Getting Here: An Odyssey Through World War II

Getting Here An Odyssey Through World War II Ruth L. Weiss Hohberg Four-year -old Ruth is lorn I mm a comfortable lininc iii She and her mother travel east to.
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He began to fear that his odyssey would end prematurely.

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That was not his only worry. With his native Greece under Nazi occupation, representatives of the exiled Greek government in Cairo demanded his immediate transfer to Egypt. Pisanos decided to ask the help of his friend Chesley Peterson, commander of the 4th Fighter Group. The intervention proved successful. Although Pisanos was not an American citizen, his transfer was accepted.

It was difficult for him to believe, but he had finally made it. Pisanos was an officer of the United States Air Force. Photo credit Flickr exeteranna. The May naturalization ceremony took place at the American embassy in London. Pisanos was the first among the six pilots who walked a few steps forward and raised his right hand to take the oath of citizenship.

He was not aware that this moment would usher in a new chapter of American history. While Eagle Squadron aviators were transferred to the American-led 4th fighter group, they kept their British spitfires for three months.

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It was then that the newly produced P Thunderbolt arrived in England. Pisanos recalled the difficult transition to the new plane. Pisanos continued to fly the P in risky bombing missions throughout Western Europe. After he crawled out of his wrecked plane, Pisanos saw two German soldiers a distance from him. They began taking pot shots at the downed pilot.

At first, Pisanos thought they were toying with him. But it took only a few seconds to realize they were trying to kill him. While the bullets passed overhead, hitting the vertical tail of his aircraft, Pisanos dropped everything and ran, with Germans in hot pursuit. During the few seconds needed to cross an open field and reach a nearby forest, Pisanos could hear his heavy breathing and the sound of bullets, which were hitting the ground to his left and right.

They got there too and began to speak German. When he finally managed to escape, he was lost. After several circles in the woods, he found his way out to a field. Pisanos could see from far away his downed aircraft and decided to flee the area. He jumped a fence and crossed a rural road before seeing the unattended motorcycle of the two German soldiers. He thought for a moment to try to ride it and escape but he did not dare.

He continued to run before disappearing in the French countryside. Photo credit Flickr dwysiu. The next four days Pisanos wandered the French countryside. His injured shoulder hurt. He ate grass and drank water from creeks in order to survive. He spent his last night under a bridge before making contact the next day with the French resistance in a nearby village. At first the French villagers were suspicious of him because he spoke English with an accent. But when they made contact with London and found out that he was a genuine American pilot, they started hugging and kissing him.

Headline from the local newspaper of Plainfield referring to Pisanos fall in France. Officials in London directed that all downed aviators be transferred to central locations. The French resistance gave Pisanos false identification and smuggled him to Paris. They hid him among boxes in a truck loaded with firearm supplies for the resistance. Pisanos was accommodated temporarily with other aviators in an apartment in Paris.

ГРАНДИОЗНАЯ СЮЖЕТНАЯ КАМПАНИЯ ПО МОТИВАМ СОБЫТИЙ ВТОРОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ

During a late night party, one of the British pilots started playing the piano. It almost proved to be a fatal mistake. In just minutes Gestapo officers appeared at their door, shouting and demanding to get in immediately. The panicked landlord asked the pilots to leave the building via the balcony. Pisanos and his companions had no option but to go out through the bedroom window, leap from the balcony and escape to the narrow streets of Paris. Some members of the French resistance were excited to find out that Pisanos knew how to speak their language. It was uncommon for an American or British aviator to speak French, but Pisanos had learned the language during his high school years in Greece.

During his stay at another house in the northern Paris suburbs, Pisanos met members of one of the most daredevil groups in the resistance. He soon joined their ranks and became one of their most dedicated members, going out every night to destroy German targets throughout the city. He did not stop working until the very end of the German occupation. While the allied forces were approaching Paris after the invasion of Normandy, Pisanos was trying to secure the safe passage of the troops by working to neutralize explosives that Germans placed below bridges. His contribution to occupied France was recognized almost 65 years later.

