A gunner's survival in Nazi territory

Alex Antanovich Jr. is shown at a World War II unit reunion decades after his incredible wartime survival story.


By Scott Beveridge


Allied air assaults over France and Germany during World War II were seeing their greatest successes in the last week of May 1944.


The daylight bombing raids were targeting strategic German-held railroads to cut off enemy supply lines, while others were pounding the French coast to drive back enemy forces.


Nearly one thousand heavy bombers were flying the missions that also were aimed at airfields and chemical and fuel stations.


The B-24 Liberator, LONI, carrying a crew of nine, however, did not fare so well. It crashed on May 30, 1944, near Rheine, Germany, after three of its four engines failed and the entire crew had bailed from the plane.


Eight crew members were captured and held by the Nazis as prisoners of war.


Meanwhile, U. S. Army Air Force Sergeant Alex Antanovich Jr. of Cokeburg, Pa., evaded capture.


He would be led by civilians to members of the antiwar movement in Holland, where he was fed, clothed, and sheltered for the next ten months.


“I was in constant fear,” said Antanovich, recalling his story that had the makings of a suspenseful war novel.


His plane had taken off that day at 6:53 a.m. from Mendlesham, England, carrying fifteen, five hundred pound bombs.


More than eighteen thousand B-24s, their wingspans spreading a 110 feet wide, had been produced in Detroit, Michigan, by Consolidated Aircraft Corporation for the war effort.


They created the largest air fleet of its kind at the time.


Antanovich, who was then 21 years old, had been trained to fire all of the plane’s ten machine guns. World War II bombing crews faced some of the worst dangers in combat.


“They were shooting at us,” he said, while discussing his military experiences when he was eighty-two years old.


“You could lose your life on takeoff. You’re loaded down to capacity. There’s no place to hide.”


He had received his training at Blythe Army Air Base in California. His crew used LONI to fly to England, following a route over Florida, South America, Africa, and Wales.


The crew called itself the League of Nations Inc. because its members all hailed from different ethnic backgrounds.


They gave the plane its identity by combining the first letters of the crew’s nickname.


Antanovich entertained himself on the flights to England by watching the lights in the cities at night.


“I was going to fight a war.”


Little else was on his mind.


He had only been in England for a month and on four previous missions to Germany when his plane crashed.


It dipped from formation with two of its engines smoking before it reached its primary target.


Other members of the 34th Bombing Group flying in nearby planes then lost sight of LONI; no one reported seeing any parachutes. The sixty-six-foot-long plane’s legacy was cut short before an artist had the time to paint its name on its side.


“When the pilot said to bail out, I was in the tail of the plane. The pilot said to throw stuff out to lighten the load. A short time later, the tail gunner who stayed on the intercom said: ‘Bail out,’ and away he went.”


Antanovich was afraid to jump from the plane, having never done so before during his military training.


“Why jump if you may never have to?”


Being the last one left in the tail of the plane, Antanovich looked over the bomb bay to see what the pilot and copilot were doing, hoping they were gaining control of the flight.


The copilot was readying for his jump, and Antanovich knew he had no choice but to do the same thing.


“I went to the Lord.”


He believed in God, but was not an especially religious soldier.


“I asked the Lord for help. I got a warm feeling over my body. I walked right over to that escape hatch and away I went. I lost my fear.”


Over the course of the next several days, nearly everything Antanovich did  went against what he was taught to do in the event he became missing in action.


When he regained his bearings on the ground, he realized he had become separated from his crew.


He had been told to run in such a situation, and to keep on the move for twenty-four hours.


“I went deeper into the woods and covered my parachute and started running.”


He came upon a house, and went in another direction, only to spot another.  At that point, he went into the thicket and decided to attempt sleep.


“I thought, ‘Where am I going to run to?' If I kept running, I could have gotten killed.”


Several hours later, he awoke to the sound of a boy pumping water and decided to start walking again.


He found himself back where he hit the ground and hid the parachute. He made the right move because he stumbled upon a friendly stranger while walking across a bicycle path. He whistled to get the man’s attention, asking him in French if he spoke that language.


The man shook his head, no.


Antanovich then asked him if he spoke English, and again, the man shook his head, no.


Antanovich pulled out a pocketbook that was part of his survival kit and designed to translate English phrases into the German language.


He used it to inform the stranger that he was hungry, and in exchange, was given a handful of sugar.


He also learned he was near Rheine, Germany, after showing the stranger one of the maps from the gear he carried. He was forty miles west of his B-24’s target and twenty miles east of Germany’s border with Holland.


“I said: ‘I’m American."


