This Memorial Day we proudly salute our hometown heroes

STORIES FROM THE FRONT


HEROES— Ventura County residents, from left, Rosy Nolan, Paul Miller, Marvin Serviss and Helen Crowell are among the shrinking number of Americans who can say they played a role in defeating the forces of Germany and Japan during World War II.

HEROES— Ventura County residents, from left, Rosy Nolan, Paul Miller, Marvin Serviss and Helen Crowell are among the shrinking number of Americans who can say they played a role in defeating the forces of Germany and Japan during World War II.

The voices of a fading generation will one day be lost.

There are 1.2 million World War II veterans in the United States. About 1,000 of them die every day.

In Ventura County, an estimated 11 percent, or 5,500, of the area’s 50,000 U.S. military veterans fought in the conflict, said Mike McManus, Ventura County veteran services officer.

“It was called the greatest generation for good reason,” McManus said. “As we lose that generation, we’re going to lose out on history.”

In honor of Memorial Day, May 27, the Acorn sat down with four local World War II vets.

These are are their stories.

Rosy Nolan, Camarillo

Emmett “Rosy” Nolan stood on the shores of Normandy in France and stared at the English Channel in silence.

The year was 1995, and the picturesque beachhead looked far different than it did 50 years earlier when Nolan parachuted into France as an 18-year-old paratrooper with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division during the massive Allied invasion in 1944, known as D-Day.

The Camarillo resident had just retired from Thousand Oaks High School as a football coach and history teacher and was taking a five-week tour of Europe with his wife, daughter and grandson to visit where he’d served during the war, including the beachhead which saw the largest military invasion in history.

“I remember we jumped into Normandy about 1 o’clock in the morning with the 82nd Airborne Division before the beach landers started at daybreak,” said Nolan, 88. “We were just a bunch of kids. You had been built up to know what was coming and you learned how to find a hole or get behind a tree or in a ditch real quick.”

Nolan’s daughter, Linda Williamson of Camarillo, said although her dad is a talkative man, he remained silently introspective during much of his return trip to Europe, especially when visiting the places where he’d fought in World War II.

“Not a word came out of his mouth,” said Williamson, who added that her father even remained tight-lipped when locals repeatedly approached her father to thank him for his service so many years earlier.

Nolan is one of 16 million Americans who served in World War II from 1941 to 1945. The war resulted in the death of 400,000 Americans who fought in the Pacific, Europe and Africa.

Williamson said it wasn’t until their trip through Europe that she found a deep appreciation for her father’s service.

“We listened to his stories growing up, but I didn’t make the full connection,” Williamson said.

Nolan, the youngest of 12 brothers and sisters, grew up on a farm in northern Oklahoma with his mother and siblings. His father died three days after he was born from injuries he sustained in a car accident.

The family struggled through the Great Depression with the rest of America, and Nolan remembers shooting quail for food with his older brothers.

Life on the farm was difficult, but the brothers learned skills, including how to shoot, that would serve them well during the war.

Nolan and his three older brothers served in combat units during World War II. They all returned home.

The veteran credited their survival to having lived on a farm.

He recalled the harsh winter of 1944 in the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He said the dozen men on his squad were hungry, so he found a chicken yard with an old rooster and six hens.

“I was the only boy that carried a switchblade to cut yourself out of a parachute, and mine was razor sharp being a farm boy,” Nolan said. “I was the only guy that knew how to wring a chicken’s neck, so I skinned that old rooster and six hens, and my squad ate them all.”

The Battle of the Bulge—the Nazi’s final European offensive— cost thousands of Allied and German soldiers their lives not only because of the war but because of the bitter cold and lack of medicine.

Nolan called the experience “a miserable life.” His toes were frostbitten and he used his knowhow as a farmhand to keep his fellow soldiers from starving.

“He cleaned out some sand and snow out of his helmet and milked the cows using his helmet,” Williamson said. “Every soldier got a cup of warm milk, and that was their Christmas dinner in 1944. They would’ve starved to death. He was always scrounging because he was a survivor. ”

Nolan’s company started the winter with 150 men, but by January 1945 there were only 50 left.

“I’m blessed to be here from what I’ve been through,” Nolan said.

The paratrooper returned to the United States at the age of 22. He attended college at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where he played football.

The Oklahoma National Guard called him back to active duty to serve as a captain in the Korean War.

