Remembering our WWII fallen

Eau Claire, WI,  native Lieutenant Dallas Books and his crew, the 579th Bomb Squadron of the 392nd Bomb Group [Dallas is in front row, second from right]

By Patti K. See for the EC Leader Telegram

May 8 was the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day commemorating Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of WWII in Europe. On Aug. 15, we’ll celebrate eight decades since Victory Over Japan Day.

In 2016, lifelong history buff Don Milne set out to write a short profile of each American WWII fallen service member every lunch break at his bank job. His goal was to honor these men and women as more than just names on a plaque or tombstone. Eventually Milne compiled more than 1,300 bios.

He soon realized that even writing one story a day, he’d need more than a thousand years to cover the 421,000 plus casualties.

This number is mind boggling. Imagine all the people currently living in Chippewa and Eau Claire counties. Now double that. You’d still be about 75,000 bodies short.

In early 2020 Milne started a nonprofit, Stories Behind the Stars (SBS), to continue his work. A trove of volunteers joined him, including 1993 UW-Eau Claire graduate Krista Finstad Hanson, now living in Minneapolis. So far, she has completed 210 profiles. When her job as an English teacher isn’t too hectic, she writes four a month. When Hanson read about SBS in a newspaper on Memorial Day, 2020, she felt drawn to help. She had worked on several historical projects, including researching her grandfather’s and great uncles’ WWII service.

During the pandemic, Hanson found that writing for SBS was something she could do via online resources such as Find a Grave, newspapers.com and Ancestry even when libraries closed. This native of Sparta started with her home county, Monroe. She wrote a profile of each of the 92 service members killed. Her first writeup is still one of her most memorable: a sailor who died when a Japanese submarine torpedoed the USS Indianapolis as it returned from a highly classified mission carrying materials for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The ship went down a few days after its top-secret delivery on July 26, 1945; the Navy had no idea where it was. A 2016 movie, “Men of Courage”, captured the sailors’ harrowing five nights in open water and their stunning rescue.

Until her first assignment, Hanson didn’t know that tragic story, famously retold in 1975 by a salty veteran in “Jaws.” Quint snarled, “Eleven hundred men went into the water, 316 men come out; the sharks took the rest.”

Though genealogists, history lovers, students and retirees have joined the Storytelling and Research Corps to memorialize those Americans who died in WWII, more volunteers are needed. There are still around 353,500 more heroes to write up. SBS offers an interactive webpage with training videos. No experience necessary.

[To volunteer, visit www.storiesbehindthestars.org]

Profiles are organized around specific battles or cemeteries. For instance, during the attack on Pearl Harbor 2,341 service members died; on D-Day 2,502 were killed. Over 8,700 are buried in Arlington Cemetery. All have had their stories told.

Heartbreaking tales like those of Francis Day, chief water tender. When his ship was bombed, he helped 15 of his smaller- sized shipmates escape through a submerged port hole. Francis knew his broad shoulders would not fit; he went down with the USS Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor.

Or of aircraft commander Eldred “Jack” Whipple, who named his B-17 bomber “Betty Lee” after his new bride. Around the time of their wedding, when he was 28, Jack wrote that his greatest ambition was to become the oldest living pilot. Within a year he was shot down by German fighters. Even with a mangled leg, he continued to fly the plane until his five surviving crew members safely bailed out.

Currently each state organizes volunteers to report on war dead in that state. Wisconsin’s director, Jean Cookle of Door County, discovered Stories Behind the Stars in 2022 just after she retired. She says, “At first I didn’t think I was qualified ... During the next few weeks I had a little voice inside me pestering me.”

Cookle’s father was part of the wave of over 34,000 American troops that stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day. She stepped up because of her dad and his buddies. She says, “It’s so important that these young brave heroes’ stories are told and that their ultimate sacrifice is not forgotten.”

Roughly 320,000 Wisconsinites served in the armed forces during WWII. More than 7,900 died, including 23 students and alumni from Eau Claire State Teachers College. A plaque outside the current site of UW-Eau Claire’s Veterans Center honors them. One is Chippewa boy John “Bud” Naset, who worked at Gutknecht’s, a corner store, during his first semester of college. He died of an accidental gunshot wound in Büdesheim, Germany, while guarding Nazi war criminals a month after they surrendered. Bud was 18 years old; three years later his remains came home to Forest Hill Cemetery.

Another is alum and lifelong Eau Claire resident Dallas Books, whose peers said he could fly any aircraft in the Army Air Corps. On his first mission with the 579th Bomb Squadron of the 392nd Bomb Group, Dallas crash-landed at the Brit base after German fighters shot the nose gear assembly off his plane “Sweet Chariot.” The B24 was nicknamed the “Flying Coffin” for its difficulty to control and its single exit in the rear.

On Dallas’s eighth mission, his lumbering “Old Glory” was shot down by German fighters. His last words were meant to comfort the nine members of his crew. He radioed a nearby plane, “Hold on a minute — we’ll be all right.” At age 25, he left behind his wife and 2-year-old son in Durand.

The burden of any war rests upon the shoulders of young people who serve. Headstones might offer a glimpse — realizing a soldier perished at 17 years old — but profiles written by the Storytelling and Research Corps provide windows into these many lives. A new app allows smartphone users to photograph a name on a grave or a memorial and be directed to the story behind that star.

No project could capture what these service members lost: an opportunity to return home and the privilege of settling into ordinary lives like the rest of us.