Nearly 80 years after World War II, their voices recall the struggle

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This story appears in the June 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Seventy-nine years ago, the most far-flung, destructive, and lethal war in history approached its end. World War II lived up to its name: It was a true global conflict that pitted the Allied powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, China, and their smaller allies—against Germany, Japan, Italy, and a few other Axis nations. Some 70 million men and women served in the armed forces, taking part in the greatest military mobilization in history. Civilians, however, did most of the suffering and dying. Of the estimated 66 million people who perished, nearly 70 percent—some 46 million—were civilians, including six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Tens of millions more were uprooted from their homes and countries, many of them living in displaced persons camps for years to come.

Equipment and supplies litter the island of Iwo Jima, scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war in the Pacific. After five days of fierce fighting, U.S. marines raised the American flag atop Mount Suribachi (background). But the fighting would rage for another three weeks, driving even battle-hardened warriors to their limit. Said one veteran: “I came across marines sitting on the ground, hands to their faces, sobbing their hearts out.”

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

The war’s aftereffects were as staggering as its scale. It laid the groundwork for the world we’ve known for more than seven decades, from the dawn of the nuclear age to the creation of Israel to the emergence of the United States and Soviet Union as the world’s dueling superpowers. It also sparked the formation of international alliances such as the United Nations and NATO, all designed to prevent such a cataclysm from happening again.

An American soldier comes ashore on Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of German-occupied France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. With some 7,000 ships carrying nearly 160,000 troops, the largest seaborne invasion in history set the stage for the liberation of Europe.

Robert Capa, International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

Yet, with the passage of time, public awareness of the war and its almost unfathomable consequences has faded, becoming as dim as the sepia tones of an old photograph. At the same time, firsthand witnesses are dwindling in number. According to U.S. government statistics, fewer than 400,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in the war—2.5 percent—were still alive in 2019.

But thanks to the willingness of some of the last survivors to share their stories, we’ve been given a valuable gift: a chance to bring the war into sharp focus again by viewing it through their eyes. With no access to the internet or other forms of today’s instant communications, most of these men and women knew little of the world beyond their communities before the war. By wrenching them out of their familiar settings, it exposed them to an overwhelming array of new experiences and tested them in previously unimaginable ways. Many found the challenges exhilarating.

That was true for 18-year-old Betty Webb, who was recruited to join Britain’s top secret code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. Webb was one of countless women whose work was crucial to their countries’ war efforts and who, in the process, found a sense of self-worth and independence they’d never known before.

Harry T. Stewart, Jr., the 20-year-old grandson of a man born into slavery, proved himself as well. A New Yorker who had never driven a car before the war, Stewart became a fighter pilot in the famed all-black unit known as the Tuskegee Airmen, flying 43 combat missions and winning a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Voices from around the world

John ‘Jack’ Thurman, U.S. Marine Corps On February 23, 1945, six U.S. Marines planted an American flag atop a battle-blasted hill on the island of Iwo Jima, a fiercely defended Japanese stronghold. The sight of the flag lifted the spirits of the weary marines, remembers John “Jack” Thurman. “Even after dark,” says Thurman, “the artillery shells would go off, and by the flash you could see that flag up there, still waving. Still standing. I couldn’t help but think of Fort McHenry and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ The bombs bursting in air really did give proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

Photograph by Robert Clark

These triumphs are inspiring and should be celebrated. Yet what dominates the survivors’ stories are the tragedies experienced by so many of them, Allied and Axis alike. Their accounts are testament to the sheer hell of World War II—the brutality, suffering, and terror experienced, and inflicted, by both sides. Particularly haunting is the testimony of Victor Gregg, a British soldier captured by the Germans. His prison was destroyed in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Gregg, who witnessed the fiery deaths of German civilians there—some 25,000 perished—was left with an abiding sense of guilt and shame. “These were women and children,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. We were supposed to be the good guys.” His story, like the others, should remain indelibly imprinted on our minds. 

Lynne Olson is the author of Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War. This is her first story for National Geographic.

A fallen Soviet soldier still grips a hand grenade while another takes aim at German invaders during the Battle of Stalingrad. The battle—one of the largest and longest in history—went on for 200 days, reducing the city (since renamed Volgograd) to rubble. Both sides suffered staggering losses,but Soviet forces ultimately prevailed, destroying the entire German Sixth Army and turning the tide of war in Europe.

Roger-Viollet/Getty Images

‘I wanted to do something more for the war effort than bake sausage rolls.’ Betty Webb, British intelligence

“It was in that room there that I signed the Official Secrets Act.” Betty Webb, 97, points with her walking stick to a ground floor room in the baronial mansion at Bletchley Park, Britain’s legendary top secret code-breaking facility during World War II. Through the bay window, a massive desk is visible. “There was a senior intelligence officer seated behind that desk,” she says, “and I remember he had a handgun lying casually beside him, right where that coffee cup is now. I was told to sign and made to understand in no uncertain terms that I could never discuss anything about my work here with anyone. I signed. It was a sobering moment. I was 18 years old at the time.”

