ww2letterproject

April 29, 1945

The sister of a marine returning from Guadalcanal once said,
“They left as boys, but they came back as men. You could see it in their faces.”

 

My Uncle Albert served in the infantry in WWII. He saw combat in Europe and became a prisoner of war. He returned home in 1945.

WWII was the largest and deadliest conflict in human history, with more than 400,000 US Armed service casualties. The US Infantry suffered more than 70% of those deaths.

Like most who served, Albert returned from the war weary and silent. Their duty done, they moved on. With the passage of time, WWII veterans’ voices grow still, and the memories of their sacrifices fade. They are heroes. We must not forget.

 

The Son Returns

Albert Banis, Abe to his family, had entered the service in 1940. He was married with two sons when he left for combat in Europe. Corporal Banis saw action at Normandy; he was captured and spent months in a German POW camp.

His family knew only that he was MIA. They learned later that he was a POW. Months passed without any information about Abe’s fate as the newspaper headlines informed them of the war raging in Europe and the collapse of Germany. At last, in March of 1945, the family received a telegram. Telegrams were expensive and used only to announce important news. (This is not the family’s first telegram. The previous June, a telegram from the Secretary of War announced the combat death of Abe’s older brother Bill.) The message was from Abe, who had just arrived in Boston harbor aboard a troop ship. Abe was safe and would be coming home.

Abe’s mother, Anna, threw a homecoming party.

One Sunday morning in early spring of 1945, you leave Dayton and travel by car to Eaton, Ohio. Daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. Birds voice their mating songs. All of this suggests that the end to a long, gray winter is near. A bright sunny morning would be nice, but today the weather is cloudy and cool. It is not a long drive – only about 24 miles. You enter Eaton on Main Street and travel along a wide, tree-lined boulevard with Victorian houses on either side. After the Greek revival courthouse, you turn left into more trees and Victorian houses. Barron Street, or Route 127, was at one time one of the country’s major north-south routes, extending from Florida all the way up to northern Michigan. Of course, the interstates have since replaced these old two lane arteries. The road runs straight and flat until a final long, leisurely turn where the earth seems to fall away below you, onto route 746 – Eldorado Road, which does indeed take you to the town of Eldorado, if you follow it all the way. You are going only a half mile or so, however, past a dilapidated barn that sits right next to the road, past a fence climbing with roses just starting to bloom. Just ahead is a white, two-story farmhouse surrounded by the wide barren farm fields of early spring. It is aging but cared for. The design is simple and practical. The spring flowers near its base add splashes of color. Pretty window curtains and a swing on the porch all say that someone has made the effort to convert this house into a warm and welcoming home. The gravel driveway leads you past an enormous pear tree, not yet in full leaf but well past winter’s stark paucity. Today, under those semi-leafed branches, tables are laden with good old fashioned Midwestern food, the mouth-watering kind and enough, as they say, for an army. Front and center sits an enormous, many-tiered cake, sheathed in white buttercream and decorated with pink and red buttercream roses. This sort of fanciness you’d expect to see in the window of a big city high end bakery, not at a farm repast…

Family and friends were in attendance, including all eight younger brothers and sisters. Abe’s older brother Bill is absent; killed in action in Italy the past May. Abe didn’t learn about his brother’s death until returning Stateside, nearly ten months after the fact. His older sister Eva isn’t there, either. She is a WAC officer stationed in Paris, far from the front lines. Abe’s younger brothers and sisters posed with their brother for the obligatory family gathering photos.

 

Victor Banis, nearly eight years old, posed with his brother Abe. At that age who wants to spend time with adults? There are fun things to do. It is spring, and a Sunday, and today there is a glorious party.

“I admit it. I was obsessed with the cake. And my mother, in her kitchen, fashioning those icing roses – who knew she could do this? My mother was ever a woman of surprises. Years later, when my sister Fanny, married now and a mother herself, added a piano to their front room, my mom sat down and began to play – something I had never suspected her of doing. So it was with the roses. Maybe after all it’s a simple thing to do, but to my boyish eyes, it seemed as if she were conjuring magic.

“There is a picture from this family gathering, of me at maybe age seven or eight – with my brother Abe, the guest of honor. Abe, MIA, and then POW, and now returned safely home to the bosom of his family, looking splendid indeed in his uniform. Standing in front of him are my sisters Fanny and Annie, in their youthful teens. I am between them, and in front of us all are Abe’s boys, Billy and Benny, three and four years old perhaps, and looking altogether unimpressed by the festivities. I am wearing a striped pullover and appear so pleased with myself and with life in general that I wonder now if perhaps I hadn’t gotten a finger into that lovely frosting… except that surely one of my hands would be missing, and, no, there they both are.

“There is other food, of course, though I remember none of it, enough of it that the table fairly groaned from its burden – fried chicken, surely. We had chickens, and from time to time when a hen got too old to lay eggs, she went into a stew pot – but fried chicken, which meant the sacrifice of younger, more tender birds, who could still pay their way, was a rare treat for us, saved for the most special of occasions. But today our chickens are called upon to perform double duty, as there would have been eggs on the table, too, pickled with beets, or deviled and stuffed, or maybe both. All of the women present, and there were many, would have brought dishes, too, their specialties. These were Midwestern farmwives, all of whom well knew their ways around a kitchen and were proud of it, and whatever they brought would be as fine as larder and love could produce in those waning days of the war: casseroles and breads and pies and cookies… And that cake. Always, that wondrous cake.”

–Victor Banis

In those photos everyone was so happy, everyone but Abe.

On July 6, 1945, Albert Leroy Banis was discharged from the U.S. Army, a month before the A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, ending WWII. Abe’s route to the homecoming party had begun a few miles away and nearly 25 years earlier. After his youth in the hills of central Pennsylvania and the farmlands of southwestern Ohio, Abe served as a GI for nearly five years. He experienced the war on three continents and journeyed through ten countries. Through the eyes a 21-22 year old, he saw the cities of Boston, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Odessa, Istanbul, and Naples. He had experienced combat and life as a prisoner of war. He suffered through a long and harrowing escape across Eastern Europe to reach this homecoming party. By train, ship, motor vehicle and foot, Abe traveled about 13,500 miles – the equivalent of a distance more than half-way around the world. When he returned home, he refused for decades to discuss his war experiences with his family.