The stranger, who turned out to be a Prussian, then flapped his arms in the air as a signal that he understood Antanovich was an airman.


The man then pointed Antanovich in the direction of German-held Holland.


Antanovich set his compass and walked the remainder of the day and well into the night.


Tired and weary after nightfall, he decided to make a bed of pine needles under a tall pine tree, where he slept his first night in Germany.


Antanovich was unarmed. He understood that German troops were killing American soldiers on sight because the country was quickly depleting it resources.


The Germans barely had enough supplies to care for their own soldiers. He had no idea just how much danger he was facing on his first full day in enemy territory.


That same day, one of Hitler’s shadow men, the Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, approved criminal combat methods under a German lynch law.


By doing so, Bormann gave his seal of approval to mob justice, instructing German civilians to kill any Allied soldiers they encountered.


The next morning, Antanovich came upon railroad tracks and decided to follow them straight toward Holland.


That could have been seen as a mistake, as well, because German soldiers were guarding the rail lines. He ducked for cover into the woods upon spotting a man in the distance.


That was when he stumbled upon a man and woman milking cows, a couple who helped him to reach safer quarters.


“I said I was an American and I was hungry.”


The couple gave him a sandwich; his only food in two days. They took him to to a house and introduced him to an English-speaking woman.


“She said: ‘I know a man who knows a man who knows where to find the underground.’”


The woman made a telephone call before escorting him by bicycle to a crossroads to meet another contact.


“She said she didn’t want to see him or him to see her.”


His survival kit also contained silk maps of Holland, France, Spain, and Belgium, as well as three cigarettes.


He had been advised to hold on to his belongings. But instead, he gave everything away to those who helped him along his way, except the maps of Holland and Belgium.


“Anything I had they asked for, I gave it to them,” he said. “I had a full pack of Camels. They told us not to smoke American tobacco because it was sweeter smelling and (the enemy would) recognize it.”


He even shed his Army Air Force uniform for civilian clothes as a disguise after reaching the underground.


His journey eventually took him to the home of Otto and Elisabeth Montagne on the outskirts of Hengelo, Holland.


They were among many anti-Nazi couples in that area who secretly shielded Allied soldiers who became separated from their units.


Their visitors usually stayed in their home for three or four days until plans were made to return them to England, through France, Spain, and Portugal. Spain temporarily held such MIAs as illegal immigrants before sending them to Portugal and England, Antanovich was told.


That escape route, however, was closed after Allied forces stormed Normandy, beginning June 6, 1944, in what became the largest amphibious invasion in history.


Antanovich’s parents, Alex and Mary, received word on June 16, 1944, from the War Department that their son was missing in action.


His younger brother, John, was part of an Army Air Force B-17 flight crew serving in the United States.


During his time in Holland, Antanovich was hidden in 16 different houses; some for a few hours and others for a month or two.


He found himself sandwiched under trapdoors on occasions when German troops searched from house to house, looking for railroad workers to help them reopen supply routes.


The Montagnes shared their home with him and three other soldiers for seven months.


Mrs. Montagne provided them with clothing from a nearby textile factory, giving them identical dark blue shirts with vertical stripes to identify them to others involved in the antiwar movement.


The men even wore wooden shoes and distinguishing hairstyles and mustaches to appear as local residents.


Mrs. Montagne often walked with a cart great distances to gather enough food to feed her guests.


Food was being rationed, and each house was permitted to use electric lights for one hour a day. Two rabbits from the barn provided dinner for Christmas, a meal that also included cheese crackers and pudding.


Antanovich and his companions lived out their long days in boredom, either reading, holding conversations, or learning to speak Dutch.


They sometimes occupied their time by playing games of Battleship, using scraps of numbered paper as game pieces, or singing songs around a piano.


The Dutch liberation effort, meanwhile, began to intensify by March 1945.


Resistance fighters ambushed Nazi General Hans Ratter on March 6, 1945, and more than one hundred Dutchmen were killed in retribution two days later.


Antanovich spent that month hiding in a hut in the woods with an armed member of the Canadian Royal Air Force.


Hitler’s army was under attack from all fronts.


“You could hear the gunfire getting close,” Antanovich said.


By the end of the month, Allied forces were racing across collapsed German defenses. On April 1, 1945, they had German troops surrounded in the Ruhr basin, while British troops rolled into Hengelo that same day.


Antanovich was rescued by members of the Welsh Guard after walking arm-in-arm to freedom with a young Dutch woman.


He was taken to the Guard’s headquarters in Brussels before being sent to a U.S. military facility in Paris, France.


“I had no identification.”


