~ Pride ~ Honor ~ Valor ~ Sacrifice ~The Jewish Experience in the U.S. Military
True Stories and Oral Histories
Books by Howard J. Leavitt
Excerpt from Semper Chai!Foreword
The genesis of Semper Chai! occurred during a conversation with a non-Jewish acquaintance in the locker room of our sports club in Riverside, California. When this seemingly well-informed, well-intentioned, and educated businessman expressed surprise that Jews ever served in the U.S. Marine Corps, I knew the time had come to shed light on this ignored subject.
I made up a list of Jewish veterans of the Marine Corps from the rolls of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, which became the nucleus of a larger list of veterans whom I tried to contact by mail or phone. Each of those who were reachable was sent a questionnaire I had prepared. My initial intent was to write a book based on the experiences of approximately fifty veterans, but that number soon doubled due to the amount of responses received. I expanded the project to include stories of Jewish veterans of the Marine Corps, deceased and living, through research in libraries and museum archives, and in firsthand accounts sent to me....
The majority of those individuals whose stories are related or to whom references are made...expressed the same feeling regarding the purpose of this work: to impart that Americans of the Jewish faith are to be counted upon to defend their country, and that many have chosen to do so in the service of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Barney Ross experienced the worst and the most intense of combat action on Guadalcanal. In one night, the Japanese launched a combined land and sea attack designed to drive the Americans out of the island. "They poured out of their positions screaming, 'Die, you dirty Yankees!' But we stopped them with mortars, machine guns, and grenades, and their dead piled up like so many hunks of meat in a butcher store. We held them off for four days, then our company got orders to move up."
The Army had arrived and was supposed to start a counteroffensive. The Marines' mission was to spearhead the attack, push the Japanese back, and let the Army take over.
Nearing the end of his tour on Guadalcanal, Christmas Eve of 1942 "was a night nobody who was on the Canal will ever forget. Jap planes raided us that night and the music and the prayers of the Christmas Mass were often drowned out by the explosions of their bombs - Marines of all faiths came to the service; those who could get away from the lines, anyway."
With the end of the Mass, the priest asked a blessing from "the God who looks down on all of us." When he called on Barney to say a few words, he said, "I've been thinking about my mother, too, and I've got a favorite song I'd like to play and sing in her honor. It's called My Yiddishe Mama."
As he sang it, first in Yiddish, the tears started to run down his cheeks. Then he sang it in English. However, he changed My Yiddishe Mama to My Wonderful Mama, and "when I finished, there were a lot of other wet Marine faces in the crowd."
With New Year's Day, things were quiet and they had a mass burial for the dead. Ross stood with about two thousand Marines watching the chaplains of the three religions hold services at the cemetary. "I stood for a long time at the graves of Whitey, Freeman, and other pals I had in the company and I felt as if my heart would break," he recalled.
"I tried to go back to the lines one more time, but I collapsed. The malaria was eating me alive. A few days later, an aid man came in with a message, 'Get your gear right away. You've been ordered to be evacuated.'"
With thirty others, he was taken by plane to the island of Ifati in the New Hebrides. His wounds plus malaria made it impossible for him to walk on his own. He had to be carried to the plane on a stretcher. After a stay in New Zealand, he was returned to the States. Barney Ross's war was over.
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