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Veterans Breakfast Club commemorates Armistice Day centennial

By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read
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When the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, ended what at the time was called the Great War, U.S. Army Cpl. Frank Woodruff Buckles still had yet to turn 18.

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Dr. Lillian Charie, who served as a U.S. Army officer in World War II, with daughter Alison

Nine-plus decades later, when he celebrated his 110th birthday in Charles Town, W.Va., in 2011, Buckles was the last surviving veteran of World War I.

“I remember in the last year of his life, I was kind of making general plans to go down and meet him and interview him, and he got sick and died before I could do it,” Mt. Lebanon resident Todd DePastino recalled. “I’ve always regretted that.”

At the time, it had been three years since he co-founded the Veterans Breakfast Club, a rotating gathering around Western Pennsylvania that provides veterans with opportunities to tell their stories for appreciative audiences.

The club’s 10-year anniversary therefore coincides with the centennial of Armistice Day, and a special observance on Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon commemorated the end of the supposed “war to end all wars.”

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Norman Rosfeld tells about his experiences with the U.S. Army Air Corps.

“We’re still very much living in the shadow of World War I,” DePastino said. “Without World War I, there would have been no World War II. There would have been no Cold War, no Korean War, no Vietnam War. The map of the Middle East was drawn largely in the wake of World War I, which determined the wars we’ve been fighting the past 30 years.”

Among the veterans who shared their experiences on Sunday were some who served during the Second World War, including Bill McAuley. He joined the Army in 1943 as a combat medic and saw action in the Bougainville Campaign.

“That was a bad battle. It really was. A lot of men were killed in that battle,” he said about the series of encounters with the Japanese forces in the South Pacific.

Fortunately for him, he was assigned to other duties.

“They found out I knew a little about music, so I transferred into the band work. And I did a show with Bob Hope,” he recalled. “Bob was a nice fellow.”

In honor of his musical background, DePastino had McAuley, now 95, lead guests in the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Also serving in the Pacific was Norman Rosfeld of the Army Air Corps, who was a radio operator on a B-29, the largest aircraft of the war. In the summer of 1945, he was stationed on Tianan, the island in the Northern Marianas from which the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki were launched.

“More missions were planned, but they called them off while negotiations were going on,” Rosfeld, 93, said. “I was on the last raid of the war, Aug. 14, 1945, on a daylight raid over Nagoya. I picked it up on the way back that the war was over.”

Another Army veteran who spoke, Dr. Lillian Charie, is 97.

“I had three older brothers and they were in the Army, and I joined, too,” she explained.

Serving in the Navy, primarily aboard tank-landing ships – known in military parlance as Landing Ship, Tank – was Peter Maurin.

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Peter Maurin served in the U.S. Navy as a gunner aboard LST-286 and LST-313.

“We had two decks, a tank deck and a top side,” he explained. “We unloaded them as quickly as possible, and then we’d take it back out and we’d wait for the wounded to come aboard. We had Navy surgeons operating on the guys just as soon as they came aboard the ship.”

His LST was among the craft involved in the invasion of Normandy, France, in June 1944, acknowledged as the major turning point toward the Allies winning the war in Europe.

“The farthest part of the ship was the bow, and that’s where I was, on a 40-millimeter gun,” Maurin said. “But we didn’t fire. We didn’t have to, because we had battleships right behind us, and they did all the firing.

“You thought there wasn’t any water, there were so many ships,” he continued. “How we could develop so much equipment in such a short period of time was amazing. It’s American ingenuity.”

For more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club, visit veteransbreakfastclub.com.

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Through the Veterans Breakfast Club, director Todd DePastino encourages veterans to tell their stories to appreciative audiences.

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