He was later returned to England to be identified by members of his bombing group, only to find all of his possessions gone.


To his relief, he was told the other members of his air crew had survived German prison camps.


On April 24, 1945, his mother was told by the military that he was returned to active duty and being rotated back to the United States.


Following the war, Antanovich went home to rural Washington County and married the former Betty Porter. The couple had two sons, Alex and David, who died in childhood, and a daughter, Yvonne.


He worked as a coal miner in Beth-Energy Corporation’s Cokeburg Mine, from which he retired in 1985 after working in the coalfields for twenty-four years.


He said it was amazing to be part of such a great generation, one that witnessed serious hardships and major triumphs.


“The men of today will never compete with, compare with what we went through. We went through the Great Depression. We saw the TV come in. When I was a kid, farmers were working with horses ... the doctor would come in a horse and buggy.”


Antanovich also began attending church after returning home from the war.


One day while reading the Bible, he came upon a verse in Psalms that states: “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.”


He said those words offered him the best explanation for his surviving such a dangerous, incredible experience during the war.


(This story was written for a 2005 oral history project at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.)

Heavily decorated for a veteran

A tiny library in southwestern Pennsylvania took the challenge seriously at a charity dinner tonight to decorate its table around a hero-themed book.

The Fredericktown Area Public Library staff actually brought its local hero to the affair and created a centerpiece shrine in his honor at the event to raise money for public libraries in Washington and Greene counties.

The overflowing assortment of old military uniforms, newspaper clippings and medals paid tribute to Ralph Natali, an 87-year-old who spent his decades-long career serving in the U.S. Navy and Air Force during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. His stuff overshadowed the table's book, Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation," about the successful lives of select World War II veterans.

The entry blew away the competition at the event, which drew more than 300 people to Bella Sera by Greco's in Canonsburg. And so did Mr. Natali in his happening sport coat and mod shades.

A lucky soldier

My father, James R. Beveridge, in the middle, celebrated with his steel mill buddies in Monessen, Pa, not long after returning to work after World War II ended.

Part VI: The second war ends

By Scott Beveridge

James R. Beveridge was going to have plenty of time for reading or playing cards to tackle the boredom of a long ocean journey to the war in Japan.

His ship was among a convoy that bid farewell to Europe at the Rock of Gibraltar, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and meandered through the Panama Canal during a 60 day journey that came to a halt off the Marshall Islands.

They were held back just before Japan’s informal World War II surrender on August 14, 1945. It was a week after the USAAF B-29 Enola Gay had devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in the first of two and only Atomic bombs ever dropped in the world brought an end to the war. As he had in Germany, my father was fortunate by a hair to escape the fighting.

Millions were left homeless in Europe, while “Allied peoples all over the world celebrated” the victory in Japan, newspapers across the world blared in headlines.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army would be slow in returning to their homes such soldiers as my father who saw little or no fighting. Beveridge waited in a stretch in Okinawa before being discharges as a corporal in January 1946.

As a gesture of thanks, the White House issued veterans thank you letters stamped with President Truman’s signature, acknowledging them for answering the nation’s call to war.

“Because you demonstrated the fortitude, resourcefulness and calm judgment necessary to carry out that task, we now look to you for leadership and example in further exalting our country in peace,” the letter stated.

Dad eventually returned to his job in at a fence and wire mill in Monessen, Pa, after returning to his home in nearby Charleroi.

“The towns were full of vets,” he recalled in 2005.

Many former soldiers living there in the Monongahela River valley took advantage of something they nicknamed, “the 52 - 20 club,” he said.

Its so-called members received $20 a week for up to 52 weeks under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill.

“Every week, you had to stand in line to get your 20 bucks,” said Beveridge, adding that some veterans were known to take the money straight to a veterans club and spend it on beer and whiskey.

“Some of them drank themselves to death,” he said. “I guess they had seen too much war.”

Four years later he married the former June Hart, who he met at a dance at the Veterans Club of Charleroi. They would have three sons, James, Scott, and Kelly by 1958, raising them in the nearby village of Webster. Beveridge would go on to lose his job as a pipefitter in 1972, becoming one of the earlier victims of the steel industry’s sharp decline in the region. He took a low-wage job as a Pinkerton security guard until something better came along, after also giving up his long love affair with Iron City beer. Two years later, he met the qualifications to become a police officer at California University of Pennsylvania, a position from which he retired in 1986.

He died Monday, March 5, 2007, in UPMC-Shadyside Hospital, Pittsburgh, from congestive heart failure.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

A lucky soldier

A silly Christmas card James R. Beveridge received while serving in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II.