That was in 1941. Britain was at war. German troops had already overrun much of Europe.

German leaders believed messages encrypted by their Enigma machines—this model could generate 103 sextillion combinations—were all but unbreakable. Bletchley personnel proved them wrong.

Webb had been taking a home economics course but joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service—the women’s army—because, as she put it, “I wanted to do something more for the war effort than bake sausage rolls.” Webb was bilingual—she’d grown up with a German au pair and had been an exchange student in Germany—so she was ordered to report to Bletchley, an hour or so north of London. “It was so secret I had no idea what it was—nobody did!—let alone what I was getting into.”

Initially Webb was put to work cataloging the thousands of encrypted German radio messages that British listening posts were intercepting each day. But as the war progressed, she moved to a more creative role: paraphrasing priceless nuggets of intelligence gleaned by the code breakers so no one would suspect it had been obtained by broken codes.

Decades would pass before those who worked at Bletchley Park were allowed to speak about what they did during the war.

“We had to make it sound as though it was information we’d picked up from spies or stolen documents or aerial reconnaissance,” she said. “The fact that we’d broken German and Japanese military codes was a closely guarded secret, known only to a very few people.”

Webb enjoyed the work. “I liked the deviousness of it,” she says with a smile. She also worked on intercepted Japanese messages and was so good at paraphrasing their contents that in June 1945, after the war in Europe ended, she was sent to Washington to help the American war effort in the Pacific. “I flew over in a flying boat,” she recalls. “It was the first time I’d ever been up in a plane. I sent my parents a postcard from Washington. I’m sure they must have wondered what I was doing, but of course they never asked, and anyway I could never tell them.”

Decades would pass before any of the people at Bletchley were allowed to speak of their work during the war. “Both of my parents had died by then, so they never knew,” she says. “All the secrecy made it tough to get a job after the war, especially for the men, since you couldn’t tell employers anything about your war years other than that you’d worked at some place called Bletchley Park.”

Webb eventually found work at a school whose headmaster had been at Bletchley. “I never knew him at the time,” she says, “but when he saw on my application that I’d been at Bletchley too, no words needed to be said, no awkward questions asked. I got the job.” —Roff Smith

‘If you feel nothing, you’re not human. And in the end we’re all human.’ Yevsei Rudinsky, Soviet navigator

The war came for Yevsei Rudinsky, a student and gymnast, when he was sent to a recruitment station and was told the country needed 100,000 pilots. “I didn’t dream of aviation, but I really liked to study,” says Rudinsky, 98. Drawn to charts and astronomy, he trained to become a navigator in Russia’s far north, where polar pilots taught their inexperienced charges to orient in treacherous weather without reliable maps. His baptism into combat came in the skies above Kursk, scene of the war’s biggest tank battle. “I flew a dive bomber, Petlyakov PE-2. We lovingly called it Peshka,” meaning a chess pawn. He recalls fear only after landing. “When you see how many holes you have in your plane, or how the Messerschmitts attacked you, then you start to feel.” He adds: “If you feel nothing, you’re not human. And in the end we’re all human.” —Eve Conant

‘We did not bury dead bodies in the winter in Stalingrad. Corpses were piled up. There was no place to bury them.’ Maria Rokhlina, combat medic, Russia

The fighting ended 75 years ago, but Maria Rokhlina still feels the war in her hands, in every finger. Born in Ukraine, she dreamed of becoming a pilot. But by 1941, when she was 16, the Nazis were advancing deep into her homeland. “I stepped from my school desk into the war,” she says. She became a combat medic and served with the Soviet forces for four years.

One day, as she was helping ferry a wounded soldier across the roiling Dniepr River, her oar broke, so she paddled through the bone-chilling water with her bare hands. The pain in her fingers is still so severe that she takes injections in each joint for relief.

In 1942 Rokhlina became trapped in the besieged city of Stalingrad. The battle raged for more than six months, reducing the city to ruins and decimating its population. Winter temperatures regularly plunged below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Rokhlina holed up with Soviet troops in a tractor factory, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper or wood to burn. “We had to warm each other with our bodies,” she says. “We took an oath there—never to forget Stalingrad, never to forget those who stood hugging each other” in what she calls “warming circles.”

Then there are the memories Rokhlina has tried to forget but can’t: the heat of a dying soldier’s intestines as she tried to push them back into his abdomen. Or her fellow medic, Valentina, raped and killed by the Germans, her breasts sliced off. “I cannot forgive them for what they did and what I saw.”

