Ink ran in the veins of these veterans of World War II
|
Version 0 of 1. George H. Becker Jr. was the first Washington Post employee to be drafted in World War II. He also was the first to die in combat. He was killed on July 9, 1944, at the tail end of the brutal Battle of Saipan, one of nearly 3,000 U.S. service members to lose their lives on that Pacific island. George was a printer at The Post, one of the people who assembled columns of type into pages. So was Harry Brown, an Army aviation engineer who was in Saipan a few months after George’s death. Harry went looking for Pfc. Becker’s grave. He found it in the Army 27th Infantry Division cemetery, about 300 feet from the water, where the land started sloping upward toward the mountains. The sand on the beach was white as snow and fine as talcum powder. “The sun was beating down like it was trying to make up for the times it had been hidden by the clouds,” Harry would later write. “I finally found the grave. . . . One of George’s dog tags is tacked on a white cross. . . . There is a metal fence around the cemetery, and in the center, a flagpole. Old Glory is on the job.” Harry’s recollection was in an amazing little newspaper that I probably would never have known about if The Post wasn’t emptying its cupboards as it prepares to move to a new building. The paper was called the Chapel Post. It was a monthly newspaper composed of letters from, and news about, Washington Post employees serving in uniform during World War II. About 200 Posties volunteered or were called up during the war. They came from every part of the paper, which at the time was headquartered on E Street NW: advertising, typesetting, printing, delivery, the mailroom, the newsroom . . . The Chapel Post was founded by a Post printer named Harry Deering. Harry knew about war. He was a runner with the Army’s 59th Artillery during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives in World War I. He started the Chapel Post to keep in touch with typographers, a group that included the typesetters whose linotype machines created mirror-image lines of type — cast from molten lead — during the production of a newspaper page. (A unit of the typographers union is called a “chapel.”) Soon other departments at the paper were clamoring to be included, and Harry expanded the focus. While preparing for the move, my colleague Evelyn Small found a single copy of the Chapel Post (January 1945) and a story about it from the September 1945 issue of Newspaperman, a trade journal. Together, they show how one longtime Washington business was affected by the war. The paper was a volunteer effort supported by Eugene Meyer, The Post’s publisher. It was sent free by airmail to Post employees who were far from home. Printed in the upper right of the front page was “Price: Hitler and Tojo will pay.” Here was news about workmates: Miss B.M. Kelly, a linotype operator, was with the Women’s Army Corps in Clovis, N.M. Dick Coe — destined to become a famed Post drama critic — was with Stars and Stripes in the Middle East. George Thorpe, a former Metro reporter, had been awarded the Soldiers Medal for pulling an injured pilot from a burning airplane that crashed in France. William C. Harris, a Marine combat correspondent who had been a copy editor at The Post, wrote from the Pacific with news that a Post colleague, reporter Earl Wilson, had just been named his commanding officer. Harris wrote: “This should be the reporter’s idea of heaven — being the military boss of a copy-reader who used to give his stuff hell.” Philip L. Graham, publisher Meyer’s son-in-law and a captain in the Army Air Forces, checked in from the Philippines. “I think most of us are enjoying the Philippines,” he wrote, “that is, only to the extent that we prefer them to New Guinea — not to Washington.” George Moltz, a pressman, was in Germany with the First Army. “Things are kinda hot around here,” he wrote. “Anyone who thinks this war is over has another thought coming — no stuff.” I’m guessing George might have written something other than “stuff” in his letter. The issue I saw came out after the holidays. Many of the letter-writers mentioned the package that Eugene Meyer had apparently sent to every Post service member for Christmas. It included anchovies, sardines, kippered herrings, olives and pepperoni. And it was much appreciated. Arthur Fagan, an Army engineer in the Pacific, wrote that “the boys in the pressroom” had sent him a nice box of goodies, too. “I only hope the dice which were in the box are better than the ones I have been using,” he wrote in the Chapel Post. When the war ended, some vets returned to The Post. Some went to other jobs. Some stayed in the service. Some, like George Becker, didn’t return at all. They rest forever far from home. On this Veterans Day, I offer all of these colleagues my thanks. Twitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly. |