Part V: On the edges of combat

By Scott Beveridge

My father arrived in Le Havre, France, during the second week of February 1945 with shattered nerves.

James R. Beveridge was then just 22 years old and assigned to perform office work for the U.S. Army’s 38th Infantry Regiment’s Quartermaster Corps. His unit would later set up tents to feed soldiers, as well as starving German refugees, sometimes serving baked beans for breakfast from clean galvanized steel garbage cans.

His unit soon marched across a U.S.-secured Normandy as more than 1,200 Allied bombers raided central Berlin. Dad said he worried all along that he would soon be called into combat.

“If the troops were trapped, you had to put down the typewriter and grab a gun and fight,” he said.

“If they overran that front line, then everyone was fighting, no matter who you were.”

Dad said he witnessed bombers en route to Germany so thick overhead that he could barely see the sky. He cheered the planes on, hoping they would bring a quick end to the war.

On April 4, 1945, his unit was dispatched to Dinslaken, a small industrial city in the Ruhr area of western Germany, a distance of two miles from the front line.

Meanwhile, American troops were marching through Germany, greeted by Germans waiving white flags of surrender.

The nights were frightening, pitch black with practically every window blind pulled shut in the houses and buildings. Frequent bombing raids had also taken out the electricity in many areas.

“You could see the shells like fireworks in the next city,” he said.

In a last-ditch effort to protect the Ruhr pocket, Nazi troops were sending “buzz bombs” across the sky toward England, dad said. “They sounded like motorboats.”

Many of the bombs malfunctioned and fell to the ground, hitting the wrong targets.

But, within a month, the war with Germany was over.

“The surrender traveled by word of mouth,” dad said. “Everybody cheered. They wanted to go home.”

Yet, President Harry S. Truman warned America the war was only half won because heavy fighting was taking its toll on U.S. troops stationed in the South Pacific.

Looking back on his life, dad said he sometimes suffered a guilty conscience because he survived the war physically unharmed, having known that was not the case for many veterans. He often overlooked, too, the value of his unit, brushing it off as woman’s duty.

The Quartermaster Corps was under the command of Maj. Guy I. Rowe, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism in France during World War I. The Corps’ main mission in dad’s war involved feeding, clothing, and equipping the troops.

Its members also were trained to fill specialized roles in every theater.

By the end of the war, the corps had handled 70,000 different supply items and prepared and served nearly 24 million meals.

It also had been assigned the grim task of burying nearly 250,000 bodies in temporary graves. Meanwhile, 4,900 corps soldiers were killed in battle.

Dad said he found himself sorting mail in England, refueling vehicles and clearing out houses in bombed out houses in Holland and Germany to make them temporary barracks for his commanders.

“If the platoon sergeant said he wanted that house to stay in, we threw out all of the furniture, put the furniture in the yard to make room for cots,” he said. “We destroyed it. The American people didn’t give a shit.”

He said he never fully understood how the army determined which soldiers carried weapons into battle or how others like him were spared such duty.

“I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now,” he said in 2005. “I was lucky. That’s the only word for it.”

After Germany fell to the Allies, he relaxed in the South of France where he was able to swim daily in the Mediterranean Sea.

The vacation wouldn’t last long because his orders soon called for him to board The Ainsworth on July 15, 1945, to backup troops a world away. The merchant ship was about to join a massive convoy of military vessels to assist in a war halfway around the globe against Japan.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part VI: The second war ends)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

A lucky soldier

Part IV: Dad's secret World War II letter

By Scott Beveridge

My father in declining health gave me a stack of letters he saved from World War II with a warning there might be something embarrassing in them.

James R. Beveridge was approaching 82 that summer of 2005, and I responded by saying he didn’t need to worry about being ashamed at his age over anything the yellowed letters might contain.

So we went on talking for hours about his service in the U.S. Army, as I took notes without ever mentioning the one startling letter written by his mother holding a secret dad carried with him to his grave in March 2007.

His mother, Madge, had intercepted a bill he received in the mail in January 1943 from a physician in Monongahela, Pa., for delivering a baby he fathered to a married woman living in that small city south of Pittsburgh.

Madge Beveridge was writing her son, a private stationed in Danville, Ill., to proudly announce that she had solved this problem.

Mrs. Beveridge, who became my grandmother 13 years later, was not regarded for having been graceful, compassionate or genuinely kind to others.

She stated in the letter that he could not have fathered the woman’s full-term baby delivered July 15, 1942, because they hadn’t known each other long enough.

“So I told this Dr. she wanted a ‘goat’ and thought to pick on a 19 year old boy, who had lost his Dad, but she forgot the boy had a mother who knew her son was worthy of a good woman,” she stated in the letter.