But like the heating circles, the horrors forged bonds. A Russian soldier, on first sight of her, promised to propose if they survived the war. They were married for 48 years. —Eve Conant

‘They transferred us to a prison in Dresden and told us we were to be shot the next morning.’ Victor Gregg, British rifleman

An offer of a bun and a cup of hot tea sounded awfully good to Victor Gregg on that raw London day in October 1937—enticing enough to follow a recruiter back to his office and sign up for the British Army. “It was my 18th birthday,” recalls Gregg, now a hundred. “And you know, as far as I recall, I never did get that cup of tea.”

Instead he got a harrowing front-row seat to World War II, from start to finish. After qualifying as a sharpshooter, Gregg was posted briefly to India and was serving in Palestine when the war broke out in September 1939. He spent the next three years in the north African desert, on covert missions behind enemy lines. Later he became a paratrooper and took part in the invasion of Italy. In September 1944 he was dropped into the Battle of Arnhem—a failed Allied attempt to secure a bridge over the Rhine River.

“They told us it would be a walkover,” he recalls. “Instead, we ran into some Panzer divisions nobody seemed to have reckoned on.” The fighting was brutal, hand to hand, and the British paratroopers were overrun. Gregg was captured and sent to a labor camp near Dresden, Germany.

That winter he made two unsuccessful escape attempts and as punishment was sent to work in a soap factory. He and another POW sabotaged the factory, causing it to burn to the ground—an act for which they were sentenced to death. “They transferred us to a prison in Dresden and told us we were to be shot the next morning,” Gregg said.

Fate intervened. That night British and American planes began raining firebombs on Dresden. The prison took a direct hit, and Gregg escaped through a broken wall. He says the horrors he saw over the next few days would haunt him for the rest of his life and fill him with guilt and shame. “Until then my war had been soldiers fighting other soldiers, but these were women and children, civilians,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. We were supposed to be the good guys.”

Gregg escaped from Dresden in the aftermath of the bombing and made his way east to join the advancing Soviet Army. He was with them in Leipzig the day Germany surrendered.

After six years of living on the edge, he found it impossible to settle into postwar civilian life. He says he sought out risk and danger, whether it was riding motorcycles, doing clandestine work for the British intelligence agency MI6, or involving himself with underground pro-democracy movements behind the Iron Curtain.

Memories of Dresden proved to be a particularly heavy burden. But recently Gregg was invited there to give a talk about his experiences. In the audience was a woman in her early 80s who, as a young girl, had survived the Dresden bombing but lost a leg. As they spoke after his lecture, Gregg says, he found the inner peace he’d been seeking for decades. “Somehow, at last, I felt forgiven.” —Roff Smith

‘The poor guys who had to be up on the deck in the North Atlantic, they were mighty cold.’ R.R. ‘Russell’ Clark, U.S. sailor

When a football injury left Russell Clark with a hernia, he knew he’d be disqualified for military service. But 18-year-old Clark, born and raised on a Kansas farm, was determined to join his two brothers at war. He paid for the operation to correct his condition, then enlisted.

By early 1945 Clark was somewhere in the North Atlantic, working in the engine room of the escort destroyer U.S.S. Farquhar. “It was hot and steamy down there—100 degrees,” recalls 95-year-old Clark.

Despite the long, hot hours below deck, Clark considered himself lucky. “The poor guys who had to be up on the deck in the North Atlantic, they were mighty cold,” he says. His one brush with enemy came the morning after Germany’s surrender. A Nazi sub that apparently hadn’t gotten the memo bore down on the Farquhar.

“We had no choice,” he says. “We made a torpedo run on them.”

An oil slick was all that remained. —Bill Newcott

‘All those burning cities made me a pacifist. And I’ve only become more of one as the years have gone by.’ Wilhelm Simonsohn, German pilot

Until Wilhelm Simonsohn walked into Warsaw in September 1939, he hadn’t seen the consequences of war up close. The 19-year-old spent the 18-day German invasion of Poland in a spotter plane, guiding tanks and infantry to their targets far below. From thousands of feet in the air, the first days of the war seemed like a great adventure.

All that changed when Simonsohn drove into the captured Polish capital, shattered by German bombers in the closing days of the campaign. Some 20,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the assault, one of the war’s first air assaults on a civilian population. The smell of rotting bodies trapped under the rubble is what Simonsohn remembers most vividly.

“I had to come to grips with a city destroyed by bombs,” he says. “I aged 10 years in a single moment. It made such an impression on me I said to myself, I’ll never drop a bomb on a human being. And I stuck by that.”

Simonsohn was no Nazi. Barely a year before, his adoptive father Leopold—a Jewish convert to Christianity decorated for his service in the trenches of WWI—had been swept up on Kristallnacht, a nationwide spasm of anti-Jewish violence that foreshadowed worse to come.

Sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, Leopold was released after Simonsohn rushed home to Hamburg from basic training and begged local Nazi bigwigs to intervene. His booming laugh silenced, Leopold died a broken man a year later. “I never saw him smile again,” Simonsohn says.

Yet hard as it is to understand in hindsight, neither his father’s fate nor the horrors of Warsaw kept Simonsohn from fighting in the invasion of France, or from joining the Luftwaffe as a pilot-in-training in 1940. “I flew with the idea that I’d prevent the English from setting our cities on fire,” he says. “I was 22 and naive.”

At the controls of a JU-52 “Night Hunter” interceptor, Simonsohn flew dozens of nighttime missions in the skies over Germany and Belgium, scrambling to intercept British bombers headed toward the German heartland. By his count, he stopped three.

By the spring of 1944, Simonsohn had the feeling that Germany’s fortunes were shifting. Often, he remembers, burning German cities lit the nighttime skies with ghostly red light.

In May 1944 Simonsohn and his crew were shot down over Belgium. Re-posted to an airbase near Berlin, he met pilots on their way to and from Germany’s many combat zones. In whispered conversations he learned the truth behind the official propaganda: From the Atlantic to North Africa, his fellow flyers reported nothing but defeat and retreat. “That’s when I knew the war was lost,” he says. “At that moment I realized I just needed to survive.”

As Allied forces closed in on Germany from the east and west, Simonsohn was assigned to the south. He spent the final months of the war flying light courier planes in Austria, following the fierce battle for Berlin from afar and dodging American bombing raids.

At dawn on May 3, 1945—two days after German radio announced Hitler’s death and the day after Soviet forces conquered the German capital—Simonsohn put his girlfriend, Elisabeth, in the passenger seat of his plane and flew from a cratered airfield on the outskirts of Vienna to a remote mountain village.

Smashing the wood and fabric frame of his aircraft, Simonsohn threw his service pistol in a pond and hid in the nearby forest while his girlfriend made herself useful milking cows. Seventy-five years later, 100 years old and nearly blind, he explains his decision to “demobilize” himself with a dose of black humor. “Hitler had deserted already,” he says. “Why should I have kept fighting?”

News of the final German surrender came not as disappointment but as tremendous relief. “May 8, 1945, was a second birthday for me. It meant an end to all the killing, all the fear,” he says. “Since then we’ve lived in peace with our neighbors for 75 years. We’ve never had that in all of German history.”

Simonsohn never flew a plane again. He returned to Hamburg, married his last passenger, and built a postwar career as a hospital administrator. In his apartment, not far from the neighborhood where his father delivered coal in a horse-drawn wagon a century ago, he keeps a shred of stiff, lacquered fabric in the back of a dusty glass cabinet. It’s a piece of his last airplane’s wing, one last souvenir from a war that never should have happened.

“Never again’” is my motto,” Simonsohn says. “The burning cities, the killing—it all made me a pacifist. And I’ve only become more of one as the years have gone by.” —Andrew Curry

‘I felt scared because I lost my emotions for a time.’ Shizuyo Takeuchi, Japanese survivor

There’s no escaping her memories of February 25, 1945—the night American B-29s firebombed Tokyo. Then 13, Takeuchi returned to find cinders where her home had been. Only an iron rice pot survived. The forbidden English dictionary, a gift from her father, was ash. She held a single page, which the wind soon swept away. A second firebombing on March 10 left her with images of running through a maelstrom of debris and smoke, and passing charred bodies—one, a mother who had tried to shield her infant beneath her.

“I felt scared because I lost my emotions for a time,” Takeuchi recalls. Now 89, married and with a son and daughter, she works as a storyteller at a center dedicated to bearing witness to the horrors of war. —Ted Gup

‘We were rushing at them screaming; they were laughing and waving their hats. My friends were falling down all around me.’ Boris Smirnov, Russian medic

“We were full of Soviet patriotism,” says Boris Smirnov, who saw many of his comrades die during the conflict Russians call the Great Patriotic War. On one occasion, Smirnov’s platoon was building a bridge over the Neman River when their commander was struck by a bullet, possibly from an enemy sniper.

“As I tried to help him, there was another soldier next to me,” Smirnov recalls. “He said, ‘Hey doctor, you help him, and I’ll cover you.’ ” As the medic bandaged the fallen officer, a shot rang out from the opposite bank, instantly killing the soldier standing watch over him. “He fell quietly,” says Smirnov, still grieved by his protector’s death.

More traumatic was the day in October 1944 when Smirnov’s platoon was surrounded and callously gunned down. “I saw the laughing German soldiers who were sitting some 50 to 60 meters from us,” Smirnov says. “We were rushing at them screaming; they were laughing and waving their hats. My friends were falling down all around me.”

