Local Veteran Profiles
Milton Berman
Suffield, CT
Branch of Service:
Army Air Corp, Captain
50th Fighter Group, 81st Squadron
1942 – 1945
On D-Day:
“We realized that the invasion was going to happen—this was common knowledge. The two things we didn’t know were when and where. This went on for a period of a few weeks. And then one evening, our commanding officer came and told us that the invasion was going to occur the next morning… about 3:30 in the morning and we had a battle breakfast. A battle breakfast was steak and eggs. So we gobbled that down, went to our various airplanes, took off, formed our squadrons, and went to Normandy. We didn’t know but the Major knew by then where we were going. We went to Normandy, and as we looked down in the early earliest light of dawn, I use the expression that you could have walked to Normandy. The channel was completely filled with boats almost touching each other as far as the eye could see. When we got over there our mission was to protect our troops from ground fire, from the stanchions of cannon that could shoot at them… but it was mayhem. We did that three times. That was D-Day for us.”
“My father’s reaction was interesting… I remember what he said when I told him that I was going to join the Air Corp. And his words were, ‘That’s what I would do.’ When I heard that, I knew I had his blessing.”
“There was an urgency to get pilots trained. So, if you didn’t catch on right away, if you didn’t land appropriately and if you didn’t show signs of being adept at learning avionics, than you would wash out.”
Edward Borucki
Southampton, MA
Branch of Service:
Navy, Chief Petty Officer
USS Helena
July 1940 – October 1945
At Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941:
“I was an engineering officer and passing out liberty cards to the off-duty watch when the general alarm sounded. [Whistle] ‘Man your battle stations. Jap planes attacking. Break out service ammunition. This is no drill.’ I hesitated a moment… what are they bothering us on Sunday? But that’s my battle station forward battle dressing and damage patrol. I was knocked against the wall or bulkhead, but by a torpedo that hit—hit where I left. Thirty-three of my shipmates were killed there, and I was saved by about thirty seconds.”
“It was really chaotic. It was like a bad dream there. You had noise and the screaming, and it was really a bad thing. Machine guns going off. And five—guns going off and we were lucky that our ship—splash seven a Japanese aircraft, we were one of the first ones to get blown there. They thought we were the Pennsylvania. We took the place of the Pennsylvania battleship and which was in a dry dock. So they hit us first.”
“There aren’t many of us left to tell the story of Pearl Harbor. Maybe there’s four thousand out of a hundred thousand left. We’ll I’m 86 years old. Most of the survivors are 80 years or more….”
Jerry Hrbek
Monson, MA
Branch of Service:
Army, 428 Escort Guard- Military Police
1943 – 1945
On D-day:
“I started to try to get up again and for some reason, don’t ask me, I just couldn’t make it. And I thought of God. And I said to him, ‘Please help me.’ And all of a sudden I felt this hand, and I am not lying to you, to this day, it was a very big hand. And it grabbed me by the left rib cage and the other hand grabbed me by my shoulder. And I got picked up off the beach and set on the beach, about a foot on the beach. I turned around to see who did it, and this voice said to me, ‘Don’t look back. I don’t want you to look back. Just run. Run, keep running. And don’t look back, and go where you have to go.’ And that’s all that was said.”
Historian: Fran Gagnon
Springfield, MA
“One of my lasting memories, and again, I’m 64, and he died in1996, but I remember being a little girl. I must have been, I don’t know, three, maybe going on four, in the kitchen with my grandmother. The war was over for a while. It was an ordinary day. We had no phone. My mother was not home at the time. She was somewhere else. And the door opened. And my uncle Stanley walked in the door. And I can still see it. And my grandmother stopped. She was at the sink, and she stopped and she just became so thrilled, so incredibly thrilled. I never saw her so happy.”
Reverend E. Gage Hotaling
Agawam, MA
Branch of Service:
US Naval Reserve, Lt. Commander
Chaplain for the 4th Division of Marines
September 1944 – April 1946
“My job, aside from the burial, they wanted a count of the bodies that were unburied, and they wanted that twice a day: morning and evening… well, the stench, of course, was so terrific, that I found that I could not do it unless I smoked. I had never smoked cigarettes, but I borrowed some cigarettes from the mean, and each time I had to count bodies, I would smoke. And that overcame the stench of the bodies. So as I’ve often said, I became addicted to smoking for 26 days. And because once I got away from it, I never had to do it again. But whenever anybody asked the question, ‘What good is smoking?’ I say, ‘It’s good for one thing: if you’re counting the dead bodies, that helps.’”
“Well, there is a picture which shows me standing up over the grave of a dead marine, and we would have four marines with a flag over each grave. And while they were kneeling with the flag I would stand up and I would give the committal words for each one. I did it not as a protestant, catholic or a Jew, but as a marine. Every man was buried as a marine. And so I gave the same committal to each one. Never bothered to look at the dog tags or know what they were.”
“My comrade, you have gallantly given your life on a foreign land for your country. And now, we commit your body to the ground, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. May your soul rest in eternal peace.”
Helen Kay Kennedy
Springfield, MA
Wartime Activity:
USO Singer at Westover and Holyoke War Memorial
1942 – 1945
“Say a prayer for the boys over there, that was the song… we had a very special show where you had to pay a war bond to get in during the war, and I sang Say a prayer for the boys over there, and in the middle of it, my pianist put part of the Lord’s Prayer. And I was saying—I’m getting the chills telling you this—I could hear the women sobbing in the audience. And then, when I sang the Lord’s Prayer and went back into Say a prayer for the boys over there, that was it. That was my favorite song.”