Mrs. Beveridge further stated she visited the physician and told him to forward the bill to the mother’s father. “So Jimmy, I had never (really) been quite happy until I found out for sure that the Beveridge blood wasn’t in that baby.”

She was humored at having solved such a serious dilemma. Meanwhile, the date she indicated her son became intimate with the woman also made it quite possible he could have fathered the child.

The subject of the letter quickly turned to dad’s mother shopping for new shoes and making plans to visit his military base. The problem was forever behind them; so she thought.

Never knowing the full truth about the child would trouble my father for the remainder of his life, according to my mother – the former June Hart - who didn’t meet or marry him until well after the war ended.

His indiscretions before they married were not a concern to mom, she said, yet he never told her about his receiving the bill for the baby. She had been told two versions about the pregnancy from people they knew in Charleroi in the 1950s. One story involved the baby – a son - dying following a premature birth while the other had him being put up for adoption.

The woman’s parents had visited the Beveridge home in Charleroi, Pa., while she was pregnant, demanding a shotgun wedding. The pregnant girlfriend had left her husband in 1941, taken back her maiden name and was living with her parents when she met my father, according to the stories he later told my mother.

“He said he told his mother he probably should marry (the woman),” mom said last week. His mother asked her son if he wanted to get married. “He said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry about it then, I’ll take care of everything,’” said my mother, who turned 80 this summer.

Like me, mom has been expressing interest in finding out the truth now that I have made this letter known to our family.

In some ways I believe dad was trying to relieve some of his guilt by giving me those letters as age was weakening his heart and eyesight. He surely knew then, that as a curious reporter I would feel compelled to dig further into the story.

But, in 2005, I was under a tight deadline to write dad’s oral history of the World War II era for an assignment to finish graduate school.

We turned the clock back to February 1945 when he arrived to a war torn Normandy, France, as Allied forces were advancing on Germany.

(Note: At this time, we have decided not to reveal the identity of the woman whose physician billed my father for fathering her child. The obituary of her brother indicates she died prior to 1986. However, little else exists about her on ancestry.com or other Internet searches. By revealing her name, it might cause embarrassment to any children she might have had after my father left for the war, never to hear from her again.)


(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part V: On the edges of combat)


(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

A lucky soldier

Part III: Dad's friends and relatives weren't so lucky

By Scott Beveridge

The letters my father sent home from World War II were nowhere near as troubling at first blush as those he would read from friends and relatives who also were serving their country in battle.

Those men were less inhibited to express the ugly side of a war that dad surely experienced, too, but would never discuss even until the day he died in 2007.

Shortly before he left Charleroi, Pa., for the Europe, his friend who was serving in the U.S. Marines encouraged him in one letter to join anything but that branch of the military.

“Stay the hell out of the Marines ....,” the friend, Frank “Gula” Galanzosky, penned from boot camp. “There are three guys in our platoon who have to go out and pick up one thousand cigarette butts and string them on a needle and thread,” Galanzosky stated in the letter written in August 1942. “One guy dropped a rifle and had to take four to bed with him that night.”

Dad would end up faring better in the Army.

Standing a slim six feet, two inches tall, he had a handsome grin and thick, curly black hair that made him popular with women on the dance floor.

He felt a cold shiver and a rumble in his stomach, however, as he stepped onto the deck of the Queen Elizabeth en route to Europe as World War II was in full gear.

To lighten the mood and bond with his unit, he and the seven other soldiers in his squad decided to shave their heads and grow beards as the ship crossed the Pacific Ocean.

“I felt silly,” he said, remembering how surprised he was to see a red mustache above his upper lip.

He had never seen something as beautiful as that ocean liner even though it had been worn and damaged by the steady stream of soldiers it was smuggling to the war. Years after the war ended, he remembered seeing a story in a newspaper that stated England required the United States to pay for the damage its troops caused to the ship.

“There was a crap game on every set of stairs,” he said. “You could see how the guys ruined it ... carved their initials on the expensive woodwork.”

When he arrived in Hale, England, two days before Christmas, he would soon learn U.S. troops were surrounded at Bastogne as the Battle of the Bulge was being fought in Belgium. The following day, a German U-boat sank a U.S. supply ship, the Leopoldville, in the English Channel, killing 819 Americans.

He was worried and scared, knowing his unit could easily be separated at any time and reassigned to battle.

“You never knew if your unit was going to be busted up, made a replacement,” he said. “Those guys were the first to get killed because you ended up in a unit that you didn’t have training for. Those guys didn’t stay alive.”