After Korea, Nolan married, had two children and became a teacher and a football coach. He was hired by Oxnard High School in 1965 and has lived in California ever since.

Nolan’s Camarillo home is decorated with his war memorabilia and numerous awards.

He occasionally visits high school history classrooms and shares his stories of war and growing up on the Oklahoma farm, which his family still owns.

When asked about Memorial Day and what it means to him, Nolan recalls his mother’s favorite gospel song that he often thinks of now.

“Precious memories/how they linger/and how they ever flood my soul/In the stillness of the midnight/precious memories/ scenes unfold.”

Stephanie Guzman

Paul Miller, Newbury Park

Ten-thousand feet above Frankfurt, Germany, the pilot of the Lassie Come Home, a B-17 Flying Fortress on its 28th combat mission, gave out the command his men had been dreading to hear since they formed as a crew in Tampa Bay, Fla., a year earlier.

“Bail out!”

The order meant one of two horrors awaited the nine-man crew—death or imprisonment.

But waist gunner Staff Sgt. Paul Miller, his close friend ball turret gunner Staff Sgt. Howard Bobb and the rest of the men in the rear of the badly damaged bomber didn’t get the message because the radio was temporarily disabled. It was Dec. 29, 1944.

What they heard was the deafening flak explosion that had rocked the ship moments earlier, taking out two of the plane’s four engines as the men were over their target: a Nazi railroad yard responsible for moving oil, supplies and troops to the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stop the Allied advance.

Though they were still awaiting final word from the pilot, Miller and Bobb, who could see flames billowing from the plane’s left wing, grabbed their parachutes, patted each other on the back and headed for the open escape door.

At the very last second, the 30-year-old Miller felt the nosediving plane begin to stabilize.

“I pulled him back. I wouldn’t let him jump,” Miller recalled. “I said, ‘The fire’s out.”

Stepping away from the open door, Miller reached for the radio and called to pilot Jack Furrer.

Furrer, 20, responded, “I need help!”

Without hesitation, Miller headed for the front of the plane, only then learning that the bombardier, the navigator and the top gunner had already abandoned ship. But when he opened the door to the bomb bay, he made an even more frightening discovery.

They still had their bombs on board.

“When you’ve got two engines out, you’ve got to get rid of your weight. But when (the bombardier) tried to salvo the bombs, they wouldn’t go,” he said.

So Miller, an 11-month veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department when he was drafted in 1943, made a courageous choice. He descended into the bomb hangar full of thousands of pounds of explosives to find out what the problem was.

“The bomb door below is open and I’ve got no chute on because there was no way I could make it down there with my chute on,” said Miller, recalling his brush with death. “I see that four or five bombs are stuck hanging from one shackle.”

He was able to reach out and flip a switch to release the bombs by hand.

Once he did this, Miller climbed back into the ship and sent word to the pilot to release the rest.

His heroism did not end there.

Continuing forward to the pilot’s deck, Miller, the oldest member of the crew, discovered the pilot alone, trapped in his chair, his flak suit caught in his seat. The copilot had followed orders and bailed out.

Miller released Furrer, who quickly stabilized the bomber and, with the help of a lone Mustang fighter plane leading the way, flew the broken plane back to safety at Thorpe Abbotts air base.

It would be the crew’s final mission. Of the four men who bailed out, one was killed by German civilians on the ground and three became prisoners of war. They ultimately returned home.

For their actions that day, both Furrer and Miller were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Miller, now 98, is a longtime resident of Newbury Park. He lives in the Sunrise Assisted Living facility in Westlake Village with his wife of 75 years, Harriet.

Kyle Jorrey

Marvin Serviss, T.O.

One night in late March 1945, Tech. Sgt. Marvin Serviss received orders to lead eight men across the Rhine River in Germany.

Serviss, 31 at the time, was second-in-command of a 28-man Army platoon, whose primary mission was to perform reconnaissance on the German troops occupying Europe during World War II.

“We got to the Rhine and we were blocked,” the Thousand Oaks resident said. “The Rhine was maybe a mile wide, and we didn’t know what was on the other side, if there were German troops there or not. So they sent a patrol over. I was in charge of the patrol.”

Alert for danger, the soldiers quietly crossed the river in two boats. Once across, they met darkness and “eerie silence,” he said.

After scouting the area, Serviss sent a beacon back to the rest of his division—allowing them all to advance across the river and into the heart of Germany. The war in Europe ended less than two months later, and Serviss earned a Bronze Star for his bravery.