There is a document from the Russian archives that Smirnov holds dear. It’s a list of his fallen comrades. —Eve Conant

‘I just want them to be remembered as good citizens’ who helped protect their country ‘even in the face of discrimination.’ Harry T. Stewart, Jr., Tuskegee Airman, U.S.

Nearly a thousand African-American pilots who served in World War II learned to fly at Tuskegee, Alabama, the only U.S. military airfield that trained black cadets. Just 10 of the famed Tuskegee Airmen remain today, and retired Lt. Col. Harry T. Stewart, Jr., who turned 95 last Independence Day, is one of them.

Growing up in Queens, New York, Stewart would wander over to a nearby airfield to admire the mammoth aluminum birds and fantasize about flying. He would finally realize his dream in 1944, when he began escorting American bombers to their targets across Europe.

During one mission, Stewart—the grandson of a man born into slavery in Alabama—shot down three enemy aircraft while escorting American bombers. He was 21 years old and had never driven a car.

During one such mission on Easter Sunday 1945, Stewart and six squadron mates were flying 5,000 feet above Nazi-occupied Austria when suddenly they found themselves outnumbered by Luftwaffe planes. Deadly dogfights ensued, Stewart squeezing off burst after burst from his P-51 Mustang’s six .50-caliber machine guns. Landing back at his base in Italy, he was greeted with fanfare and credited with downing three enemy aircraft—a feat for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But the rookie fighter pilot was thinking of three fellow aviators shot down in the battle. One died instantly, one managed to crash-land in Yugoslavia, and one bailed out, his body reportedly discovered in Austria after the country was liberated from the Nazis two weeks later.

After the war Stewart stayed in the Air Force—President Harry Truman mandated racial integration of the military in 1948—and won the inaugural “top gun” competition with two fellow Tuskegee pilots in 1949. A year later, postwar budget cuts forced thousands of officers, including Stewart, out of the Air Force. He earned his commercial pilot’s license on the GI Bill and applied to fly for Pan American and Trans World Airlines. They rejected him. They didn’t hire black pilots then.

By 1945 more than 1.2 million African Americans were serving in uniform in Europe, the Pacific, and on the home front.

The loss of his wings and dignity seeped in. But Stewart had a history of overcoming obstacles. He applied to New York University and earned a degree in mechanical engineering. He found employment and success as an engineer, traveling around North America, the Far East, and Europe. His last job took him to Michigan, where he rose through the ranks at one of the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline companies and retired as a vice president.

In 2018 Stewart traveled to Austria for the first time since the war, this time as a guest of the Austrian government. Researchers investigating the fate of downed Allied pilots had determined that Stewart’s squadron mate Walter Manning, the one who had bailed out during the bloody Easter mission, had been captured alive.

While awaiting transfer to a prisoner of war camp, the 24-year-old had been lynched by a mob incited by racist Nazi propaganda. Exactly 73 years later, Stewart and his daughter looked on as Austrian dignitaries apologized for the atrocity and dedicated a memorial.

Stewart says he never expected to see the Tuskegee Airmen acknowledged in museums and memorials, and written into history books and Hollywood films. His hope for their legacy? “I just want them to be remembered as good citizens—good Americans who felt duty-bound to join in protecting their country during times of need, even in the face of discrimination.” —Katie Sanders

‘You were an old man if you were still there at 23. If we let it bother us, it would destroy us. You just had to go on.’ Eugene Polinsky, B-24 navigator, U.S.

Grammy-winning producer, playwright, and actor Eugene Polinsky flew clandestine missions over Nazi-occupied Belgium, France, and Norway during the war. Instead of unleashing bombs, his eight-man American crew dropped Allied agents, weapons, motorbikes, cash, and other vital supplies to resistance fighters as part of a mission called Operation Carpetbagger. “I didn’t know what I was doing then,” says Polinsky, now 99. “I didn’t know what I was carrying. I would have been terrified!”

The Carpetbaggers were the air arm of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. intelligence agency that ran espionage and sabotage operations. Between 1944 and 1945 the Carpetbaggers dropped more than 500 agents and some 5,000 tons of supplies into hostile territory. They flew late and low, so low that the planes’ bellies snagged tree branches. “They told us, ‘If you’re shot down, if they capture you, you’ll be shot as a spy,’ ” Polinsky says. “ ‘So don’t get shot down.’ Great advice.”

Polinsky (top row, second from left in wartime photo), was navigator aboard a B-24 Liberator. He’s now the last surviving member of his crew.

Courtesy Eugene Polinsky (Digitized by Past Present Pix)

Born in Manhattan on September 11, 1920, Polinsky was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. When he arrived in England for duty with the Eighth Air Force, his crew was assigned to stripped-down B-24 Liberators, painted black to blend into the night. Hours before a mission, the ground crew loaded supply containers into the plane’s bomb bay. Just before takeoff, agents known to the airmen only as “Joes” and “Josephines” sometimes slipped aboard.