Pisanos still remembers the crazy celebration that followed the German evacuation of Paris and the arrival of the allied forces in the city. Very soon he reunited with the American army and was sent back to London. During his return he was surprised to learn that he was no longer eligible to participate in combat missions due to his work with the French resistance. It was a security measure in place to protect aviators. Because his activity in France exposed him to a lot of information pertinent to the intelligence community, there was a fear that if he were caught and tortured he may provide some of that intelligence.

When the war ended, Pisanos returned to America. He was 25 years old and had accomplished more than he ever imagined. Pisanos thought that time had come to settle down. He decided to accept a civilian pilot position for TWA and went to Kansas City to attend the local flying school. It was there that he met his future wife, Sofia. But his passion for military aviation would not fade.

Very soon he quit his job to join the newly formed U. This time his task was to test advanced jet fighters and new weapons. His NATO assignments took him all over the world. His family and friends in Greece had not seen him for years. His parents seized the opportunity and rushed to visit him.

Pisanos offered them a plane ride. But his mother accepted, even though she was afraid of flying. With the engine roaring, they took to the sky. Today, Pisanos lives in San Diego. Although his wife Sofia has passed away and his children live with their families far away, Pisanos is never alone. Surrounded by veteran and Greek-American friends, he enjoys visiting the orthodox church of Saint Constantine and going for coffee. When he is among good company and a lot of cups of coffee, Pisanos still sometimes stares at the sky. Web design and graphics by Stephen Mekosh.

The year-old retired United States Air Force fighter pilot, whose World War II experience included multiple escapes from death, was inspired to become an aviator years before the conflict began. But his son planned to travel another path. But he was determined to find his way out of Greece. Pisanos with his instructor after the first air training. Bruce was just the first wave of skilled staff to go through the dorms during the summer, repairing the wear and tear from one year of residents and making everything as fresh and functional as possible for the next wave of students who will arrive in August.

In the carpenter's footsteps will come the air conditioning experts, the electricians, the plumbers, and the painters, the small army of craftsmen necessary to keep these buildings some nearly a century old comfortable and welcoming. Bruce is a modest man, soft-spoken and of few words but with an obvious eye for detail.

I learned that students stepping up on bureau drawers to reach upper bunks are rough on the furniture.

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And that nail polish remover will buckle the lucite tops on vanities. And that you need to be prepared for surprises, even after the rooms have been vacated and the cleaners have done their work. In the back of one Galloway Hall cabinet Bruce discovered an article of forgotten clothing, a remarkably elaborate and colorful ahem!

Bruce did not blush or laugh, as I did, but kept on with his job, just remarking that he had seen worse. To the freshmen who swarm into the residences in a couple months, all the work of Bruce and his colleagues will be invisible. But Bruce won't mind, as he hasn't for the past fourteen move-in days. And for that we can all be very thankful. I am proud to be a Japanese-American but have not had a typical Japanese-American experience, if there is such a thing.

I did not, for instance, grow up in a large ethnic community in a place like Hawaii or California. I did not speak Japanese at home or live in the midst of an extended Japanese-American family. My father was an immigrant from Japan, who came to America in the early s to get an education. My mother was from upstate New York and was of good German and English stock. They met as postdocs in a lab at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the rest, as they say, is history. So, in other words, I had no relatives who were subjected to that most defining and scarring of Japanese-American experiences, mass internment by the U.

In my hometown of Bryan, Texas, there were only two families of Japanese ancestry and I grew up with very little awareness of what being Japanese-American meant. I went on to learn Japanese language in college and become a historian of modern Japan, but an appreciation of my hyphenated-American heritage was slow in coming. When living in Kansas, where Japanese-Americans are about as rare as they are in central Texas, I began giving public talks for Asian American Heritage Month, often because there was no one else in the area willing or able to do so.

I served as the faculty advisor for the Asian-American Student Union, an experience which was educational and always rewarding for me. And when I was asked to write a book chapter on the history of Asian-Americans in Kansas, I gladly took on the project, to educate myself and to share with others a story that had never been told before.

Some of what I learned was unforgettable: Although it clearly had been brewing for a while, a real awareness of being part of a larger Japanese-American community and history is something relatively recent for me. In , I had the opportunity to be a member of the Japanese-American Leadership Delegation, a program sponsored by the Japanese government and the U. From them I came to appreciate the diversity of the Japanese-American experience and the complex legacies of wartime internment. Most importantly, though, my time with them helped me realize the extent to which shared bonds of culture and shared challenges in American society knit us together as Japanese-Americans despite superficial differences of age, geography, and personal circumstance.

