Recalling Chatham’s Role In World War II And Honoring Its Veterans

by Ed Fouhy

            The Chatham First Night Committee honored World War II veterans with a luncheon Dec. 29 luncheon at the Chatham VFW as part of the theme of this year’s celebration, which saluted the 1940s. In his keynote speech Ed Fouhy recalled Chatham's contribution to the war effort and paid tribute to the veterans.

            It is a privilege, and I mean that with all the sincerity in my bones, it is a privilege to be invited to speak to this group of World War II veterans, your families and friends. It is a personal privilege because I was a little boy during World War II and you were my heroes.

            The country was mobilized, as it had never been before – or since. The enemy was literally at our shores. German submarines cruised the waters off Cape Cod waiting to ambush and torpedo ships leaving Boston Harbor. Wreckage and sometimes bodies washed up on the beaches of Cape Cod.

            Back then we kids learned to live with rationing, to eat less and grow vegetables in the backyard, to recycle everything – newspapers, tin cans, old tires even our toothpaste tubes. And we were taught to duck under our desks at school when the air raid siren went off. Most of all we were taught to respect and honor the young men and women who had gone off to join the service.

            We wrote letters to you – our brothers, fathers, cousins, friends. One of my cousins married a captain in the airborne. He was killed in Sicily.

            We kids were taught to wave to you when you drove by in truck convoys, so imagine my confusion on the summer day in 1944 when I was standing on Main Street. A convoy of six-by-six Army trucks came down Route 28 headed for Chathamport. I dutifully waved to the soldiers crowding the backs of the trucks and they smiled back.

            But an adult who saw me waving rushed to my side, grabbed me and said, “Don’t wave to those soldiers. They’re German prisoners of war.”

            And that’s how I learned a bit of history about Chatham’s role in World War II.

            Last spring I had conversations about their World War II experiences with II Chatham natives, Dave Ryder, who was a fisherman and therefore was not drafted during the war, and Reggie Nickerson, who, as a 16-year-old, patrolled the beaches as a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary. When he was old enough, Reggie joined the Army Air Corps, though the war ended before he went overseas,

            Dave, the fisherman, now 94 years old and living in a retirement home in Brewster, told me that after a day’s work on his own boat he would often go out at night as skipper of a wooden hulled yacht based in Harwich Port. It was armed only with a rusty deck-mounted cannon. He and the crew would search for German submarines that operated off the coast. Fortunately they never spotted one, he told me, because they weren’t sure that rusty gun would fire.

            Reggie told me he was working for the town highway department after graduating from Chatham High School, before he went off to the Army. Reggie said he supervised the prisoners of war who came to operate the bulldozers and heavy equipment that set the town back on its feet after the devastating hurricane in September of 1944 blew down trees and power lines, blocking the roads.

            I’ve learned a great deal from Dave and Reggie and others about how vital this town was to the war effort and therefore how highly appropriate it is that the First Night Committee invited you to this luncheon.

            Chatham was home to five military installations – not counting the Acme laundry where the German POWs worked. There were three Coast Guard facilities, including the lighthouse, a lifesaving station on Morris Island that doubled as a base for anti-submarine operations, and a navigation facility.

            There was a highly secret Army base I haven’t been able to learn much about and, of course, there was the vital and super-secret Marconi radio station operated by the Navy that still stands in Chathamport. It was briefly guarded by a detachment of Marines, so all of the services were represented. The Wayside Inn was a USO facility where the servicemen and women could go to relax.

            Many of the service members stationed in Chatham were women; they were Coast Guard SPARS at the navigation station, and many of the personnel at the Marconi facility were females the Navy called WAVES. There was a gender imbalance that may have had something to do with the transfer of the Marine detachment out of Chatham shortly after they arrived. They were replaced by civilian guards on the theory, perhaps, that the civilians were less likely to distract the WAVES than those frisky marines. I’d like to repeat that is only my theory. 

            But for many of you the war was much more dangerous than code-breaking duty in Chatham. We’ve all read the books and seen the movies but in my brief experience with combat they are a pale version of the reality of World War II. Those of us who were not there can only imagine the smell of gun powder, the thunder of artillery, the long stretches of boredom broken by moments of sheer terror.