As navigator, Polinsky squatted on a gun case toward the nose of the cramped, freezing Liberator, directing the pilot to the target. When they neared the drop zone, the pilot dipped down as low as 300 feet, and upon spotting signal lights from Allies below, the dispatcher sent the night’s load parachuting out. Back in England, officers waited and hoped the number of crews that took off the previous night would match the number that landed before the sun rose. But 42 Carpetbagger planes never returned, and 21 more were mangled beyond repair. More than 200 of Polinsky’s fellow airmen ended up missing, imprisoned, or killed in combat. “You saw the 18- and 19-year-olds come in as replacements,” Polinsky recalls. “You were an old man if you were still there at 23. If we let it bother us, it would destroy us. You had to just go on.”

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In August 1944, after a successful drop over Belgium, Polinsky’s crew returned from their 35th mission—the magic number for a ticket home. Their final orders were to “forget everything.” And so he did for many years.

Between 1944 and 1945 the Carpetbaggers dropped more than 500 agents and some 5,000 tons of supplies into hostile territory.

Then, in 2001, Polinsky received a mysterious invitation to a reception in Belgium celebrating a new book about an elaborate Allied operation to liberate the Port of Antwerp in 1944. Polinsky never knew he had played an important part in the mission until his host, the former head of the Belgian resistance, told him the story. “We were friends all these years,” he said. “Only you were up in the air, and I was down on the ground.”

“You want your whole life to do something,” the veteran says. “To find out that you did it when you were just a kid and you didn’t know it, well—that’s a strange feeling.” —Katie Sanders

‘That was the beginning of our missions. We’d go door to door to look for orphaned children.’ Igor and Valentina Morshtein, on a mercy mission

Their lives were intertwined by war, the siege of Leningrad, and 40 years as friends working in the same factory. But romance blossomed only after both became widowers. Valentina was raised in orphanages; Igor’s mother died trying to evacuate their famine-ravaged city. One day Igor and some boys heard a child crying. “We went to look,” he recalls. “We found a one-year-old baby trying to nurse from his mother lying dead next to him.” That, he says, “was the beginning of our missions. We’d go door to door to look for orphaned children.”

A drop-off place was organized, and babies were given the last names of the children who found them. “We didn’t think to look for identification papers,” Igor says. “We were boys, 12 to 14. We were not serious, but we felt the need that was there.” By the time they were old enough to fight, “we were malnourished, we didn’t have the strength to pick up our weapons.” The army fed him, and he eventually helped liberate Leningrad from the Nazi stranglehold. Four years ago, he got a call from a veteran’s committee. A woman was looking for him. “It turns out I had found her as a baby during the siege and took her to the baby drop-off.” She was named after him. —Eve Conant

‘I suppose they figured if I could understand economic theory, I could crack code.’ Arthur Maddocks, breaker of Nazi codes

“I suppose they figured if I could understand economic theory, I could crack code,” says Arthur Maddocks, who was a top student at Oxford University when he was recruited by British intelligence. Like Betty Webb, Maddocks was posted to Bletchley Park. He was put to work cracking the Lorenz code, the encrypted messaging system used only by Hitler and his most senior generals. Lorenz had two layers of encryption and millions of possibilities to unravel. But by the time the war was drawing to a close, Maddocks and his colleagues—assisted by Colossus, the world’s first computer—were reading communications between Germany’s leaders so far in advance that V-E Day—May 8, 1945, the day Germany surrendered—was something of an anticlimax, Maddocks says. “We already knew it was over.” —Roff Smith

‘I looked at my mom—it still hurts to this day. She had these big tears running down her face like streams, and I felt in my soul this was the last time I’d see her.’ Valentin Shorin, orphaned in Leningrad

He was just five when the Nazis began their nearly 900-day campaign to starve and shell Leningrad into submission. At first Valentin Shorin’s mother kept working, and took him to kindergarten by trolley each day. Then the bombing started. Loudspeakers in the streets broadcast the air raid alert, followed by a whistling sound and the thunder of collapsing buildings. Mother and son were constantly hungry, “but I figured it out later—she was giving me her rations as well,” Shorin says. Finally his mother grew too weak to walk. He remembers his aunt pulling her in a rag-filled wooden sled with one hand, and pulling him with the other. They reached his kindergarten. “I looked at my mom—it still hurts to this day. She had these big tears running down her face like streams, and I felt in my soul this was the last time I’d see her.” He bit his aunt to break away, but his mother called out, “Valya, go, go. I’ll get better and come pick you up.” Instead, he says, “my kindergarten became my first orphanage.” —Eve Conant

‘I have had, in my life, whole squadrons of guardian angels looking after me. There’s no other way.’ Hans-Erdmann Schönbeck, German officer

Hans-Erdmann Schönbeck survived the biggest, bloodiest battle in history. He looked Adolf Hitler in the eye. He slept a few feet from the bomb that nearly took the führer’s life—and escaped the bloody purge that followed its explosion.

