‘The greatest generation’: Hoover World War II veterans share their stories

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Two and a half years ago, Shelby County photographer Jeff Rease decided he wanted to do portrait photos of World War II veterans as a thank you for their service and sacrifice.

The Highland Lakes resident thought he might find a few of those veterans still around, but once he got started, he had no idea how quickly his effort would expand.

His first subject was retired Marine Col. Carl Cooper, a Vestavia Hills resident who fought in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War. Once Rease shared what he was doing on Facebook, “it really kind of took off,” he said.

He now has photographed at least 210 World War II veterans, including two from Hoover — Herman Stubblefield, a 100-year-old Shades Mountain resident who was an Air Force fighter pilot during the war, and John Little, a 97-year-old Trace Crossings resident who fought in five major battles as an Army infantryman in Italy. Here are the stories of their backgrounds and war experiences, as shared by them:

Herman Stubblefield

Stubblefield was 21 when he entered the military in 1942. He had finished two years at David Lipscomb Junior College in Nashville on a pre-engineering track and knew he was about to get drafted for the war, so he volunteered in order to be able to choose his branch of service — the Army Air Force.

“From the time I was a little bitty kid, I’d had an ambition to fly, and the only way I was ever going to get any flight training is if somebody else paid for it, which the government did,” Stubblefield said.

After Army basic training, he was briefly put in aircraft mechanic school and then transferred into the flight training program. After a week of tests in San Antonio and a brief period of menial assignments, he spent about nine months in flight training in Arizona and California.

He was assigned to the 364th Fighter Group in early 1944, took a train ride from the West Coast to the East Coast and crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Queen Elizabeth, a cruise ship that had been converted into a troop carrier.

They arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, and took a train ride to the English Royal Air Force base in Honington. He missed his group’s first two missions due to a respiratory infection, but his first mission turned out to be a historic one on March 5, 1944. It was the first time U.S. heavy bombers went as far inland as Berlin.

Stubblefield flew a P-38 twin-engine fighter, and his group’s primary job was to protect the bombers from enemy aircraft.

The bombers spent about 15 hours in the air, but the smaller fighters with smaller gas tanks had to tag-team as escorts. His group’s part was in the Berlin area, so “my very first mission was watching bombers go over the city of Berlin,” he said.

He saw a lot of anti-aircraft fire, but none of it came close to him, so his first conclusion was that combat wasn’t so bad after all.

He flew 77 missions in total, over Germany, France and Denmark. He saw a lot of enemy fighters, but didn’t have a lot of close encounters.

“I don’t remember ever having any enemy fighter firing at me,” he said.

He did shoot at one, but all the enemy planes went into a near vertical dive below cloud cover at 12,000 feet, and he thought it unwise to follow them through the clouds. He thinks he struck one of the plane’s hydraulic systems, though, because he saw the plane’s wheels extend.

When asked if he ever got scared, Stubblefield said “Sure I was scared. You’re scared all the time. You get used to it, and you accept it.”

He vividly remembers one particular mission over northern France after the invasion of Normandy when a group of fighters were targeting trains carrying supplies. He was in a squadron providing top cover at 13,000 feet while the lower fighters strafed a train.

“Somebody hit something that set off an explosion, and the whole train just totally disappeared … and left a trench where the train was,” Stubblefield said. “I remember actually feeling the jolt at 13,000 feet when it went off.”

Intelligence officers determined the train was carrying buzz bomb charges headed to German airbases targeting England.

The toughest part of his war experience was that the cockpits of the P-38 fighters were freezing cold. In July 1944, his group changed to P-51 planes that had engines in the front, keeping the cockpits much warmer. He initially wore the same type of clothes and nearly burned up but learned quickly, he said.

When Stubblefield began his service, fighter pilots qualified to return home after 200 flight hours, but after he had 100 hours, the standard was upped to 300 hours. After he finished a mission that put him at 283 hours, his commander told him he was finished — that the standard had been dropped to 285 hours and he wasn’t sending him up again.

So Stubblefield made his way back to the United States. While he was away, he proposed by letter to a sweetheart he had met in Nashville in 1937 — Rebecca Watson, and she accepted. They married a week after he returned in October 1944 and were married 72 years until her death in 2017. They had three children.

Stubblefield served as a flight instructor at Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery and another base in Georgia for about a year before leaving the military in October 1945 after the Japanese surrendered. 

He worked as a hog and cattle farmer in Tennessee for seven years until drought and three years of bad crops led him back to become a civilian flight instructor for the Air Force during the Korean War for three years.

He then worked 30 years flying corporate planes, retiring from Vulcan Materials in 1986. He continued doing part-time corporate flying for seven or eight years but more as a hobby.

Stubblefield and his wife did extensive traveling, visiting all the lower 48 states, Alaska and all but one Canadian province, mostly in a travel trailer, but they never made it to Hawaii or Nova Scotia.

He returned to England for a reunion with his fighter group in the late 1980s and flew to Frankfurt, Germany, in the mid-1990s to visit a German preacher his church was supporting. The latter trip brought back a lot of memories of a previous flight over Frankfurt, he said.

Stubblefield said his war experience was “a big adventure” and he’s thankful for the 100 years he has had. “The Lord’s been good to me,” he said.

John Little

Little, who grew up in the Mt. Olive community in north Jefferson County, signed up for the draft when he turned 18 in 1942. He was in the 11th grade at Mortimer Jordan High School. He got called for service in the Army in 1943, spent 13 weeks at basic training in South Carolina and was shipped off with 5,500 troops to north Africa for more combat training.

