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It's a good time to cover this area's immense contributions to "The War."
In a nutshell, who are the local people and what are their accomplishments that would appear on a newsreel summarizing the war?
At the risk of major omissions, the massive list of achievements can be distilled into four newsreel scenes, as gleaned from "In the thick of the fight":
No. 1: Sacrifice
Those who died: 570 or more men from York County died in uniform. That comes to 1 out of every 700 American war deaths.
Selfless act: Rabbi Alexander D. Goode's selfless actions, giving up his life jacket and seat on a lifeboat, have enshrined his name in books, murals and paintings. He's one of the "Four Chaplains," heroic clergymen who went down with the troop transport Dorchester so that others might live.
Most prominent: W.L. Glatfelter, one of four sons of P.H. Glatfelter II, of the paper mill family, died in the crash of an air transport plane in Mississippi.
One of six: Charles E. Williams died in Italy late in the war.
Notifying next of kin: Western Union telegram to Anne Frutiger of Red Lion - "The secretary of war deeply regrets to inform you that your husband 1/Lt Fruitger Thomas W. killed in action in Pacific Area 15 Dec. 44 while being transported abouard a Japanese Vessel."
Rallying the troops: York Corporation's "Shop News" - "How many boys from York Corporation (now Johnson Controls) won't come back? Nobody knows the exact number. Nobody. But - The number who do come back - on their own two feet instead of in a flag-draped box - will be in exact proportion to the job we do here at home. For every minute that we can help shorten the war will mean more lives saved."
The answer to the initial question: 25.
Number serving: About 20,000 York countians, or 1 out of every 9 people within county borders.
Those wounded: Number unknown, but the total would be in the thousands.
One of the wounded: Ross Kurtz wrote that he got in the way of a mortar shell in Italy. His stomach was badly mangled. His hips and arms caught some shrapnel, too.
"However my face did not fare as well," he wrote.
Shrapnel hit above his mouth, smashing out all his teeth on the right side of his jaw. It broke several facial bones and the roof of his mouth. Later, doctors found that his lower jaw also was fractured.
"It looks as if Kurtz is going to have to keep his mouth shut for awhile," he wrote, "as they are going to wire together what teeth I have left."
No. 2: The York Plan
The plan defined: The 15-point York Plan was a co- operative effort by area industries to share skilled workers and underused machinery to secure demanding defense contracts. These contracts otherwise would have been too large for a single business to handle.
Slogan: "To Do What We Can With What We Have."
Points 1 and 2: "To make use of present facilities in regards to tools," and "To get idle tools and idle men working."
Early adopter: S. Forry Laucks, owner of York Safe and Lock, came to the game early but was too autocratic and Democratic to make the plan work across the community.
Organizer and promoter: York Corporation's W. S. Shipley and the Manufacturers' Association took to the stump locally and across America to tell how men, machines and material in almost every plant worked for virtually every other plant. This added to the health of local factories coming out of the Depression and created even more demand for women workers and the postponement of retirements.
York Safe's view: S. Forry Laucks - "If the workers in your plant can make something so massive as a bank vault, and yet so delicate and precise as the lock on a safety-deposit box - well, I guess they can turn out not only a gun carriage but the breechblock of the gun and the firing mechanism as well."
Farms, factories bridged: Factory space was so scarce in York that Charles Coffey set up a machine shop in the end of City Market, where farmers still sold their wares. He crafted parts for York Safe and Lock machines that, in turn, made armor plates.
How it all worked: Laucks farmed out more than 45 percent of the 6,000 individual parts found in anti-aircraft mounts to York Corporation, S. Morgan Smith, A.B. Farquhar and dozens of other nearby companies. In Gettysburg, for example, Barge Donmoyer set up a machine shop in a new, but never-used, tourist cabin. He finished metal parts for a 37 mm anti-tank gun.
Women at work: Helen Young, York Corporation - "Before working here in the Yorkco shops I was employed in an office, and I can say that I like the shop much better. The work is different from that which women usually do, and I think my job is very interesting. Of course there is the feeling that I am doing my duty, which makes the job more appealing."
No. 3: Hero ofthe highest rank
Who: Gen. Jacob Loucks Devers earned four stars, the highest rank ever achieved by a York County native.
