Their War

When the country called, these men rose to answer

James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 22, 2007 at midnight

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They were young men caught in one of mankind's oldest - and deadliest - enterprises.

When the planet convulsed into all-out war and the line between good and evil flashed with neon clarity, they left behind families, personal dreams and the luxury of youthful optimism and headed into a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions from which so many would never return.

On Sunday, PBS will begin airing The War, Ken Burns' seven-part, 15-hour opus on World War II, as seen through the eyes of those who fought and lived it.

Today, on a smaller scale, the Rocky Mountain News offers its readers a glimpse into the war as experienced by three Denver-area veterans: a pilot, a soldier, a sailor - men who, when their world was threatened, answered the call to defend it.

Fred Jeffers

Twenty-five thousand feet above terrain he couldn't see, through thunderstorms of flak and clouds of black smoke, the kid from the Menominee nation in Wisconsin who never wanted to fly found himself smack dab in the middle of history's greatest conflict, piloting a "tin can with wings," too busy to be scared.

The fear would come later. Down on the ground at the debriefings, where they'd pass around cheap liquor and cigarettes to "help calm you down." Sometimes the booze and the nicotine worked. Sometimes they didn't.

Sometimes bomber pilot 2nd Lt. Fred Jeffers was still antsy. Wanted to know what happened to that plane right above him. One second it was there. Next second it was "just a great orange ball."

The plane had slid out of formation and that was that. No time to worry about the crew. No time to worry that you might be next because "otherwise you'd just be scared s---less." Just time enough "to do what we had to do, and that's all there was to it."

And when you asked about the plane that had gone orange and whether there was word on the crew more than likely what you got was . . . nothing.

"The briefing people, most of the time, they wouldn't tell us nothing."

There is a thin smile on Fred Jeffers' 86-year-old face as he remembers things in the living room of his Littleton home. Across the room is Tish, one of his five daughters, who has heard her father's stories many times, and Tish's husband Tom Gadbois, who hasn't heard them nearly enough.

"It's just amazing, his stories," Gadbois said. "It gives you this incredible appreciation for what people like dad went through."

Jeffers shrugs. What he did was what he had to do. No big deal. The 22 bombing missions over Germany and occupied France, dropping payload after payload on tank factories, railroad yards, submarine pens and fortified artillery? Just his job. A job he never expected.

Hey, if that logging camp he was working in had served a decent breakfast, he might never have gone to war. But the toast was so bad one day that Jeffers blew up. The boss heard him. The boss said, 'You don't like the food here, why don't you just quit?'

Someone said the Army Air Corps might be a good idea. Might have been, too, if the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor 10 months later. By dint of his skills as an efficient payroll clerk, Pfc. Jeffers got tabbed for officer training school. By sheer coincidence - the idle hunch of his CO - he became a pilot.

Back then you had to learn quick. PT-121, BT-13s, Cessnas - "Bamboo Bombers" they called them. Then into the cockpits of B-24s. Off to England. Learning to fly in formation - "wingtip over wingtip." Learning not to get spooked by the flak storms and the shrapnel biting into your plane. Hoping to get in 25 missions - your ticket back home.

As he talks, Jeffers' smooth hands become bomber formations, illustrating flight positions, veering in different directions, turning the living room into blue sky.

And then he isn't talking about formations. He's talking about his plane. All the planes had names. "The Travlin Bag" - that was his. All the planes had pictures of women. Jeffers' was leggy, with a lot of cleavage and a little valise.

Jeffers smiles. The Travlin Bag got him where he had to go and - better still - back to where he'd come from. To base in England. To those briefings where you learned how successful your bomb run had been because you sure couldn't tell from 25,000 feet up, through clouds of black explosions.

After the war, Jeffers stayed in the Air Corps - it didn't become the Air Force until 1947 - for another 16 years. Flying the Berlin Airlift. Flying the Cold War. Flying to the rank of major. Along the way he studied the war. Battles, campaigns, dates, details. Important stuff.