He then went to Italy, where he would spend the rest of the war, and joined the C Company of the 34th Infantry Division. He started out as a rifleman but spent most of his time as a wireman, whose job was to lay a telephone line between wherever his company went and the nearest headquarters.

Little was in five major battles. The first and largest was in Monte Cassino, an extensive campaign where U.S. and other Allied troops tried and failed to capture a strategic monastery held by the Germans at the top of the mountain. After an Allied bombing, Polish troops eventually captured the monastery.

By then, Little’s company had been transferred to Anzio, which was on the way to Rome. Little rode a tank into Rome when U.S. forces captured the city on June 4, 1944 — two days before the famous Normandy invasion on the coast of France.

His company moved north and helped take the key port city of Livorno, then briefly captured Pisa before taking Florence and Milan.

He was in Milan when Italian partisans hung the bodies of the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress upside down for public display.

Little vividly remembers when the Germans surrendered in Italy in May 1945. They were in the Po Valley, and a German general’s officer drove up in a Jeep with a big white flag on it and asked for the highest ranking U.S. officer to go back with him to meet the general, who wanted assurances his men would not be fired upon when surrendering.

“It was really sad the way it happened,” Little said.

The German troops marched down with the general in front, riding a big, white horse. The general got off his horse, saluted and handed his gun to a U.S. first lieutenant. The next day, Little’s company learned all German troops in Italy had surrendered.

His company stayed in Italy to help care for Italian civilians before being shipped home. “They had absolutely nothing to eat,” he said.

Little said the most difficult part of his wartime experiences was when they were in a position of safety and got orders to move out.

“You knew you had to get the Germans out of those holes some way or another to move on to that place, sometimes by force and sometimes by the power of artillery and mortars,” he said. “That was a stressful time until you had your new position secured. It might take a day. It might take two days, but sooner or later, it had to be done.”

He received the Purple Heart after a phosphorus shell exploded above his foxhole, burning his left arm and sending him to the hospital in Naples for 17 days.

Little initially earned $1 a day — or $30 a month — for his service, but once he entered combat, the pay climbed to $80 a month. He was able to save $2,200 of that and used it to build a home for him and his wife, Nancy, whom he married in August 1946. They settled in Mt. Olive and had two daughters.

Little got a job with the DuPont explosive plant in Watson a few months after returning from the war and worked there for 30 years before retiring.

“I never did make a whole lot of money, but we always had good insurance and a decent pension, which I still get and thank the Lord for that,” he said.

He and his wife moved to Trace Crossings in 1991 and still live there today. He maintains a “war room.” Among items on the wall are his Purple Heart, Bronze Star for combat, a letter of appreciation from President Harry Truman, a P-38 revolver he took off a German officer and his combat New Testament he kept in his front pocket as a soldier. He also kept the letters Nancy wrote him while he was in Italy.

In 1984, he went back to Rome and got to tour some of the cities of the big battles in which he fought. “That was great. It was really breathtaking,” he said. He also took an Honor Flight to see the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. several years ago. “That was fantastic. It’s unbelievable,” he said.

Little said it was his duty and honor to serve his country.

“I had combat training, but you’re never prepared for what you see and have to do,” he said. “Everything that was required of you was for our freedom and democracy.”

Hard-working generation

Rease, the photographer taking pictures of World War II veterans, said his effort escalated after The Washington Post wrote about what he was doing a year ago. He has since received 250 to 300 emails with recommendations from 41 states.

In March of this year, he took a road trip through Florida to photograph 15 veterans, and in May, he went up the East Coast for a month-long trip and took pictures of 27 more. He has 150 leads left, but some of them already have passed away, he said. Of the 210 he has photographed, about 40 of those have also passed away, including Cooper of Vestavia Hills, who died Aug. 29 at the age of 101.

Rease said he wants to capture images of as many World War II veterans as possible before it’s too late. He also takes time to interview them to record their stories.

Some, such as Little, occasionally talk to school groups about their experiences, but some of them haven’t talked about World War II in 50 to 70 years, Rease said.

He doesn’t press them on subjects that might be hard for them but allows them to share what they want.

“I’m just kind of in awe at the little details they remember,” he said.

But then again, what they went through wasn’t just everyday living, he said. “That was a monumental world war. They may have wanted to forget some things, but they can’t because of how important it was. I heard some amazing stories.”

Some World War II veterans’ stories are not as dramatic as others, but all of them contributed to winning the war, whether they served on a desk stateside or deep in combat somewhere, he said.

One common denominator is that all of them are humble and quick not to call themselves heroes, he said. They say, “it’s the ones who didn’t make it back who are the heroes” and “I just did what I was taught to do.”

Also, many of those he photographed and interviewed came from small towns and farms. They grew up in the Great Depression and had very little. “They knew what hard work was, and they were willing to go out and do it,” Rease said. “You can find that still today, but it seems less common.”

Little said being a combat soldier teaches you that life is not just about yourself.

“If you’re in a rifle company, you’ve got about 200 people depending on you,” he said. You have to take it seriously and humbly “and realize you’re the one that might do something or say something that might make those other 200 safe by the things you did and were supposed to do.”

Little said that when he was discharged, a general told him “you had nothing when you came in here. You still don’t have anything. Don’t ask for anything. Go home and try to get a job and go to work and you can have something hopefully.”

“By doing that, that made a generation of people that was willing to do,” Little said.

Rease said most of the veterans he photographs enjoy the experience.

“It really helps a lot of them get closure. The guys end up just loving it,” he said. “I’m just fortunate I’m able to do it and be where I am to get to meet them.”

To see the portraits Rease has taken and read stories and see videos of the veterans, go to portraitsofhonor.us. Rease also has a link to a gofundme account for people who want to help cover the expenses of his work with veterans.