Now 98, Schönbeck has only one explanation: “I have had, in my life, whole squadrons of guardian angels looking after me. There’s no other way.”

Assigned to a German tank regiment in the summer of 1940, Schönbeck says he felt a part of the world’s best army. For a year his unit rampaged across the Soviet Union. Eight tanks were shot out from under him, and he was given one field promotion after another. By the time his tank crested a hill overlooking Stalingrad in August 1942, he led a 250-man tank company. He wasn’t quite 20 years old.

The next five months were a turning point, for Germany and Schönbeck. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were cut off from their supply lines. The situation grew desperate in winter, when night temperatures plunged to lethal lows.

Schönbeck and his men tore down houses to burn for heat, turning their Russian inhabitants out into the snow. His tanks out of fuel, his men starving, Schönbeck shrank from a strapping young man to a 99-pound shadow. He was overcome by an unfamiliar emotion: doubt.

During cold nights the young officer listened to his men curse Hitler for abandoning them. Months earlier, saying such things would have meant execution. Now he found himself silently agreeing.

On January 19, 1943, Schönbeck was wounded by an artillery blast that punctured his lungs and shattered his shoulder. A sergeant shoved the young officer onto a German bomber. It took off minutes later, and Schönbeck became one of the few German soldiers to survive Stalingrad. The battle, the largest in history, was the start of the Wehrmacht’s collapse on the Eastern Front, and of the end for Nazi Germany.

Ten months after his unlikely escape, the young officer briefly was assigned to guide Hitler’s entourage through the streets of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). Schönbeck recalls rushing to open the führer’s car door, snapping to attention, and saluting as Hitler emerged.

As he followed Hitler into a meeting hall, Schönbeck’s thoughts darkened, thinking of the lives lost in Stalingrad. He fingered the pistol at his belt, then remembered Stalingrad again. “I thought, ‘You’ve been given another chance at life. Do this and you’ll surely die—and they’ll kill your whole family.’ ”

Schönbeck was assigned to an intelligence unit at a secret base where Hitler had a headquarters. As he was delivering a briefing, his commander asked a strange question. “He said, ‘If something big happens, we can count on you, right?’ ” Schönbeck recalls. He learned later that his fellow officers were plotting to assassinate Hitler and that his bunkmate had hidden explosives in their room. But the Stalingrad survivor kept to himself. “That’s the thing about living in a dictatorship,” he says. “You never knew who to trust.”

When the plot failed, a bloody purge began. “My roommate was one of the first ones hanged,” Schönbeck says.

After the war, he moved to Munich and got a job in Germany’s booming postwar auto industry. He rose through the ranks, and in the 1980s he was head of the German Automobile Industry Association. “I lived, I made it,” he says. “I wasn’t going to waste that.” —Andrew Curry

Mallie hadn’t heard of Rosie the Riveter—the term used to describe women who worked in defense plants—until five years ago. Mallie Mellon, U.S. warplane builder

Born in a Kentucky farmhouse, Mallie Osborne Mellon, along with her husband and their young son, boarded a bus to Detroit in 1943, responding to a radio ad for civilian war jobs. By then more than 300,000 American women were involved in aircraft production, many by shooting rivets into warplanes in Motor City’s factories. Mellon worked at Briggs Manufacturing, burnishing parts for bombers rolling off the assembly line at Henry Ford’s mammoth Willow Run plant nearby.

Mellon, now a hundred, hadn’t heard of Rosie the Riveter—the term used to describe women who worked in defense plants—until five years ago, when she learned that she was one. Now she attends monthly American Rosie the Riveter Association gatherings. She still has her southern drawl, but Michigan is home, and the Rosies are family. —Katie Sanders

‘We were in striped pajamas, lice infested. But we were polite, spoke the truth, and discussed what the world should be like.’ Frederick Terna, Holocaust survivor, Czechoslovakia

Soon after Frederick Terna arrived at Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1943, he began sketching. He drew triple-level bunk beds, lines of people awaiting meager food rations, and the railroad tracks that transported prisoners to Auschwitz. He signed some sketches with a symbol so they couldn’t be traced back to him. Drawing, he found, was a reminder of his humanity.

Terna was 16 years old when German troops marched into Prague, his hometown, in 1939. When American soldiers liberated him six years later, he says, he was “one of those shuffling skeletons.” He had been held in four concentration camps and had starved, escaped, been caught, and frozen nearly to death. He returned to Prague and learned that no one else in his immediate family had survived the war.