"We call him the History Channel," laughs Tish. When she and Tom watch a movie about World War II, they call him up. Y'know, fact checking.

He's glad they ask. People need to know about the war.

"Kids today don't know about what happened then, and they should."

They should know about a time when brave men who didn't think they were brave managed to save the world simply because they did what they had to do.

Don Haynie

The long-ago sergeant who inspired Gen. George Patton to single him out as one dumb SOB sits on a couch flanked by his wife, four of his 20 grandchildren and one of his 18 great- grandchildren, talking about what it's like to see a man cut in half by a flamethrower.

There are other images and memories that swirl around in Don Haynie's mind. The soldier who picked up his nearly severed leg before they carried him away on a stretcher. The endless cacophony of machine guns, artillery, mortars and, especially, the "screaming meemie" bombs that felt they were tearing your ears apart even before they exploded. The once-every-three-weeks baths that consisted of lye soap and a powerful fire hose and 20 naked GIs wincing from the water pressure but grateful to have the grime and stench of battle temporarily washed away.

Of course, there are more stories. Stories he told Hazel when he got back from the war.

"He had a psychological need to talk, talk, talk when he first came home," she recalls from the living room of their Arvada home. "Then, after a year, he shut up. Didn't talk about the war for about 50 years."

"Guess I figured I'd said enough," replies Haynie, 82, a tall man with a keen memory and a sense of humor best described as no-nonsense.

For nearly three years he slogged through Europe. Rifle squad leader in the 14th Armored Division. First sergeant in the 9th Infantry Division. Participant in and witness to the horrific might of world war.

"You have to be in war to understand what it's like," he says, tone matter-of-fact but guarded. "I lost a lot of friends. I learned to deal with it. No one counseled us how to do it. We saw death every day. You get used to it."

Then, from out of nowhere, the mood swirls 180 degrees. The old soldier knows one of the ways you deal with death - and its memory - is to go somewhere else.

"Did you know that Gen. George Patton once called me a 'dumb sonofabitch?' "

Seems Patton took exception to the sandbags adorning the personnel carrier that was transporting men to another front.

"Sergeant, you dumb sonofabitch, don't you know that sandbags slow you down and use gasoline?" Patton demanded.

"Yessir," replied Haynie, who also knew that they protected his men from enemy bullets.

Patton stomped off. The sandbags stayed in place.

Haynie couldn't have been much more than 20 when he yessir'd the choleric general but held his ground. But by then he was no longer a boy.

"I turned from a boy to man during the battle of Rittershoffen," he says flatly. "That was the turning point of my life."

The two-week epic battle in northeast France - fought deep in the maw of the winter of 1944-45 - claimed thousands of lives.

It was there that Haynie saw the soldier who carefully protected his severed leg. It was there he obeyed insane orders like "jumping in front of a German tank to shoot the treads off it." It was there he watched as the German soldiers - dressed in white against the snow - kept coming and coming, only to be mowed down "like firewood" by the Americans. It was there, enveloped by the bellow and scream of war, that maybe he learned what every soldier has to.

"Did you expect to actually come home from the war, Grandpa, or did you expect to die?" asks Jana Read.

"I expected to die any minute," he says. "You just get used to it."

A shrug.

"There wasn't anything to do but keep going."

Across the burning ruins of Europe. Liberating inmates from POW and concentration camps. Never forgetting their eyes. Never forgetting the bodies everywhere, war's indelible legacy.

Never forgetting that troop train he was on. Bound for Belgium and then on to the South Pacific. Never forgetting how the news came that Japan had surrendered. How the soldiers on board were so happy and crazy "we celebrated by shooting out the windows on the train."

The smile appears. The smile disappears.

"How does it feel to kill? I'm not aware who I killed because of the distance. I'm not even sure I did."

He waits.

"But I sure used up a lot of clips of ammunition."

The room is quiet for a moment. A quiet that spans generations. Everybody is looking at the old soldier. The old soldier who doesn't seem dumb at all.

