Identity reinforced: Jewish-American GIs in WWII

It’s been over 73 years since Sampson Lester Friedman served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, but the memories haunt him to this day.

He was part of a 12-man crew flying in a Boeing B-29 VH Superfortress bomber whose mission was to drop incendiary bombs over Tokyo,. “It was horrible, stinking, burning,” he recalled. “The plane bounced around like a kite.”

Friedman, 94, now lives in Bellerose. He is one of 550,000 Jewish-American men and women who entered the United States Armed Forces during World War II. They served in all branches of the military and played an integral role in Allied victory over Germany and Japan. Their experiences have been portrayed in book and film.

 Like all Americans, these men and women fought to defend freedom. Thousands were wounded; 11,000 were killed in action. For Jewish GIs from immigrant families, whose relatives’ lives were imperiled by the Nazi regime, it was personal. Jewish soldiers found themselves fighting on two fronts: against fascism in Europe, and within their own ranks, to dispel stereotypes of Jews as weaklings unfit for combat.

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States two days later, Friedman, then a 19-year-old student at New York University, enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. “Everyone wanted to serve,” he said. “Europe was in flames.”

Herb Chavkin, 97, grew up in the Bronx. “I was a Jew,” he said. “As a result [I] did not feel it was wrong when I was drafted. I was anxious to overcome Germany. It was unbelievable that a country so advanced as Germany, a leading light of Europe, could have allowed and encouraged Adolf Hitler.”

For Friedman and Chavkin, who grew up in cities with large Jewish populations, adjustment to military life began with basic training.

“We were on an obstacle course,” Friedman recalled. “I put in a burst of speed, and one of the non-Jewish men yelled, ‘You lousy Jew bastard’ because I beat him.”

Chavkin was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, where he completed basic training as a Seaman Second Class. “Of over 200 students, there were only three Jews,” he said. He found friends among all classes. At officer school at Notre Dame, he played handball against the priests.

Having grown up near Floyd Bennett Field, Friedman had always wanted to fly. But after passing the rigorous physical and mental tests of Air Corps training, he was not chosen to pilot.

“The Air Corps was a club mostly of non-Jews,” he said. “I was in the washout room, where I saw all of these Jewish guys. I said, ‘I still want to fly.’ So they let me be a bombardier.”

He was transferred to bombardier school in New Mexico, where he graduated and became a flight officer. He was later promoted to first lieutenant. Traveling across the U.S. to be deployed overseas, he recalled the country’s mobilization for war from the windows of his train: “Factories were working all day and night — welding, building ships. The U.S. went into full gear.”

May 8, 1945 marked Allied victory in Europe, but the war against Japan raged on. “The Japanese had occupied the whole Pacific Rim,” Friedman said. As Allied forces gained supremacy in the Pacific, they began massive air attacks on Japan’s urban and industrial centers. A bombardier in the 9th Bomb Group, 20th Air Force, Friedman was positioned in the airplane’s nose.

“I found out I was the most important guy on the ship, dropping bombs, going into the target.”

He was equipped with six guns that fired at the push of a button. From his base in the Mariana Islands, Friedman flew 25 missions over Japan. Planes traveled 18 hours nonstop, carrying all their fuel as well as tons of bombs.

Three missions involved dropping incendiary bombs on Tokyo. To him, “it was as devastating as the atomic bomb,” he said. “Every time I went to the target, I said the Shema Yisrael.” But it was the only way to avert the loss of thousands of lives — U.S., allied, and Japanese — had an invasion of mainland Japan become necessary.

“We were out there to end the war,” said Friedman. “We destroyed people. I have to live with that. When we dropped the incendiaries by parachute, the tail gunner saw the damage … The extreme heat generated a rising smoke upwards. I’ll never forget that smell.”

On one mission, Friedman shot down an oncoming kamikaze suicide bomber.  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, having saved the lives of the crew on the ship below.

Herb Chavkin, on the other hand, was drafted into the Navy. He was there for three years, including an eighteen-month stint as an engineering officer on an assault ship in the Philippines, and fought in the Battle for Leyte Gulf.

The battle, which lasted from October 23 to 25, 1944, crippled the Japanese combined fleet, enabling the U.S. invasion of the Philippines and reinforcing Allied control of the Pacific.

“I was a very lucky guy,” Chavkin said. “I was too young to know the danger.”

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945, aboard the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri.

With the destruction of European Jewry, America’s Jewish community became the world’s largest. Jewish GIs, who had gone to war to fight the Nazis, found themselves profoundly changed. Their struggles to prove their courage as soldiers and patriots had strengthened them.

“I flew with Irish, Scotch, English and other Americans of different backgrounds and proved myself to be just as good as they,” said Friedman. “Every time we took off, I said the Shema. I told myself, if I get through this I’m going to shul every Shabbat — and I did. The war reinforced my identity as a Jewish person.” It also left him with a long list of people to say Kaddish for.

After returning, Jewish veterans sought to return to civilian life and normalcy. Chavkin was discharged as a lieutenant junior grade, earned a graduate degree in pharmacy from Columbia, and raised two sons with his wife, Shirley.

“The war turned out to be an education for me personally,” he said. “I learned about diesel engineering, how to transmit orders to people, how to get along with people. I became a better human being because of it.”

In 1946, Friedman married Lila, “the love of my life,” and moved to Bellerose, where they raised three sons. He now speaks at the Bellerose Jewish Center every Memorial and Veterans Day, honoring servicemen killed in combat. “They laid their lives and never came home. 

“This is the reason you are able to live in a free country today. There are no other countries with freedoms like ours.”