Terna married a fellow camp survivor and eventually ended up in New York, where he became a full-time artist. Now, at 96, he still paints and lectures. In the top floor studio of his Brooklyn home, he mixes dry pigments into acrylic paint. “It’s my stab at immortality,” he says of the medium. Terna’s canvases, thick with texture and fiery scenes, line the hallways. “We have left a record. My record is visual.”

Nearly 40 years after the war, Terna discovered someone had saved his drawings from Terezín and taken them to Israel. “We didn’t know then that I was actually making historical documents.” Like the number tattooed on his arm—114974—they were evidence of what happened to him and six million other Jews who perished in the Holocaust. “Yes, our families are gone, but their memory is kept alive,” he says. “It’s my obligation—and, in a way, it’s now yours, to remind the world.” —Nina Strochlic

‘I am 80 years old, and I still cry.’ Jeannine Burk, hid from Nazis in Brussels

When Jeannine Burk was three years old, her father took her on a streetcar across Brussels. He rang a stranger’s doorbell, kissed his daughter goodbye, and left her with the woman who answered. He would be arrested by the Gestapo in a roundup of Jewish citizens, and later died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1944, Burk remained hidden in the home of the Christian woman. She had food and shelter but little else. When Nazis paraded nearby, her helper ordered her to the outhouse. Burk would peek out through a gap between the boards, then back into the darkest corner.

In 1944 British soldiers arrived. Soon after, her mother, back from hiding in the countryside, came for her. Burk never saw her helper again. “I am 80 years old, and I still cry,” says Burk. “I never had a chance to say thank you.” —Katie Sanders

‘They discriminated against us, cursed at us, just because we were refugees … I was nine—the war wasn’t my fault.’ Waltraud Pless, child survivor, Germany

Even as a child, Waltraud Pless couldn’t help but see the way many Germans benefited from the Nazi regime. She didn’t have to look far: Her parents were broke when Hitler rose to power in 1933. Six years later her father was an officer in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military division. By the time he went off to fight in the invasion of France, the family had two cars, a nice house, and a warehouse full of valuable “secondhand” furniture.

“Where did all his money come from?” Pless asks. “It’s clear to me now: It could only have come from Jewish households. No one can tell me he didn’t know Jews were persecuted.”

Her father once plopped her in the car for an errand to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the edge of Berlin. “I saw the people there, how they were living,” she says. Was she shocked? The impeccably dressed 85-year-old shakes her head and shrugs. “Things like that were just a given.”

Then, suddenly, they weren’t. In the fall of 1944, Pless saw the roads around their family’s home, hundreds of miles east of Berlin, filling with families fleeing the Soviet Union’s Red Army. For weeks she slept in her clothes, ready to join the river of refugees at any moment. Finally, on a freezing night in February 1945, the evacuation order came.

“I thought it was temporary,” she recalls. “As soon as the Russians were defeated, we’d be back home. That’s how powerful the [Nazi] propaganda was at the time.”

After weeks on the move, sleeping in strangers’ apartments and railway stations, she and her mother, brother, and sister were shipped to an island off Germany’s Baltic coast. The popular tourist destination had plenty of beds, but in April the rapidly advancing Soviets cut off access to the mainland, and there was nothing to eat.

Without electricity or radios, Pless and her family were unaware of Germany’s surrender until they heard celebratory gunfire from the Red Army units garrisoned in nearby houses. Constantly hungry, Pless spent that spring searching for food. One day, she says, she followed a farmer’s cart as it bounced along a cobbled road, gathering spilled potatoes into her skirt. Before she knew it she was alone in a field far from town. “That’s when a Russian soldier grabbed me and raped me,” she says. She was nine years old. Pless says she ran home to tell her mother, but her screams were met with silence.

That fall the family got word that Pless’s father had survived the fall of Berlin and was being held by U.S. soldiers in a camp near Hamburg. But there would be no going home: Their village was now Polish territory.

For the next decade the reunited family struggled, living first in pig stalls and barns, later crowding into small apartments with other families. In the lean postwar years, many Germans resented Pless and the millions of others displaced by the conflict as extra mouths to feed. “They discriminated against us, cursed at us,” she says, “just because we were refugees.”

Seventy-five years later, Pless feels neither anger nor guilt. “There are truly tragic stories out there. Mine, by comparison, is almost trivial,” she says. “I was nine—the war wasn’t my fault. But I’m not a victim, either.”

Today Pless visits schools in the Hamburg area to talk about her wartime experiences, motivated, she says, by concern.

“Look at the world now: People haven’t learned. It’s horrifying that neo-Nazis are back, and not just in Germany, in the U.S., in Scandinavia. People are still so easily manipulated.” —Andrew Curry

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