The news dad would soon be receiving about his only brother, as well as his best friend and cousin, was far more frightening.

Thomas L. Beveridge, who was a radioman in the U.S. Army Air Forces, would become missing in action for five days after his airplane crashed in Burma in July 1944. Tom Beveridge another crewman survived the crash with nothing more to eat than an ant-covered chocolate bar.

They used a machete to cut their way out of a jungle to a stream and followed it downstream to a U.S. military base. He suffered a brief period of amnesia before bumping into a relative who jarred his memory.

Meanwhile, dad’s best friend from home, Joe Yoney, was wounded in friendly fire by a bullet that traveled through a letter in his pocket. Dad had sent that letter to Joe, and would eventually receive a copy of it for proof.

Dad said war movies from that era wrongly led some in the States to believe there were many soldiers who enjoyed the war and liked to kill.

“I didn’t meet any of those kind of guys,” he said. “My friends who got shot, they patched them up and sent them back.

Yoney later told dad he bawled like a baby when he was shot across the stomach in Sicily.

“They shot him up with morphine to shut him up,” dad said.

Then in February 1945 dad received news in a letter from his mother that his school chum, Dale Covin, had been killed by Japanese fighters in a parachute jump over the Philippine Islands.

Covin was either shot to death while in the air or tangled in a tree.

“He was dead before he hit the ground,” dad said. “That happened a lot.”

Dad’s cousin, Dale Faux of Morgantown, W. Va., also was witness to tragedy while serving in the Army Air Forces in India.

“As for Jim, he has had a lot of good breaks and I hope he continues to get them,” Faux wrote in December 1944 in a letter to dad’s mother, Madge Beveridge.

Faux relayed to his aunt that he watched from a barren hillside while the remains of eight of his fellow soldiers whom he had befriended like brothers were being buried in makeshift graves.

“And if there was a trace of moisture in my eyes, I’m not ashamed to admit it,” he wrote.

As Faux penned the letter, he and his comrades were collecting money for an Indian boy whose stomach was swollen from malnutrition, hoping the boy would use it to buy a bit of rice to keep him alive. “What would we ever suffer that would even compare to that?” Faux expressed.

Another letter eventually turned up in my dad’s war mementos that concerned me, even to this day.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part IV: Dad's secret World War II letter)


(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

A World War II vet barely survived Burma

Thomas L. Beveridge, standing second from left, and his flight crew pals posed for this photograph with residents of India during World War II.

It’s been four years since I wrote this newspaper column for the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., and an appropriate time to publish it again here with Veterans Day approaching in two days. It’s about my uncle, Tom Beveridge, who was assigned to what has been called the most-dangerous duty in World War II. It’s important to remember people like him who struggled until his death to put the war behind him, especially because so many years have passed since this war ended and people are beginning to look at it through rose-colored glasses. There were thousands of stories such as his which didn’t make the pages of Tom Brokaw’s 2004 book, “The Greatest Generation,” that tended to glamorize the post-war lives of these veterans.

By Scott Beveridge

World War II was over, and Sgt. Thomas L. Beveridge was ready to put the U.S. Army Air Forces behind him.

But returning to the real world stirred more anxiety in the young Charleroi, Pa., man than did his flying the most dangerous airplane missions in the war effort.

“I'm more afraid of facing civilian life than I was ever afraid of facing the Army and a war,” he wrote in a letter to his mother, Madge, while awaiting his separation papers after the war ended in 1945.

It was a profound message from a man who would never come to terms with the demons that haunted his soul.

The 1942 graduate of Charleroi High School, and my father’s brother, was eager to serve his country as an extension of his boyhood fondness for airplanes. He was so anxious that he lied about his age to enlist at age 17, one year shy of the minimum age to serve.

“From the looks of the situation, it seems that we are really getting on with the war. I wish to hell I would get my chance to fight it,” Tom Beveridge wrote home June 10, 1943, from his station at Tomah, Wis.

“I'm a radioman and I know my job and all I want to do is to get my chance to do it,” he boasted in the letter sent just before he was deployed to Delhi, India.

At the time, his call to arms was top secret. It soon would have him intercepting enemy radio transmissions while aboard cargo planes delivering supplies to China's forces engaged in battle with Japan.

With the Burma Road cut off by Japanese troops in early 1942, there was no way to supply China’s defense other than from air bases in India. It was the worst flying route ever assigned to air transport, according to Air Force Magazine Online.

The duty over the Himalayas was dubbed, “Flying the Hump,” with planes loaded to capacity and struggling to maintain safe altitudes in thin air above the mountain range.

