97-year-old Bill Rossi still proudly wears his Navy Seabees cap. He helped assemble the atomic bomb and took care of the Enola Gay that delivered it to Japan from Tinian Island in the South Pacific.
Ed Clifford (on the left in photo) worked as a member of the ground crew with the 15th Air Force in Southern Italy.
And Fred Nuzzo was a B‑24 tail gunner in the same unit.
These World War II New Haven veterans were among 25 honored by Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz at a poignant ceremony at the Conte West Hills School Wednesday afternoon.
It was the 126th such ceremony, each one in a different Connecticut town, that Bysiewicz has conducted to call attention to the public service rendered by the World War II generation.
It was spawned in 2007 when a staffer informed her 1,000 World War II vets die each day, including 40 in Connecticut, she said. (The federal government has updated that estimate to 851 in 2009.)
“When I heard that, [I decided] we should do something to say thank you before it’s too late,” said Bysiewicz, whose father is a World War II vet. She hailed the vets’ resilience, modesty, and spirit of public service.
Rossi, Nuzzo, Clifford (click here to read a story about a playground recently dedicated to him), and others at the event Wednesday told stories of their battles 65 years ago. They remain proud of what they did. Their opinion on the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was decidedly different.
On the upcoming decision by President Obama to stay the course, withdraw, or ramp up in Afghanistan, this sample of the vets at least were clear in their opinion. Bill Rossi captured it: “Let’s get the HELL out, and that’s ‘HELL’ in capital letters.”
Unlike the vets interviewed at Wednesday’s New Haven ceremony, Bysiewicz, the leading Democratic candidate for governor in 2010, offered no strong opinion when asked her take on the options facing the president in Afghanistan.
She said the most difficult official function of her tenure in office has been attending the more than 40 funerals for young Connecticut soldiers. Still she said she had not yet fully studied the options whether to withdraw, stay the course, or ramp up.
“Clearly I would like to stop sending young people to the Middle East.”
Wednesday’s event was not a political one. It was ceremonial, and nostalgic.
Bill Rossi recalled how he got a local Elm City store, Berger Brothers, to send box upon box of their goods so he could clothe the ravaged population that had been abused by the Japanese. “That’s how we brought New Haven to Tinian.”
Other vets, such as former Marine Edmund Grant, recalled watching from his ship as the U.S. flag was raised on Mount Surabaci on Iwo Jima.
Rose Zimmerman, also a Marine, recalled how she was one of the first women Marines to drive: her job, transporting bigwigs around at the Quantico base in Virginia. “I was happy to be there and serving my country. [They were] the best years of my life,” she said.
Rossi brought a model of the U.S.S. Indianapolis with him to the ceremony. It was the ship that carried the atomic bomb to Tinian. After more than six decades, did he think it was right to have used that weapon to end the war with the Japan?
Rossi said he speaks about the war and the Enola Gay to lots of high school classes, but on the moral rightness or wrongness: “I withhold my opinion.”
On the Afghanistan war, however, he did not withhold his opinion Wednesday. If we just get out, they’ll talk to each other and settle their differences, he said. He compared it to the war in Vietnam. “Now Vietnam is accepting Americans to come visit their hotels.”
After they get done with honoring World War II vets, Bysiewicz will move on to the Korean War vets, said Dave Killian, a staff assistant. He said the secretary’s time and all the staff’s is almost all volunteered, and costs are paid for privately, by the Whelen Engineering Company of Chester.
