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Leo Rose bombed Tokyo in a fiery low-level raid. Morris Shoss survived the infamous Bataan Death March. Jesse Oppenheimer helped avert a riot on a Pacific-bound troopship.
Leo Rose shows old photos and maps during the videotaped interview. The videotapes will be available at the Beldon Library at the San Antonio Jewish Campus.
Photo by Edward A. Ornelas/Express-News Photographer
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They are among 16 area Jewish veterans of World War II who are sharing their war experiences for posterity in an oral history project sponsored by the Jewish Federation of San Antonio.
The resulting videotapes will be made available for researchers at the Beldon Library at the San Antonio Jewish Campus.
They've already made an impression on USAA executive Mickey Roth, who conducted the interviews. He learned new things about people he's known for years and gained new perspectives on the war, he said.
Rose's older brother, Julius Rose, was lost with his Navy submarine on a mission into Tokyo Bay. As an Army Air Force bombardier/navigator on a B-29 bomber, Rose thought he and his air crew would be killed too.
Late in the war, Gen. Curtis LeMay ordered firebombing of Japanese cities after high-altitude precision bombing of factories didn't meet expectations, Rose recalled.
"We had to come down to 3,000 feet. We all thought we'd never come home," he said.
Shoss had even less reason to expect survival.
After the surrender of U.S. forces on the Bataan peninsula and the nearby fortress island of Corregidor in the spring of 1942, he staggered through the 55-mile Bataan Death March and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp.
In September 1944, he was among 650 prisoners bound for Japan when their prison ship was sunk. Only 82 survived.
"Telling the story helps," Shoss said. "A lot of people who went through this experience went off their rockers with post-traumatic stress syndrome.
"The whole experience was like a very bad dream."
The federation hopes other Jewish veterans of the war will share their stories too. They can call Beth Keough at (210) 302-6965 for more information.
Oppenheimer related how his quartermaster battalion's 5,000 black soldiers and about 60 white officers — fresh from Gen. George Patton's Third Army in Germany — were shipped to the Pacific.
The unit had operated well in Europe. But the ship was hot and cramped, and shipboard rules were enforced by Marines unaccustomed to dealing with black troops, he said.
"The men were kept below decks and couldn't come up. If they were allowed up on deck, they weren't allowed to light cigarettes," Oppenheimer recalled. "It was a clash of cultures and personalities, basically."
Oppenheimer said he and other Army officers stepped in, created a committee to air the troops' grievances and managed to improve their conditions.
"It was difficult to persuade the Marines to go along with it, but they really didn't have much choice," he said. "We were going to have a full-scale riot on our hands; it was quite obvious."
The veterans agreed on the importance of preserving firsthand memories of World War II, an upheaval unlike any other.
"Nazism was a cancer," Oppenheimer said. "If we hadn't gotten involved, it would have overrun all of Europe, and the whole world would have been dominated by it."
Businessman Oscar Ehrenberg said he woke up in the middle of the night with the idea for the project. He had just heard a longtime friend relate his experiences in the Battle of the Bulge.
"Imagine how much better our generation would have understood the Civil War if we'd had videotapes of people who had fought in the battles of Gettysburg, Shiloh and Vicksburg," Ehrenberg said.
jparker@express-news.net
07/23/2001
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