Profiles in courage: 5 WWII veterans

Dale Rabe of Peoria was a radioman on the USS Bennington, an Essex-class aircraft carrier, fighting in the Marshall Islands and the Philippines.

Dale recalled a trick a kamikaze pilot once tried against the Bennington. As U.S. planes lined up to return to the flat top, the last American flier noticed that the plane behind him did not have its landing gear down. A closer look confirmed it was a Zero, and the Bennington's guns opened up on it, but the plane slammed into the carrier's fan tail. Crews removing the wreckage found the Zero's carburetor, which had been manufactured in Milwaukee.

Typhoons were another menace in the Pacific. Crashing waves from one storm bent the bow end of the Bennington's flight deck. Fleet command ordered the carrier to maintain its position, so the crew used torches to remove the damaged section of the deck. Pilots continued to use the shortened deck, but their planes could not be fully loaded.

Edgar Gutweniger of Peoria was a 17-year-old waiter about to lose his country-club job when he enlisted in 1945. Because he wasn't 18, the Army recruiter sent him home to get his mother's permission. Permission slip signed, he was inducted — four hours and 14 minutes later, Japan surrendered. But he was in the Army now, so Edgar went through boot camp and was sent to Austria as part of the occupation force. He jokes that he might be the youngest World War II vet anywhere.

An avid photographer, he took many pictures, many of them framed by a pair of small American flags or oak leaves he carried with him everywhere.

Bill Glaseman of Scottsdale recalled how the Ninth Army occupied Luftwaffe regional headquarters in Brunswick, Germany, in 1945. U.S. troops had been told to not cross the Elbe River, where Soviet forces were massing on the other side. After a meet-and-greet with their Soviet counterparts, the Americans started a baseball game.

"We heard a drone of engines and looked up to see aircraft in tight formation spelling out USA," he said. "A few minutes later, another drone of aircraft flew over spelling out USSR."

Then came a third formation with a different message: S---T.

In addition to several photos, Bill brought with him two front pages of Stars and Stripes, the armed-forces newspaper. An early headline blared "Hitler crosses the Rhine"; a 1945 headline declared "Yanks cross the Rhine."

Fred Brule

of Chandler had worked for Kodak before the war, and he used those skills while in the Navy in the Pacific. One of his chief responsibilities was V-mail, which saved critical space on transport ships by replacing millions of sheets of paper with rolls of microfilm.

V-mail — the V stands for victory — used a special form that combined letter and envelope. After the letter was written and addressed, it was photographed and reduced to the size of a thumbnail. At the receiving end, the V-mail was enlarged to about a quarter of the original form and delivered to the addressee.

The National Postal Museum estimates that 37 mail bags would have been required to carry 150,000 single-page letters, at a weight of 2,575 pounds. V-mail reduced the load to one mail sack weighing 45 pounds.

Lenny DeMarco of Sun City West fought with the Marines in the Marshalls, Tinian and Iwo. In 1944 on Rongelap Atoll, he was hit by shrapnel in the legs and back and developed jungle rot, which landed him in medical quarantine. Other men wounded that day received the Purple Heart, but Lenny did not. Because of the snub, Lenny refused to wear any of the other medals he had earned, which sometimes got him in Dutch with his commanders. "They'd lock me up for a few hours, then let me out," he said.

After dinner on our first night in Baltimore, Lenny was called to the lectern along with his guardian, his daughter, Karen, who with her cousin had lobbied the military and Congress for years to correct the oversight. To rousing applause, Lenny finally got the Purple Heart he had earned 70 years earlier. "It was the surprise of my life," Lenny said.

Despite all the horrors he witnessed in war, Lenny told me it didn't take long to leave that behind him. And he harbors no hatred for the Japanese. In fact, while golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland in the 1980s, he befriended a Japanese marine — "Have you ever seen a Japanese marine? They're huge!" — who today calls Lenny his "American father."