Ralph McClelland

Like the ocean tides he once navigated, swells of memories rise and fall through the old sailor's mind, moving him back and forth across seven decades, from war to peace, from a great loss to an even greater love.

"There's an ending to everything," Ralph McClelland said. "A beginning, a middle and ending to everything."

He is 91 now and, frankly, "I never expected to live this long." Neither did he expect he would be living without Charlotte, the love of his life whom he lost once, gained back and lost again. But that's what happened. Just like the war happened.

It took eight years for him to finish college, countless years of having to drop out and work to earn enough money to go back. By the time he graduated, his country needed him. So a guy from landlocked Minneapolis decided on the Navy. Go figure.

He became an ensign assigned to the USS Pleiades, a cargo ship cutting her way through the choppy waters of the North Atlantic, running supplies to bases in Iceland. But the sea wasn't only rough - his roommate vomited so often and so violently he got a hernia - it was treacherous.

"Torpedo junction, that's what they called it," recalled -McClelland, talking about the corridor his ship sailed. "German subs were thicker than the hair on a cat."

The subs would stalk the convoys, preying on the slower ships. One convoy started with 40 ships and ended with 20. You went to sleep at night with your life jacket close and your clothes still on.

"That was probably silly," McClelland said. "I mean, if you ever did go into the water, you'd freeze to death pretty quick. Sleeping in your clothes wouldn't have done much. But we did it anyway."

It was on the Pleiades that the young officer met a younger USO dancer named Charlotte Wayne. She was the most gorgeous thing he'd ever seen. Love at first sight exploded under the stars the first night he met her. Sixty-three years later, he would remember the date: May 7, 1944.

Then the war separated them. One day the Dear John letter arrived. She had met someone from her hometown. But she wanted to stay in touch. Their friendship was sacred to her.

The young officer swallowed his terrible hurt and sailed on. That's what you did in the war. You didn't worry about what might happen. "You were either gonna make it or not make it. But you're out there with a bunch of fellows, and you just do what you're told."

What they told him to do next was get on the USS Stokes and sail to the South Pacific. The waters were warmer but even deadlier. McClelland arrived at the invasion of Iwo Jima. The battle, which took five weeks, was the bloodiest of the Pacific theater. In the end, 6,800 Americans and 20,000 Japanese were killed.

McClelland watched the warriors leave the Stokes on 24 landing crafts. Sixty years later he could still see one face.

"Spencer, that was his name. He was from Kentucky. I remember his face before he went ashore. He was a good seaman. He never came back."

After Iwo Jima, the Stokes sailed to Okinawa, where "kamikazes were thicker than the hair on a cat." Any vessel was fair game for an enemy suicide mission. A lot of ships were hit. -McClelland went about his duties on the Stokes thinking, "I wonder if today is our day to die."

But it never was. On Aug. 6, 1945 - McClelland's 29th birthday - the atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima. Nine days later the war was over.

McClelland returned home to work in insurance. Every year, at Christmas he would hear from Charlotte. In 1983, she wrote again. Her husband had died. She wanted to see Ralph. Just one time. He went to her home in Colorado. He was 66. She was 61 - and still gorgeous.

Six months later they were married. Twenty-one years later, Charlotte - "the greatest person I've ever known" - died.

Today, McClelland lives on the sixth floor of a building in an Aurora seniors village. Alone. Able to focus more clearly on the past than the present because his macular degeneration is getting worse. But he gets by.

Once a week, he is visited by Mike Davis, a hospice volunteer. "When I showed up Ralph said to me, 'Hospice? Well, I'm not dead yet, am I?' " laughed Davis.

No, but he had developed prostate cancer. That explained Davis on his doorstep, ready to do odd chores for McClelland, ready to listen to his life's tales.

That was a year ago and -McClelland, as he says, is "still around." Still close with Davis. Still close with his stepson and his stepson's children. Even closer with his memories of war and love. Memories thicker than the hair on a cat.

meadowj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2606

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