The Greatest Generations
Tom Brokaw, the well-known NBC news anchor is credited with coining the phrase The Greatest Generation in his book titled “The Greatest Generation.”
Generally defined as those born in the early 1900s to mid to late 1920s, this is the generation that experienced life during the Great Depression, and fought in World War II or worked in the industries that supported the war effort.
The generation that followed the Greatest Generation were those born late 1920s to 1945 and are referred to as the Silent Generation.
And of course, the children of those two generations make up the group commonly referred to as the Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 to the early 1960s.
If you are my age, your parents are most likely to be of the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation. Their efforts to establish and build their families following what they experienced in the Depression, World War II, and the Korean War set the stage for our country today.
My dad straddled the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation having been born in 1929.
Today is Veteran’s Day and I was happy to have had the opportunity to visit with my dad.
He was wearing his Korean War Veteran hat.
My dad once told me “I had a lot of fun in the Army.”
I have told the story before about the time my dad tried to get into the action of World War II by going up to New York City when he heard the British Merchant Marine was taking on sailors his age. That turned out not to be true so he and his friend returned home to Oceanport.
And how instead, his World War II service was to participate in a program called the Crop Corps working on farms that grew food for the armed services.
My dad finally did get into the action when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. He was first stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, so there were times my mother and my grandparents would visit him at Fort Dix. This was before he and my mother were married.
Trained to be a radio operator, after his first assignment at Fort Dix, he wanted to learn how to operate landing craft and was planning to be transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for his next assignment.
Unfortunately, he got the flu and didn’t make that transfer.
Once he recuperated, he was transferred to Fort Drum in upstate New York. At Fort Drum, he participated in war games. His instructor was an ex-tank commander and my dad was assigned to drive the commander’s car.
He enjoyed that.
He seemed to have a knack for getting sick in the service and while at Fort Drum suffered a bad case of tonsillitis.
It was during his time at Fort Drum that he took leave to go home and marry my mother.
As fate would have it, he was never deployed to combat in Korea. He thought maybe his blindness in his one eye might have made him not combat worthy. My dad was basically blind in one eye from birth (which probably should have kept him out of the Army to begin with).
So after Fort Drum and getting married, he was reassigned to the coastal defenses of New York City in Brooklyn and Staten Island; and Connecticut and Rhode Island with an anti-aircraft battalion. According to my dad, they were big guns, 120 mm, and though they were assisted by a computer, a human had to” match the needle” he said. This assignment, though it was stateside, was considered combat duty.
He told me they would have target practice by having a pilot pull a target behind an airplane for them to shoot at.
“Man, I used to feel sorry for those guys,” my dad once said.
Though I never asked him, I often thought that hopefully my dad wasn’t the guy “lining up the needle.”
They named their gun “Marilyn Monroe” and had it painted on both sides. Just the name in letters though, no images of Marilyn.
From his station in the New York City boroughs, he would go to Sandy Hook in New Jersey to pick up shells and to Cape Cod in Massachusetts to practice with the guns.
He told another story of the Ford Club Coupe he had fixed up and installed a new rear end. One night he fell asleep and wrecked it while traveling with his army buddy Frankie, who was knocked out of the car. My dad had a shotgun in the back seat and as a result they were both put in jail. When finally released they had to hitchhike back to camp in Rhode Island.
He liked his experiences in the Army.
As he said, he had “a lot of fun in the Army.”
The facility where my dad now lives had a program today to recognize their veterans. There were about a dozen residents who were recognized with certificates of appreciation, and their names and service branches were announced. They served cake and juice. You could pick out many of the residents who were veterans by the hats they wore embroidered with the name of the conflict or the service unit they were assigned to like Airborne or Naval Aviator.
I spoke with the “Captain” which is what my mom calls him, the Naval Aviator whose mission at the Nursing Facility is to visit his neighbor’s rooms on a daily basis in his power wheelchair delivering lollypops as a gesture of kindness. He told me in the war his mission was to fly “dive bombers” off of aircraft carriers in the Pacific conflict of World War II and logged many missions.
Our once proud members of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation who did everything they could to get into the fight and defend our freedoms are still proud, but their members are dwindling. Many are in facilities, like my father. Many are in wheelchairs, like my father. Some can still proudly tell their stories like “the Captain,” but some like my father, can’t.
And then there are still some, like my daughters Hayley and Alexa’s “Papa Jack” who served in the Army during World War II in Europe and just turned 100 years old in September, that are still driving and enjoying activities like the race track.
We should be proud of them, what they endured and what they did for us.
We should be proud also of those of the other generations who responded to our wars and conflicts, and our defense like Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many others less discussed.
We should be proud of all of our veterans.
Yet I hope that when the Greatest Generation is gone, and the Silent Generation is gone, someone other than their children remembers.
Remembers who they were and what they did.
Enduring the hardest of times and loving their country so much that they couldn’t wait to get into the fight to protect our freedoms, then return to build a better life for their families and their future.
So thanks to all our veterans for your willingness to serve.
And thanks Pop for all that, and for the better life part too.
