Augusta (SC)-area World War II veterans tell their stories in movie

From The Augusta, South Carolina Chronicle: Augusta-area World War II veterans tell their stories in movie
An estimated 740 World War II veterans die every day, taking with them irreplaceable firsthand memories of events from our history books.

In the ongoing effort to stem that loss, more than 700 stories have been collected by Augusta-Richmond County Historical Society volunteers in the past four years. The World War II accounts range from larger-than-life figures who flew under the Eiffel Tower to Pearl Harbor wives who watched in disbelief as Japanese planes passed overhead.

A fraction of those stories have been collected into a roughly 70-minute movie called War Stories, which will be shown on Oct. 30 at Aiken Community Playhouse.

“It’s been a labor of love, really,” said Fred Gehle, one of the core team of volunteers who have coordinated and recorded the interviews since 2007.

In an interview about their work, a copy of which is stored in the Library of Congress, Gehle and three others talked about the challenges of working with old soldiers who would often rather not remember the things they’ve seen and done. Many of the stories are grim, but there also plenty of positive notes sprinkled in.

Jan Hicks, a retired major general and now the head of upper school of Augusta Preparatory Day School, said one of her favorite interviews was with a member of the French Resistance. His parents long assumed that he had been killed but, on the day Paris was liberated, he rode a tank to his parents’ home.

“It was a year before I could tell that story without crying,” said Hicks, a former commanding general of Fort Gordon.

Another memorable character for Hicks was an Army Air corpsman who flew his plane underneath the Eiffel Tower.

Some stories put a human face on the enemy. Bill Tilt remembers a soldier who worked alongside a German prisoner of war to rebuild a French port. The German soldier asked the Americans to tell his mother he was OK if they passed through his hometown.

The American soldier later got the chance to do just that, Tilt said.

Thurman Slusser, of North Augusta, is one of the veterans interviewed. He said he was overcome by the tropical beauty of Oahu when he arrived on the Hawaiian island in October 1941.

“They call it paradise for the simple reason it was,” said Slusser, at the time a fresh-faced teenager from Pennsylvania recently drafted into the Army.

Two months of paradise became hell the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. Slusser was at Schofield Barracks when he heard planes flying overhead. It was a familiar sound, but any notion it was a Marine Corps training run was quickly disabused when he saw the Rising Sun emblem.

One plane flew so low, Slusser could see the Japanese pilot through the open canopy.

“It was devastating. You felt completely defeated,” said Slusser.

When Tilt volunteered to help with the project, it was on the condition he could partner with his longtime friend, Stan Schrader. Both have a military background and combat experience in Vietnam, which goes a long way toward helping veterans feel comfortable.

Reluctance to speak is common. One Battle of the Bulge veteran refused to talk about combat, and it took the combined experience of Schrader and Tilt to stretch the interview to the 30 minutes required for the Library of Congress. Other times, the veterans opened up for the first time in 60 years, Hicks said.

Schrader has found that any reluctance to speak is usually conquered with some gentle coaxing.

“I tell them, ‘You’re the only who knows your story,’ ” Schrader said.