“Once you were over the Rhine it was the end of the party,” he said.

Serviss, a Philadelphia native, was drafted in 1941 as part of the U.S. Army’s 26th Infantry Division. After spending several years training and patrolling the American Atlantic coast, the division was deployed to Normandy, France.

They landed in September 1944, three months after D-Day.

“They thought it would be a walk-in—like you would just walk in and take over—so they didn’t send us with winter clothing,” Serviss said. “But (the Normandy campaign) lasted around six months. There was more problem with frostbite than anything else.”

By winter 1944 his division had become allies with the Maquis, the underground members of the French Resistance. As the division moved through Normandy toward the German border, Serviss’ platoon was usually among the first to raid enemy lines.

“We made contact with the local Maquis there,” he said. “They would sneak us across (the German lines) at night, and they hid us during the daytime. They’d hide us in barns and so forth. Then we’d come out at night, scout around, spot the Germans and find their positions, then report the information back.”

Sometimes they would hide in German-occupied towns and villages for weeks at a time. There were many close calls.

Worrying about whether they’d be captured wasn’t an option.

“There’s a saying: ‘What will be, will be,’” said Serviss, who turns 100 today. “If your boat’s got your name on it, it’s going to take you no matter what. So you can take solace in that. This is the philosophy that kept you going. If you start worrying about what could happen, you’ll go bananas. And a lot did.”

When Serviss was deployed overseas, he had left behind his wife, Ruth, then 23 and pregnant with the couple’s first child. He wrote home as often as he could.

“If I got a letter I knew he was still alive and not in trouble,” Ruth, now 92, said.

Serviss said he “never wrote about the bad parts.”

Now, 68 years after the end of WWII, he still remembers seeing 18-year-old soldiers getting killed on their first day of combat and medics jumping between foxholes to treat the injured as bullets flew by.

Serviss said facing danger was the price of defending his country.

“Everybody did their part,” he said. “We did our job and it was successful.”

Darleen Principe

Helen Hartwell Crowell, T.O.

One of the most profound inventions of humankind was a wartime secret hidden on a college campus in Ames, Iowa.

Seven decades have passed since the secret was detonated in a blinding shot of light seen for 200 miles and a monumental cloud of smoke reaching 40,000 feet above the hills of central New Mexico. Its partial blueprint was laid out in pages that Helen Hartwell Crowell may or may not have had tucked in the crook of her arm.

The 92-year-old still won’t say what the documents contained. Secrecy is as important to her now as it was in 1943, when she was hired as a secretary for metallurgist Harley Wilhelm and nuclear chemist Frank Spedding, members of a clandestine Iowa State University team that developed a process for producing large quantities of pure uranium metal for atomic energy.

The discovery was part of a broader top-secret American effort, dubbed the Manhattan Project, that led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear bomb.

“I was just a secretary but I knew things that were very important. We didn’t talk about it. It’s still secret,” she said.

In written recollections of that time, Crowell said, “Only a few at the top knew what the project was all about.” Those involved knew only the assignment they were given. “When we were questioned about what we were doing . . . our answer was we were making lipstick for female spies.”

The secretary was instructed to “not tell anybody anything.”

“They said there were spies at the campus. They were sure,” she said.

There were also concerns that the reactive materials that made up the bomb could cause health problems. Everyone involved with the project had their blood tested every six months.

Despite her proximity to the process, Crowell did not know that a test explosion was set to go off near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.

“I read about it just like everybody else,” she said.

The powerful weapon changed the world.

Crowell’s late husband, U.S. Marine Steve Crowell, was preparing to invade Japan when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945. He said the decision saved his life. His wife, privy to so many sealed details, did not realize the attacks were coming.

“I was as astonished as everyone else was, but it ended the war,” she said. “We were all so happy that it ended the war. That was the main feeling.”

Crowell’s only child, Colleen Wolfson of Thousand Oaks, said she’s just starting to learn about the two years her mother spent with the Manhattan Project.

“What she did was an important part of history,” Wolfson said.

On Oct. 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves presented Crowell and others with the Manhattan Project team at Iowa State with an Army-Navy award for excellence in production. Crowell wears the pin, tarnished with age: Red, white and blue stripes extend from two sides of a circle with an “E” engraved in the middle.

“I’m proud of my part in ending the war,” she said.

Anna Bitong