            My wife Barbara and I had a small glimpse of the terror of war while we were visiting southern France a few years ago. We were guests at the Negresco Hotel in Nice on the Fourth of July. We received an invitation from the hotel manager to a cocktail party and reception for his American guests, to celebrate Independence Day. We were delighted to attend along with perhaps 10-15 others.

            After a gracious welcome, the manager, who was speaking in French-accented English, called our attention to a man standing in the group. I don’t remember his name, let’s call him Bill. The Frenchmen introduced Bill and his wife and said they were frequent guests at the Negresco, a grand old hotel right on the beach. Then the Frenchman told the story of how he met Bill.

            It was just days after American soldiers came ashore on the beach just outside the hotel. They had to fight hard against the Nazis to get a toehold, but they got it. Their next objective was an airfield five or six miles away. But the road had been heavily mined by the Germans and Bill’s unit had been ordered to clear the mines.

            He appeared at the hotel and said to the manager, “I need all of your mattresses.” The manager asked why and Bill told him they’d be used to protect the soldiers he commanded as they cleared the mines. So all the beds were stripped and the mattresses used to help the US Army advance on the Nice airport.

            Later Bill, the American soldier, and the Frenchman became good friends and after the war, Bill, later joined by his wife, became frequent guests at the Negresco.

            “But,” said the French hotel manager, “ever since that day when he first came to my hotel, when Bill checks out I always look to see if he’s taken any of my mattresses.”

            That is just a small glimpse of the respect and honor that millions of people who were liberated from Nazi or Japanese rule hold for the young soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who liberated them.

            And you have not been forgotten.  The name of the boulevard that runs along the water in front of the Negresco Hotel in Nice, France is Avenue des Americans.

            When I was invited to deliver this talk, I guess it was expected that I would invoke the name that Tom Brokaw, my former colleague at NBC News, gave you: the greatest generation.

            The fact is our country has been blessed with a number of great generations, including those Puritans who settled this land, the pioneers who pushed west, and the soldiers who fought the Civil War to save our national union. They were all great generations.  You too represent a great generation – you served your country in a massive worldwide conflict. You faced death in the islands of the Pacific as well as in the cities and villages of Europe and North Africa, and in the North Atlantic just off our coast, a watery graveyard for many ships and men. 

            You were ordinary people faced with a task on a scale that even today is hard to imagine, and you rose to greatness by your service, your courage and your patriotism – real patriotism, not the empty gestures that sometime pass for patriotism today.

            As I thought about those acts of patriotism, courage, compassion, self-sacrifice offered by this great generation, words to honor you failed me. So I turned to the words of another son of Massachusetts, the distinguished Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He graduated with the class of 1861, and went off to the Civil War along with most of his classmates. The survivors gathered years later to reflect on those who had been lost and to consider what war had done to them. Justice Holmes’ words are more than a century old but I think they express the sentiment I feel for you:

            Holmes said, “The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report for those who come after us.

            “But above all we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade and will look downward and dig or from Aspiration her axe and cord and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.”

            So spoke Oliver Wendell Holmes, a veteran of the Union Army.

            Those who know you will attest to this fact: You have brought to the work of building your lives a mighty heart. I know a little bit about those mighty hearts.

             Many of you left the service after the Japanese signed the surrender documents on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Harbor. But some stayed on in the military.

            The officers and senior non-commissioned officers, the men who taught me how to be a Marine Corps second lieutenant, were veterans of World War II; they seldom spoke of it but we saw their campaign ribbons. They were the instructors and the commanders who taught us, the generation that came next, how to fight and eventually how to win the Cold War.  Of course there were some hot spots in that 40-year campaign – Korea, Vietnam - but nothing on the scale of World War II.

            So let me conclude by offering a salute to you. I learned in my first day at boot camp that a salute is a mutual gesture of respect, a long-held military tradition that honors both the officer saluted and the lower rank whose salute is returned. May I ask the veterans now to stand and for the rest of you here in the hall to offer a salute or your own gesture of respect to this generation, those who are here and those who are not -- all of them whose hearts were touched with fire.

            Thank you.

            Chatham resident Ed Fouhy spent 25 years as a reporter, producers and news executive.  He was Saigon bureau chief for CBS during the height of the Vietnam War and produced the 1988 and 1992 presidential debates.  The winner of five Emmy Awards, he was a founder and, for five years, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism.  He served in the Marine Corps officer and was cited for leadership under combat conditions in Lebanon.