11, 1944, Margaret Woodrome bought her husband, Harold "Woody" Woodrome, a pocket-size Bible to carry while fighting overseas. "I found this Bible and I just knew I had to have it," she said. "I just wasn't sure that he would come home."
