“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II

An accidental explosion at the Californian naval base Port Chicago killed 320 personnel. A month later, hundreds of members of the loading crew, who were predominantly black, protested and refused to load the ships until working and safety conditions were improved. Fifty of the protestors, the “Chicago 50,” were arrested on charges of mutiny. Among them was Joseph Small. The case was especially notorious in the African American community, who noted how it was mainly black personnel who were subjected to poor working conditions. In the end, Joseph and the other men accused of causing the explosion were “discharged under honorable conditions” (400). Joseph notes that after the explosion, the base was fully integrated.

James Sanders was a sailor on an American ship, while Hans Göbeler was a crew member on a German submarine. Hans was held captive on the ship James served on. They both recall the strange camaraderie between the Germans and their American captors. An American sailor who held Hans captive gave Hans his address and told Hans to contact him after the war was over. Sadly, the American sailor was killed in the Pacific a year later.

Charlie Miller was captured by German soldiers and became a prisoner of war. Despite some negative experiences, Charlie came away from the war believing that people of different and even opposing nationalities do not truly hate each other (416-17).

A French American priest, Jacques Raboud was put in a German labor camp as a child. There he was traumatized by the experience of the guards leaving an asthmatic friend to die on a freezing night. When they were liberated, Jacques took the opportunity to get revenge on the Germans who left his friend to die.

Polish couple Walter and Olga were both prisoners in a German camp. They managed to meet and even date while at the labor camp. Together they later migrated to the United States.

Living under the Hitler regime, Erich was forced to quit his job as a journalist and work in a factory alongside German prisoners. Still, he became a soldier because it was safer than being a civilian under suspicion. When he became a prisoner of war under the Allies, he tried to teach himself how to “de-Nazify” the other German prisoners.

A Ukrainian poet, filmmaker, and physician, Vitaly Korotich as a child witnessed the Germans massacre the Jews in the city of Kiev. Even toward the end, Vitaly recalls that some Jews could not believe that a civilized country like Germany could be capable of such atrocities, “that in one nation it is possible to have Heine, Goethe, and Hitler. Beethoven and Himmler” (435). Still, Vitaly remembers that a poor German soldier gave him bread and a harmonica.

A director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Joseph Levine was a social worker for concentration camp survivors in Germany. He notes that Jewish survivors were impoverished and left without family to support them, and that only one German he encountered admitted culpability for the Holocaust. In Poland there were even massacres of Jews who tried to return to their Polish hometowns.