Rockford’s Sam Caruana fought with the U.S. Army 104th Infantry Division they called the “Timberwolves” at the Battle of the Bulge.
It was there in Nordhausen, Germany that Caruana, and his unit discovered something that at the time he couldn’t quite understand: a Nazi death camp.
Bodies of Jewish prisoners littered the ground, bones in the crematorium.
Caruana and his fellow soldiers would go on to liberate three more Jewish concentration camps.
“It was horrible, just horrible,” said Caruana, now 103 years old. “You were thinking differently at that time. You weren’t the person you normally were when you see it, those atrocities. It was hard to believe.”
Caruana was among 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 held by a group of people that grows smaller each year, the last of the eyewitnesses to deadliest war in history.
Okinawa was ‘fiercest’ of island invasions
U.S. Navy veteran Bill Hunter, 101, of Roscoe, grew up in Monroe, Wisconsin.
He worked as world-class magician most of his life. But during World War II, he served with the U.S. Navy’s Armed Guard as a gunner and signalman stationed aboard merchant ships.
Hunter had tried to volunteer for the Navy along with his friends who were joining the military in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. But there weren’t enough training camps available and Hunter was forced to wait until he was drafted.
His ships participated in harrowing assaults in the Pacific including the invasion of Okinawa.
“We were in lots of invasions, but Okinawa was the last one and probably the most fierce of all those we’d been in,” Hunter said. “It was the largest convoy ever assembled in the Pacific and possibly the world.”
‘We all said good-bye’
Sverre Vinje of Rockford took a fall earlier this year and broke several bones. But that didn’t stop the 100-year-old from standing with a little help at a microphone Saturday and singing a stirring rendition of “God Bless America,” that brought tears to some eyes in the audience.
Vinje was a tenor who could have studied music in New York when he returned from the war. But he was told he would have to leave his family behind. For him, that wasn’t much of a choice. He stayed and worked as a milkman in Minnesota in what he said was the “hardest job in the world,” delivering milk even if there was deep snow and sub-zero temperatures.
Later, he worked as a mailman and then in machine a shop when his family moved to Rockford. But there had been moments in the Pacific Ocean during World War II that Vinje thought he would never see his family again.
Vinje was a sailor and then fireman aboard the USS Donaldson. It was severely damaged in what was called Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 — the worst natural disaster in U.S. Naval history. Three U.S. Destroyers were sunk, 790 personnel were killed and 146 planes smashed, according the U.S. Navy.
Eighty-foot waves crashed into the Donaldson as 175 mph winds threw it around. The sailors thought they were about to die.
“Our mast went underwater, tore the radar bell off the mast, then another wave threw us the other way, and we lost our aft steering and we had to go down and do it manually,” Vinje said. “We were down below 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 ventilating 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 on X @jeffkolkey.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford area WWII veterans honored on Pearl Harbor anniversary