Thinking more consciously of my Japanese-Americanness if there is such a word has led to some surprising discoveries. For example, last summer I tagged along with my wife Marjorie to Utah, where she was attending a conference. While she listened to and delivered academic papers, I played the tourist. In between an organ recital in the Mormon Tabernacle and a pastrami burger a Salt Lake City greasy-spoon specialty , I made a pilgrimage to Topaz, one of the ten major Japanese-American internment camps spread mainly across the desolate expanses of the intermountain West.

To call the Topaz site isolated is a bit like calling Dallas a little warm in August. Located about miles south of the Great Salt Lake, near the sleepy farm town of Delta in a broad valley cut by the Sevier River from the Wasatch Mountains, Topaz is not the kind of place you would just stumble across. On a cloudless summer afternoon, the grid of dirt roads and a few aging foundations from camp buildings were the only relics left of the 8, Japanese-Americans who lived here 70 years ago. It was almost perfectly quiet as I walked what once was a barbed-wire perimeter, the silence broken only by locusts rising from the sagebrush, an occasional hare darting out in front of me, the flapping of an American flag at a small memorial by the highway, and the heavy sound of my footfalls.

It was beautiful and horrible and peaceful and disturbing, all at the same time. I drove away with profound respect for the endurance and resilience of the people most of whom were U. I was aware there were two internment camps in Arkansas, as I had a student at the University of Kansas who wrote a term paper for me about them. But imagine how surprised I was when I walked into the Mills Center for the first time, late last October when Marjorie and I were on our introductory tour of the Hendrix campus, and encountered one of the true masterpieces of Japanese-American internment camp art.

Tom was one step ahead of me and sent along a fascinating article by Robert Meriwether explaining how the painting had ended up at Hendrix.

As many of you will know, Louis Freund, who taught art at the college during the war, invited Sugimoto to have his only exhibition in Arkansas at least beyond the fences of the camps themselves on the Hendrix campus in It is a testament to the Hendrix community and its enduring commitment to inclusiveness that, even in a time of war and fear and injustice, the campus could welcome a Japanese-American artist with talent and a quiet message of resignation, loyalty, and dignity in distress.

And I know for sure that high on my list of priorities when I arrive in Conway are visits to the sites of the internment camps in Jerome and Rohwer and a tour of the new museum only a year old as of April dedicated to their history in the delta town of McGehee. I first met my future wife in the fall of , when we were both wet-behind-the-ears graduate students at Oxford University. Marjorie Swann was a Canadian, from a fly-speck of a town on an island in Lake Huron with more moose than people. She was at Oxford on a Commonwealth Scholarship a charming remnant of British imperial noblesse oblige and was reading for a degree in English Renaissance literature.

Our courtship was not exactly the stuff of romance novels or made-for-Lifetime movies. To say it was nerdy is putting it mildly: We would take tea breaks together, she emerging from the ancient, overheated library she preferred, me staggering into the sunlight from the medieval dungeon of a library I frequented. Then, as now, Marjorie was an absolute whiz with a red pen and a stickler for clarity and logic. It was love at first comma splice. We then began the peripatetic lives of contemporary academics. She subsequently earned a prestigious postdoc thank you, cradle-to-grave Canadian government and stayed in Princeton when I went off to Japan for a year to conduct research.


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We reunited in, of all places, Denton, Texas, where Marjorie had won a coveted tenure-track job at the University of North Texas. After a year in the Lone Star State, when I was happily a kept man, working on my own dissertation while Marjorie labored as a grunt of a junior faculty member, we packed up again and hit the road. The next port of call for us and a long layover, it turned out was in Lawrence, Kansas, where we both landed jobs at the University of Kansas.

We became rabid basketball fans, even more rabid regional art collectors of which more will follow in another blog post , and we rescued a historic home from demolition, completely renovated it, and got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Marjorie returned to her roots in rural Canada where she had a summer market garden to earn the money for college and kept us supplied with a backyard bounty of scrupulously organic raspberries, herbs, and heirloom tomatoes. Since , of course, we have been down in Dallas, where brutal summers make gardening all but impossible and a historic house is anything built before Warning to future students at Hendrix: Swann will work you hard and have no patience for sloppiness or laziness. Advice to future students at Hendrix: As always, Marjorie continues to burn the candle at both ends, being an active scholar while still heaping red ink by the bucket-load on student essays.