They crew typically faced “extreme turbulence, thunderstorms and icing,” the magazine reported in March 1991.

In late 1943, there were 155 accidents and 168 fatalities in just one month. Downed airmen were exposed to thick jungles, temperatures of more than 130 degrees in the shade and headhunters.

The flight crew work was especially demanding, with some pilots in the air as long as 165 hours a month.

“Sometimes I think I'm more in the air these days than on the ground,” Beveridge penned in a letter home in June 1944.

Conditions on the ground were not much better.

“Everything is a total mess,” he wrote five months later, describing his garbage-filled and ant-infested barracks. A nearby comrade named Mac had been flying all night, “and he looks like he is dead,” Beveridge wrote.

That letter, meanwhile, was written about two months after he was missing in action when his plane crashed in Burma. He and another airman parachuted to the ground, becoming the only two survivors of the crash.

They used a machete to cut their way out of a jungle, spending five days with nothing more to eat than an ant-covered chocolate bar. He also experienced a brief period of amnesia after being rescued by Allied troops, and, ultimately, returned to duty.

“I am OK now and in the best of health, just a few scratches,” he wrote in an Aug. 11, 1944, letter to his mother.

On the surface, Beveridge might have appeared healthy.

But he would spend the rest of his life as an alcoholic, known to drink hard liquor by the iced-tea glass as the years went by. He managed to earn a business degree from West Virginia University, Morgantown, after being discharged, and went on to carve out a successful career as a finance executive in Los Angeles.

Unlike today, though, veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam were simply given their walking papers to civilian life.

Post-traumatic stress disorder was not identified as a diagnosis until the 1970s, said Chuck Williamson, director of veteran affairs at California University of Pennsylvania.

“We know millions of World War II veterans suffered various degrees of PTSD,” Williamson said.

The disorder, he said, can lead to depression and self-medication with drugs and alcohol as a way to deal with their stress.

“We've learned that from my generation” said Williamson, a Vietnam War veteran.

A more-recent Army study indicated that about one in six soldiers in Iraq reported symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or PTSD, The New York Times reported in December 2004.

With the number expected to rise sharply, the Army deployed combat stress control units to Iraq to provide fast treatment to shell shocked soldiers and keep them close to their units, the newspaper reported.

Beveridge, as a survivor of a plane that crashed in a jungle, would have had similar issues to resolve, Williamson said. War flight crews such as his spent countless hours together, and were known to form close, family-type bonds, he said.

“In fact, they were kids going off to do the most horrible things a man can do,” he said. “That's severe trauma.”

Soldiers who survived such experiences could spend the rest of their lives questioning why they lived when their best friends did not, Williamson said.

“You can't reconcile that,” he added.

My uncle twice attempted detoxification to no avail. He suffered a fatal heart attack at age 65 in 1989 in a liquor store in Los Angeles.

The man with a fascination with flight was purchasing booze at the time in bottles the size of those served on commercial airlines.

A lucky soldier

A stack of yellowed letters, parts of a U.S. Army uniform and a Nazi armband are among the items my father, James R. Beveridge, saved from his participation in World War II.

Part II: Stirring the memories of war

By Scott Beveridge

The pay earned by a U.S. Army private during World War II was not attractive to my dad when he enlisted in the military and earned that rank after leaving a steel job in Monessen.

Industrial work was picking up in America in the early 1940s because President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised England he would supply its defense with steel and other war supplies in place of troops to fend off German invasion.

Dad said he would have preferred to continue working at Pages Steel and Wire Corp, a Pennsylvania mill that wove fence from steel billets produced at the blast furnaces at the nearby Pittsburgh Steel Co. The mills paid quite bit more money than the $50 a month he would earn each month in the military after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war.

By 1943, dad valued a good-paying job, having been raised during the Great Depression and suffered the difficulties of moving from one town to the next while his father, Robert, found work in any number of temporary jobs.

His family was always met an unwelcome outsider to a new town at a time when one in four men were jobless. His father was seen as being there to steal a job opportunity from a local man. As a result, dad had to quickly learn how to do battle with the other boys his age and older.

Dad's family finally arrived in Charleroi, Pa. when was in the ninth grade, and he immediately felt at home there after attending as many as 20 public schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Charleroi, though, was a money town with two long downtown streets lined with expensive shops and department stores. The town was nicknamed the “Magic City” because it developed so quickly in the 1890s, and would later break records for having some of the highest retail sales in Pennsylvania. Located upwind from a string of dirty mills along the Monongahela River, its air was clean and sidewalks were filled to their brink with only the best-dressed people from throughout the region.

