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."
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."
Members of the 761st Tank Battalion had a lot of things stacked against them in World War II. They were the first black unit to face combat. They were thrust into some of the fiercest fighting of the battle for Europe in some of the worst weather and conditions.
Marvin Wright listened to his mother, gave up life as a swing band drummer and returned to college in 1940. Uncle Sam interrupted and sent the musician in a different direction.
Henry "Hank" Eversmann's bum right leg caused him a lot of pain as a carpenter and still inspires choice words if it gets knocked. He's glad to have lived with it. The alternatives were not good. "Christ, I thought I'd never get back here," he said.
In 1940, everybody knew war was coming for the United States: China had been invaded by Japan in 1937, and Britain, France and Germany had been duking it out for a year.
The Nash automobile dealership in Belleville couldn't get any cars to sell in 1942, so the owner's wife started a nightclub -- Verna's Nash Tavern -- and Jack Voland started working. Voland was a 17-year-old trumpet player working nights in the club filled with smoke, booze and servicemen.
A Swansea woman did her part during World War II with needle and thread. Bernice Loewe, 95, earned $104.80 every two weeks as a civil servant at what was then called Scott Field. She was an aircraft fabric and leather worker with the 3310th Maintenance and Supply Group at the base back when Scott Field was known for its radio school.
Second Lt. Herschel Malvin had trouble with the brand new B-24 Liberator assigned to him by the U.S. Army just before he was sent overseas. He griped until he got another one. It was a hand-me-down from a crew that completed enough missions to earn a ticket back home to the states.
When Belleville resident Earl Morris woke up on Christmas in 1944, he was feeling down in the dumps. The 22-year-old was sleeping on the floor of an unheated, unfurnished room in the attic of a French farm house and dreaming of his mom's roast turkey and freshly baked pies.
Sanfus Lampley's World War II service took him from the juke joints of Georgia to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. He worked in the skin-searing deserts of Iran to supply the Russians. Then he slogged through mud in the jungles of Burma to build a supply road into China.
A 40-pound radio likely saved Oscar "Ossie" Joffray's life when he was shot April 19, 1945, by a German sniper in Nuremberg. "It was just like somebody stuck me with a big needle," Joffray, 83, said of being hit in his right shoulder. "The bullet probably ricocheted off the radio."
Neil Scheibel got to Okinawa just before the end of World War II and just in time for a typhoon. Scheibel was an aviation electrician in the U.S. Navy, part of Combat Aircraft Service Unit, Fighter, 3. He arrived on July 4, 1945, the Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15 and Typhoon Louise hit on Oct. 9. "There was an ammo dump built into the hillside near the beach. We were packed in there. All we did was sat and talked about it being over," said Scheibel, who said there was little light in the bunker.
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