World War II

By Adrienne Lee

Maria Cristina [Pozos] Parra knows few details about World War II outside the stories her husband, Ambrosio Parra, chose to tell her, and a wound on his foot that left him in pain for the rest of his life. As she put it: “He told me a little bit, but he didn’t like to talk about [it].

Maria Pozos and Ambrosio Parra met in the mid-1940s at Randolph Air Force Base – located in Universal City, Texas, just outside San Antonio – when her supervisor asked her to escort Ambrosio, the new employee, to the base’s machine shop. Five years later, they got married.

By Jocelyn Ehnstrom

As a young kid, Julius Moreno enjoyed playing baseball, tending to his family’s farm animals at their home in San Antonio and singing in his neighborhood band called “The Holly Boys.”

But the first priority of Moreno’s father, Julio Moreno, Sr., was making sure all nine of his children, the second oldest of whom was Moreno, got a good education.

By Pierre Bertrand

It seems as if Army infantryman Julian Medina, who was drafted in 1943, was on the frontlines of every major World War II European campaign, from the Normandy Invasion to the Battle of the Bulge.

“I was in every fight. I was in every battle,” said Medina, who was part of the Army’s 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division in 1943.

His European service began in Scotland, where he was among thousands of American soldiers being trained for amphibious assaults.

By David Muto

Trinidad Martinez remembers the little things.

Like the long list of vegetables he helped his family grow on their ranch in South Texas before World War II broke out.

Thoughts like that punctuate Martinez's recollections of his time at war, during which he endured years of incredible hardship at the hands of enemy combatants and even walked in the infamous Bataan Death March. He seems amused while recalling these smaller, seemingly trivial memories of his youth, as if they've been uncovered for the first time in years.

By Brittany Rodriguez

He was only a child when the war began, but Rudy Elizondo supported the United States in his own way.

From his time in the Boy Scouts to his service in the United States Navy, Elizondo proved that one could fight a war without going overseas.

“When the war started, I was just 11 years old,” he said. “I heard my parents talk ... Then later on in the evening we heard a radio broadcast from President Roosevelt that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and that he was going to Congress to see about a declaration of war.”

By Sara Delarosa

When Willie Luna Moreno entered the Armed Forces in April of 1943, he was only 19.

Moreno began basic training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas, and later in Massachusetts and Maryland. Afterward, he went to England, France and Germany.

Starting as a Private First Class, he was involved in the infantry and military police, as well as the 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed Big Red One partially due to a shoulder patch emblazoned with a red numeral “1.” As a part of Big Red One, Moreno was in Omaha Beach, Normandy, on D-Day.

By Jeffrey McWhorter

Morning broke as the train rolled into Texarkana, Texas.

“Now don’t close your eyes,” the porter admonished a 22-year-old Bertha Flores, “because we’re getting close … and we’ll pass it real fast.”

For the past twenty-four hours, the eager young woman had asked the porter the same question every hour: “Where are we?” And each time she received the same patient reply, “Still in Texas.”

By Soren Silkenson

When Alfred P. Flores was 16, his brother Robert, was lost in an early guided missile attack that sank his ship, the Rohna, three miles off the coast of Italy.

The sinking in the Mediterranean of the British troop transport vessel on Nov. 26, 1943, killed more than 1,000 U.S. troops in one of the worst losses of U.S. maritime history.

Details of the disaster were initially shrouded in military secrecy. Flores was determined to help find his brother but was told he was too young to enlist. Shortly after turning 17, he was finally allowed.

By Borger Bargas

On April 29, 1945, Genovevo Bargas and some of his shipmates looked to the sky from the deck of the USS Comfort. A Japanese kamikaze was headed straight for their hospital ship. They were in the midst of the Battle of Okinawa, the last major battle of World War II.

The kamikaze missed the USS Comfort’s smoke stack, but still managed to create a huge hole in the vessel.

“We only saw one part of the Japanese [pilot’s] body,” said Bargas, motioning from the neck up, “the rest was nothing.”

By Hope Teel

Out of work with eight mouths to feed, Henry Rodriguez’s family left California in the early 1930s during the beginning of the Great Depression.

For Rodriguez, the family’s youngest member, the trip marked his first experience with racial discrimination.

“People didn’t know anything about backgrounds,” Rodriguez said. “People thought there were only Anglos and Indians, and we were Indians.”

As the family traveled across several states, Rodriguez watched his parents persevere, despite weather, racial and financial obstacles.