Even though work was picking up and his father had found work as a welder at a Monessen steel mill, dad's parents were quick to consider packing up the family once more for a move to another town. Dad said he threatened to drop out of high school if they moved, so they stayed.

His father would live long enough to see him graduate in 1940 from Charleroi High School before dying, unexpectedly, from a stroke. His mother, Madge, was about to become all alone in her world after the war called away her two sons.

Dad's only sibling, Thomas, was three years his junior and he joined the Army, too, in 1944 after lying about his age.

Their mother received regular allotments from them, money that was withdrawn from their military salaries and matched by the government because she was without a husband and dependent on their incomes to survive. She also took jobs as a housemaid to get by and regularly kept in touch with her sons via a steady stream of letters they exchanged and would keep for the remainder of their lives.

These old memories surfaced again in May 2005 when dad retrieved a white gift box he used to store his tokens from the war to tell this story.

His collection contained a red, white, and black cotton Nazi armband, something he rarely pulled out because of what it represented, and because it was against U.S. law to bring home such items seized from the enemy.

He also kept his olive green and moth-worn Army hat, routine military paperwork, and a number of letters his friends and relatives mailed his mother from the war.

The bulk of those letters were written by dad to reassure his mother that he was fit, “in the pink,” and safe, words he purposely selected to keep her free from worry.

Yet, some of them spoke to these soldiers longing for such luxuries as a warm bed, home-cooked meals or dates with a hometown gal as they dealt with the insanities of war.

Their words also carried with them profound war experiences, details that had been stored away for decades before dad retrieved the mementos from his dusty closet.

My dad, James R. Beveridge, left, and his brother, Thomas, with their mother, Madge, in 1940 after they arrived in Charleroi, Pa. With the Great Depression ending, World War II would soon be calling the brothers to the U.S. Army.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part III: Dad's friends and relatives weren't so lucky)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

A lucky soldier

My father, James R. Beveridge of Charleroi, Pa., left, in Danville, Ill., with an unidentified pal shortly before embarking for Europe with the U.S. Army during World War II.

Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see

By Scott Beveridge

The Queen Elizabeth had the ability to outrun German U-boats during World War II, moving at a speed that qualified it as a troopship for American soldiers destined to reshape the globe.

As the largest luxury cruise liner in the world at the time, it had been painted battleship gray and fitted with magnetic mine detecting devices to double as a warship before it docked March 7, 1940, in New York on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

The ocean liner and its sister ship, the Queen Mary, were capable of carrying fifteen thousand men, nearly an entire division, to wartime service. And my father would eventually become one of them.

Four years later, James R. Beveridge and his fellow troops assigned to the U.S. Army’s 550th Quartermaster Corps, stepped aboard what had by then become a beat up vessel. They were scared, nervous and unsure about where the war would take them when the she shoved off at 5 a.m. December 16, 1944, and arrived in breakneck speed six days later at Glasgow, Scotland.

“That ship was so fast it could make it over in three or four days but, it had to zigzag because it wasn’t in a convey,” dad said, more than sixty years later in the summer of 2005.

“That way a submarine couldn’t hit it, get a bead on it,” he recalled when he was 82 years old.

It was his first call to the war zone after having spent the previous two years in training at Army bases in the United States.

He decided to enlist October 7, 1942, with his best friend, Joe Yoney. They were naive 22-year-old men from Charleroi, Pa., a bustling retail boomtown that lived off the backs of steelworkers about twenty-five miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa.

They briefly considered joining the U.S. Merchant Marines as their hometown on the western banks of the Monongahela River was being stripped of its draft-age men. Beveridge and Yoney had already received their draft notices; service in the war was inevitable.

“I might as well get it over with,” dad said, taking his thoughts back to the first time he visited a recruiter’s office in nearby Donora.

But his mother, Madge, disapproved of his joining the Marines over her fears that he might be killed aboard a boat struck by a torpedo, images she had seen on Newsreels. American moviegoers were kept abreast of the defense effort by those short black-and-white news films that were produced by the major motion picture companies.

“I told Yoney: ‘My mom’s going to have a stroke. Let’s go down to Donora and enlist in the Army,’” dad said. “I didn’t go home and tell my mom anything. I just went and joined.”

He was soon assigned to basic training at Camp Lee, Va., where he earned a paltry fifty dollars a month as a buck private.

It was uncanny, he said, because his father, Robert, had been stationed at the same base for training in World War I.

But dad longed to be home, especially that day in 1944 when he shipped out for active duty in another continent that, to him, was as far away as a Jupiter.

(Click here to read Part II: Stirring the memories of war.)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)