Library of Virginia seeks documents, diaries, mementos from World War II veterans, families

The Washington Post: Library of Virginia seeks documents, diaries, mementos from World War II veterans, families

RICHMOND, Va. — All four Thomas brothers fought in World War II, leaving behind the coal mines of southwest Virginia for battlefields in the faraway Pacific: Fiji, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. One left a leg behind and another survived the sinking of his ship, but all four came home.

For the Thomas family and many others, the extraordinary experiences of the Virginians who served in World War II have been preserved in photos and letters home, often stuffed in boxes packed with mementoes and stored in an attic.

The Library of Virginia is collecting those memories, asking veterans, their spouses and children to submit documents, diaries and photographs that will help keep alive the wartime experiences of those 300,000 Virginians. Some 11,000 never returned from the war.

“This ‘Greatest Generation’ is passing from the scene,” said Sandra Gioia Treadway, librarian of Virginia. “While people are still alive and their records — their letters, diaries, artifacts, medals — are still in family hands, we want to raise awareness that this is history and that this is the perfect place to bring those items.”

Michael Thomas, an attorney with the State Corporation Commission, heeded the call last week. He brought a panoramic photograph of his father, Charlie, taken on July 5, 1943, as his unit departed for the Pacific. He also brought stories of the remarkable Thomas brothers, all coal miners from the Wise County crossroads of Banner.

“My father always joked throughout the rest of his life that the best thing that ever happened to him was World War II because it got him out of the coal mines,” Thomas said.

All the Thomas men found adventure in the Pacific.

Charlie’s anti-aircraft unit was part of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Army “as it leapfrogged from New Guinea into the Philippines,” Thomas said.

Howard Thomas served on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin, which lost more than 700 crew members in a Japanese attack. Ray served on the USS Laffey, a destroyer that suffered heavy casualties and sank after a fierce, close-quarters battle with several Japanese warships. John, a Marine lost a leg scrambling out of a foxhole in Guadalcanal.

“We’re probably losing 100 of the World War II vets a day across the United States,” Michael Thomas said. “They have important stories to tell. I felt compelled to come down and at least tell my father’s story.”

Robert C. “Clinker” Moss III felt the same tug to share the wartime experiences of his father, Robert C. Moss Jr. He came bearing stories, letters and even a map his father drew of Chef-du-Pont, Normandy, where he and other D-Day troops arrived by parachute in 1944. He crashed through the thatched roof of a stone barn.

As he swung from the rafters like a marionette and struggled to free himself from the nylon lines, Moss heard Germans approaching the barn. They fired through a window, missing Moss.

He pulled out his .45-caliber, fired an errant shot, then kept firing.

Moss caught one German with his frantic gunfire. “I did not see that man move again,” he wrote. He then sliced the suspension lines with his knife.

“I went down flat and crawled to the door,” Moss wrote. “I saw the other one standing about five or six feet away and shot him. He spun around and went backwards and fell and lay there.”

Moss, a Richmond native, had been working as a reporter in Waynesboro before he enlisted in 1942, leaving a wife and baby behind. He was a second lieutenant.

His map, drawn with great precision, depicts roads, a creamery, chicken house and trees.

Moss was so inspired by his father’s narrative, he led a family trip there in June 2000, with a stop in Paris. Two residents claimed his father had parachuted into their roofs.

“That was interesting,” Moss said. “It definitely was not their roofs.”

Moss, an engineer, said he began researching his father’s exploits a decade ago. “I realized how hungry I was for information on his experience,” he said of his father, a lawyer, who died in 1985. “I want others to have access to these details.”

The Library of Virginia has materials dating to the Revolutionary War and is in the midst of a statewide drive to collect and digitalize documents from the Civil War. Curators are mindful of the passing decades and of baby boomers who may be downsizing as they near retirement.

“We want to be sure that, if they don’t have space for that material, they know there is a historical repository and archives that would love to have them because it’s Virginia’s and America’s history,” Treadway said.

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People interested in donating correspondence, documents, photographs and diaries can call the library 804-692-3795 or e-mail jessica.tyree(at)lva.virginia.gov.