Sam Caruana of Rockford fought with the U.S. Army’s 104th Infantry Division, which they called the “Timberwolves” during the Battle of the Bulge.
It was there in Nordhausen, Germany, that Caruana and his unit discovered something he couldn’t quite understand at the time: a Nazi death camp.
Bodies of Jewish prisoners lay scattered on the ground, bones in the crematorium.
Caruana and his fellow soldiers would liberate three more Jewish concentration camps.
“It was terrible, just terrible,” said Caruana, now 103 years old. ‘You thought differently then. You weren’t the person you normally were when you see those cruelties. It was hard to believe.’
Caruana was one of dozens of World War II veterans, “Rosie the Riveters,” and wartime nurses honored at a special event in Rockford on Dec. 7, 2024, the 83rd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
All the veterans were at least 97 years old, keepers of memories of a group of people that grows smaller every year, the last of the eyewitnesses of history’s deadliest war.
Okinawa was the ‘heaviest’ of the island invasions
U.S. Navy veteran Bill Hunter, 101, of Roscoe, grew up in Monroe, Wisconsin.
He worked as a world-class magician for most of his life. But during World War II he served in the U.S. Navy’s Armed Guard as a gunner and signalman aboard merchant ships.
Hunter had tried to volunteer for the Navy, along with his friends who joined the military in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. But there weren’t enough training camps available and Hunter had to wait until he was drafted.
His ships took part in harrowing attacks in the Pacific, including the invasion of Okinawa.
“We’ve been through a lot of invasions, but Okinawa was the last and probably the most intense of all the invasions we’ve been in,” Hunter said. “It was the largest convoy ever assembled in the Pacific and possibly in the world.”
‘We all said goodbye’
Sverre Vinje of Rockford fell earlier this year and broke several bones. But that didn’t stop the 100-year-old from standing at a microphone with a little help on Saturday and singing a moving rendition of “God Bless America,” which brought tears to some of the audience’s eyes.
Vinje was a tenor who had been able to study music in New York upon returning from the war. But he was told he would have to leave his family behind. For him that wasn’t really a choice. He stayed and worked as a milkman in Minnesota, where he said it was “the hardest job in the world,” delivering milk even when there was deep snow and temperatures were below freezing.
He later worked as a mail carrier and then in a machine shop when his family moved to Rockford. But there had been moments in the Pacific during World War II when Vinje thought he would never see his family again.
Vinje was a sailor and then a firefighter aboard the USS Donaldson. It was severely damaged in what was dubbed Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 – the worst natural disaster in the history of the US Navy. According to the US Navy, three American destroyers were sunk, 790 men were killed and 146 aircraft were destroyed.
Waves 75 feet high crashed into the Donaldson, while winds of 240 miles per hour tossed it around. The sailors thought they were about to die.
“Our mast went underwater, tore the radar bubble off the mast, then another wave threw us the other way, and we lost our steering gear aft and had to go down and do it manually,” Vinje said. “We were downstairs and we saw foam coming down through the hatches. So we all said goodbye to each other. We thought we were underwater. And here it was just the fire retardant that had broken open and was coming down through the ventilation system. .”
Jeff Kolkey writes about government, economic development and other issues for the Rockford Register Star. He can be reached at (815) 987-1374, via email at jkolkey@rrstar.com and at @jeffkolkey.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford World War II veterans honored on Pearl Harbor anniversary