For several years she has been working on Izaak Walton, a seventeenth-century author who is regarded as something of a literary patron saint by all sport fishermen. His volume The Compleat Angler if only Marjorie had been around to correct his spelling! The more the merrier, it seems, since Marjorie has just completed compleated?

It is a lovely book, with a ribbon bookmark and a striking cover designed to attract all those fishermen who are voracious readers in the months when they cannot be standing amidst a stream in their waders. In her introduction, Marjorie urges us to reconsider how we regard this time-honored text: The Compleat Angler , she argues, is not just a fishing manual, not just a celebration of the countryside, and not just an Anglican meditation in an age of civil war, but it is also very much an ecological study, an unusually early reflection of an environmental consciousness in English literature.

The edition has already been attracting lots of attention, even in places where ivory-tower scholars usually fear to tread. It was one of two featured reviews in an issue of the TLS which is, in British literary circles, like running in the Kentucky Derby if you happen to be a racehorse. Just look where an Oxford doctorate can take you! Marjorie has written a blog on The Compleat Angler for the publisher you can read it here — link to http: While Marjorie was walking in the steps of Izaak Walton, visiting all the historic sites associated with him, and poring over sources in museums and libraries, I was either obligingly taking photographs often while wearing mittens or else relaxing in a pub across the street, trying to stay warm.

It was all in a good cause, though, as the edition sets a new standard for reprints of Izaak Walton and as Marjorie is hard at work on a book about The Compleat Angler and its post-Renaissance afterlives. Marjorie is looking forward to the move to Conway, to joining the Hendrix community, and to teaching poetry come the fall. The couple that proofreads together stays together. I am not exactly known for my athletic prowess. I have never excelled as a participant in any sport, although I am quite proficient as a spectator.

I took the path of least resistance in PE throughout my school career, but I improbably ended up on three straight champion intramural soccer teams in high school despite being more of an impediment on the field than an active player. I was a member of the Middle Common Room cricket team when in grad school at Oxford, as just about anyone can stand around on a lawn in white clothing between tea breaks.

Our season tickets in Allen Fieldhouse were somewhere up beyond the nosebleed section: The only sport in which I can claim even the most rudimentary expertise is bowling. The King Pins stitched on the back, and a pot belly. Be that as it may, I love bowling and have been indulging regularly for a very long time. I started in sixth grade, when all the students at St.

I am the first to admit this was not the Heisman Trophy or an Olympic medal, but I was darned proud of it and, modest though it was, it ended up being the only sporting recognition I would ever earn in my life. My athletic ambition stoked by this external recognition, I started pestering my father to go bowling with me on weekends.

My father did not drive — which, more so than being Japanese, regularly wearing Bermuda shorts, and not owning any firearms, make him quite an outlier in Bryan, Texas — so every Saturday we would get out our bikes and ride over to Triangle Bowl. After cheeseburgers, fries, and large Big Reds the diet of champions in bowling circles , we would intensely and very competitively roll a few games. My father usually won, which irritated me considerably, but we always enjoyed the time together and the good-natured rivalry made us both more proficient bowlers.

For a good many years after my father passed away, through college, graduate school, and beyond, I did not set foot in a bowling alley.

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Then, in about , I was traveling with a group of KU undergraduates in China and was persuaded, against my better judgment, to go bowling in Wuhan late one night. I was immediately hooked again. As soon as I got back to Lawrence I started going to Royal Crest Lanes, first once a week or so, then twice, and ultimately as often as I could fit it into my schedule.

I bought my own shoes, then a ball, then a better ball, and was soon decked out like a pro, with a tricked-out roller bag, flashy bowling shoes with flames up the sides, and lucky towels. Since coming to Dallas, the frequency of my bowling has tailed off considerably. I should confess that I am quite picky about where I bowl.

I am no fan of the fancy-schmancy new bowling centers popping up these days, especially in trendy places like Dallas, with martini bars and mood lighting and plush sofas and wall-to-wall hipsters and exorbitant prices.