Major accomplishments: The Roosevelt Avenue native led the attack of the Sixth Army Group through the south of France to open another front against the Germans in August 1944. The Germans were fighting Omar Bradley's armies that had entered through Normandy beaches on D-Day. Then, Devers led his two units - the Seventh Army and the French First Army - consisting at times of 250,000 men across the Rhine River through the south of Germany.
Mission in Germany: Locking arms with George Patton's 3rd Army, Jake Devers' mission was to watch Patton's right flank and to eliminate any possibility of an embarrassing last-ditch Nazi holdout in the rugged Alps, the rumored National Redoubt.
What Devers' men found: His men freed the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau and helped capture Hitler's famed "Eagle's Nest" Alpine retreat. They also rounded up stray Gestapo leaders.
"We've got to destroy the Gestapo type of mentality," Devers said. "We got to shoot them, although I guess, of course, we have got to do it legally."
Those concentration camps: Nurse M.L. Hamberger, serving in the European Theater, saw evidences that camp officers forced prisoners to jump off a cliff. If they refused, officers pushed them. Prisoners were hung on hooks, where they slowly strangled. If they survived that, they were burned alive.
"Nothing is horrible enough for the people who are responsible for such suffering," she wrote to her parents, former York residents Mr. and Mrs. Roy Hamberger.
Ike didn't like Jakie: Commanding Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower clashed with Devers and listed him 24th on a list of 38 most-able field commanders in Europe. Eisenhower wrote that Devers was "most inaccurate in statements and evaluations. ... He has not, so far, produced among the seniors of the American organization here a feeling of confidence and trust."
Another evaluation: Historian Charles Whiting - "Devers' problem was that he wasn't flamboyant like Patton, nor did he have General Bradley's publicity machine. He lacked the flair that made him good 'copy' for correspondents. They wanted stories for the 'folks back home.' Devers could not provide them."
Devers' salute: "With this great effort put out in York, you have given us the equipment and the food and the incentive to go ahead, without which we could not have done what has been done. We have received this equipment, and we have received it at the right time, and the right place, and we had plenty of it."
No. 4: Enemy withinour borders
What happened? Nearly 2,000 German and Austrian prisoners, up to 500 at one time, were interned at a 15-acre enclosure at the playground in Stewartstown. The prisoners were detained between June 30, 1944, and Oct. 31, 1945, at Camp Stewartstown. Many of the prisoners, captured during fighting in Northern Africa, were still clad in their uniforms or parts of them.
Why here? With the orchards and canneries in the southern part of York County crying for workers during harvest season, the government offered prisoners of war as a solution.
Historic perspective: This was the second time in county history that soldiers representing the forces Americans were fighting came to York. From 1781-1783, British prisoners of war were detained at Camp Security in present-day Springettsbury Township.
The camp: Several buildings dotted the fairgrounds, accommodating Sunday school picnics, fairs and carnivals before the war. In a twist, residents had used some of the land for Victory gardens, a national initiative to encourage home-grown vegetables and fruit to free up these items for fighting men to battle the Germans.
A guard's view: Victor Nolt - "Some were mere soldiers. Others, the younger ones were Hitler's boys, arrogant.
"They were the gods themselves, the indestructible race, whereas the older ones were ordinary Germans."
The town's view: Some believed the POWs were inadequately guarded and treated too well. Others realized that they were just boys, like county youth fighting overseas.
"Pity would rise in our hearts as we thought of them so far from their homeland," Erma Barnes wrote. "Then we remembered the hometown boys fighting and dying on foreign soil, in a war started by their leader - and one would then feel almost like a traitor."
Ken Burns has made a great contribution in reminding America of its rapidly dwindling "Greatest Generation."
And York County did what it could with what it had in "The War" to ensure that the "Greatest Generation," indeed, could become great.
James McClure is editor of the York Daily Record/Sunday News. He has written five books on York County history, including "In the thick of the fight, York County, Pa. Counters the Axis threat in World War II." To contact him, call 771-2000, or e-mail jem@ ydr.com.
To watch
The rest of Ken Burns' “The War” will be broadcast at 8 p.m. today through Tuesday and at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WITF-TV (Ch. 33) and WMPB-TV (Ch. 67).
To read more
Read numerous posts relating World War II highlights from York/Adams on James McClure's local history blog, http://www.yorktownsquare.com
