Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502200039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CROWDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On Friday morning, Mason Miller Jr. sat in a small office at the Roanoke Valley History Museum and reflected on his experiences as a Navy officer in World War II as the tape recorder rolled.
From July 1942 to July 1943, Miller served in the Pacific on the USS Helena, a light cruiser. Early on the morning of July 5, 1943, a torpedo hit the Helena's bow and blew it completely off the ship. Two more torpedoes hit the ship, and it sank in half an hour.
"I was with a group of people in the water," Miller said. "After we'd been in the water for a while, we saw what looked like the outline of a ship. An officer had a flashlight and signaled DD50 [USS Helena]. The ship signaled back DD446 [USS Radford]."
After boarding the Radford, Miller said, "I remember stripping down and throwing everything overboard because I was so oil-soaked."
It's a story Miller has told many times to his family and friends.
But last week, Miller responded to a newspaper ad the museum had placed and told the story again, saying he wanted to make sure he could pass on his experiences so future generations will have a true sense of what the war was like.
"I thought I had something to contribute concerning the Navy," the Roanoke native said. "I hope that they would realize the difficult time that World War II was, and realize that it wasn't a cakewalk and that it turned out to be a real serious affair."
Miller is not alone.
The Roanoke Valley History Museum - thanks to a $71,000 grant from the Defense Department's Legacy Fund - is conducting a series of taped interviews with World War II veterans to be included in an exhibit to open in August.
The museum has interviewed almost 20 people since Feb. 9. Similar interviews also were conducted a few years ago.
"You're not going to get this through reading somebody's account of an event," said David Hicks, curator of the exhibit. "This fleshes out the historical facts.
"People see the sanitized version on film; these men saw the actual events."
Hicks said the museum is trying to get the interviews transcribed to make them more valuable for historians. The museum also wants some of the veterans to form a speakers' bureau to go to schools and speak about their experiences.
"The interviewees have been absolutely superb," Hicks said. "They come in, and they just talk. They've been really open, been very clear in their explanations. That's not an easy thing to do for something [that happened] over 50 years ago."
Hicks said that listening to the veterans will be a far better way to learn about the war than reading history books written a half-century after the fact. The interviews' advantage is their presentation in the wartime context. He cited the recent opposition to the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit as an example of how the war is being taken out of context.
"Two of [the veterans] that I spoke to thought they were going to be in the invasion of Japan," Hicks said. "Both of them believed that if they had invaded Japan, a lot of Americans would have been killed. If they hadn't bombed Japan, they knew that their unit would have been assigned to Japan, and they believe they wouldn't have survived.
"To try to put what happened in 1945 into a 1995 context doesn't work. That's not understanding history. A lot of people look at it and say, `That shouldn't have been done.' You try to avoid putting 50 years of what you know and 50 years of ideas on top of what happened at that time.
"The attitude was `kill or be killed.' There is no real time to think about - as historians do today - issues and questions. The soldiers are in the thick of it, having to deal with it."
Hicks also is looking for civilians who were alive during the war at any age to talk about their wartime memories.
Frank Dezelich, who saw action in the China-Burma-India theater from 1943 until the end of the war, initially applied to be interviewed about three years ago and was contacted when the museum decided to do this set of interviews. He hopes they will educate people, especially those born after the war ended.
Dezelich, who was an Air Force sergeant, offered numerous graphic tales of what life was like and what he saw in the war.
"One time, we heard a P51 Mustang take off and the motor sounded bad," he said. "A Chinese soldier had been walking on the runway and got hit by the plane and killed. The pilot circled around and came back and landed on a street on top of a command carrier, killing a couple of GIs."
When the pilot found out he had killed the GIs, he had a nervous breakdown and had to be sent home, Dezelich said.
Another time, his commanding officer and about six of his buddies were flying up to Rangoon, Burma, on leave. The plane was just about to land, he said, when the control tower told them that the airfield was being bombed and not to land. The plane circled until it ran out of fuel and crashed, killing everyone on board.
"When we heard, we went back to our tents and got our guns and were going to go down to Rangoon and wipe out the airfield, but the MPs stopped us."
Dezelich, a New York native who now lives in Bedford, said some historians have misrepresented the war.
"In some cases, they glorify it, like it's a lot of fun," he said. "They don't realize that a lot of people were being killed and maimed. Probably the people who are writing [the history books] were never in a war."
by CNB