Harry’s interview with WWII Oral History Project

In his interview with the World War II Oral History Project, Harry recalled that Aug. 15, 1945, was the day President Truman announced the end of the war. He also mentioned another reason for the date’s significance, as you’ll see in the transcript on this page. I first heard the interview after Harry died, on a CD our family obtained from the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Later I found the audio cassette tape Harry had saved from the interview, which took place in his Leisure World apartment community in Silver Spring, MD.


Murray: This is August 28, 2007, Leisure World of Maryland Oral History Project of World War II. We’re interviewing Harry Zubkoff, who was born June 16, 1921. He served in the Army becoming a Staff Sergeant. My name’s Murray Seeger. I’m helped by Adel Schwartz.

Well Harry, you told us you’re from Buffalo, North Buffalo. I’m from the south side of Buffalo, about 15 miles. [Both chuckle.] Where were you on December 7, 1941?

Harry: I was working for the Bell Aircraft Corporation. We were already on a three-shift program there producing airplanes, mostly for sale to Russia.

Murray: This is also North Buffalo?

Harry: Yes, Bell Aircraft plant on Elmwood near Hertel.

Murray: Yes, my mother went there part time as an inspector.

Photos on this page from Harry’s Army album and files

Harry: How ’bout that.

Murray: How ’bout that. And you were 20 years old. And what was your skill, what was your training?

Harry: I had spent six or eight months at the Burgard Vocational School learning how to do things like riveting and soldering and valving and all of that, the kind of skills they were looking for in the war plants. And I went to work at Bell in the fall of 1939.

Murray: Now they were making a fighter plane at that time, right?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: What was it called?

Harry: It was called the Airacobra P-39.

Murray: Right, and you said they’re largely being sold to Russia at that time.

Harry: Yes, they were. It was an unusual design aircraft because it did not have an engine in front; it had an engine right underneath the pilot in the middle of the airplane.

Murray: And it had a cannon in the front nose.

Harry: And a cannon in the front, right.

Murray: I remember that. And on the other side of Buffalo they were making the P-40s.

Harry: That’s right, at Curtiss.

Murray: Yep, Curtiss-Wright. Now, were you working on December 7th, you think?

Harry: Yes, we were working. They had a loud speaker in the plant. Around noon or 1:00 I think it was, the loud speaker came on and there was an announcement that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Everybody stopped working for a few minutes, and a dozen guys – within my sight – dropped all their equipment and said they’re going down to enlist.

Murray: Oh my goodness.


Harry: There was a general exodus almost every day from that point on; men were getting up, going out, and enlisting right away.

Murray: Amazing reaction.

Harry: It was.

Murray: Did you know where Pearl Harbor was?

Harry: At the time I didn’t, no, but I found out soon afterwards.

Murray: Now what was your family situation at that time?

Harry: Well, let’s say this. My parents were both terminally ill. I was the only breadwinner in the family, and I was working and taking care of both my mother and father. I had two married sisters living in Buffalo, and they pitched in as much as they could, but they both had little children, and you know, times were tough, it was the Depression, and their husbands were not making much money, so they really couldn’t help. So, that’s what I was doing.

Murray: Now, you registered for the draft at this point.

Harry: Oh yes.

Murray: Were you called up?

Harry: I was deferred because I was working at a war plant.

Murray: And you were also support for your parents I would think.

Harry: Well, I don’t know if that entered in to their calculations.

Murray: Ok. Did you continue working? When did you actually enter into the service?

Harry: July 1945.

Murray: Now were you drafted at that point?

Harry: Yeah, we were all – maybe 10 or 12 thousand were laid off in January 1945. Contracts expired; the company was, say, contracting.

Murray: That plane wasn’t very successful.

Harry: No, it wasn’t used by Americans.

Murray: The Air Force didn’t like it very much.

Harry: No.

Murray: Now the war in Europe was over.

Harry: That’s right.

Murray: And you’re called in. Where did they send you?

Harry: They sent me to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, for basic training. Mind you, I wanted to get
into the Air Force. I had a private pilot license.

Murray: My goodness.

Harry: But the Air Force didn’t need people anymore, so they put me in with combat engineers for basic training.

Murray: You think it was for your mechanical skills?

Harry: Probably.

Murray: Where did you go for basic training for combat engineers?

Harry: Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.

Murray: Oh, Ok, I’m sorry, I thought that was another camp. Sixteen weeks?

Harry: Sixteen weeks.

Murray: And from there?

Harry: From there, they yanked me out of there just before the group was going overseas. We were supposed to go to the Pacific.

Murray: Yeah, you would have been part of the Army invading Japan presumably.

Harry: Right.

Murray: And, do you remember where you were when the bomb was dropped?

Harry: Yeah, that was in September, no, the bombs were dropped in August, and I was in Louisiana.

Murray: You were sweating it out in Louisiana. And the Armistice Truce was signed in September?

Harry: It was signed early in September. As a coincidence, I had been married on August 15th, 1943. On August 15th, 1945, when I was in Louisiana, President Truman announced that the war is officially over. But it wasn’t signed in Japan until later, in September.

Murray: Right. Your service was supposed to be what, the duration and six months?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: But you have to have points?

Harry: Well, I didn’t have any points.

Murray: And from Louisiana, where did they ship you?

Harry: They sent me to Baltimore, to go to intelligence school. Fort Holabird in Baltimore. I went to intelligence school for three or four months, then they shipped me out to France.

Fort Holabird, Baltimore, 1946

Murray: Now what kind of intelligence were you supposed to be doing?

Harry: Counterintelligence.

Murray: Now you’re going to interview people?

Harry: Yes.

Murray: Do you have a language?

Harry: They taught me German. And theoretically I was fairly fluent in German.

Murray: Sprichst du Deutsch?

Harry: Not anymore. You know, when was that, 60 years ago or so? I haven’t used it since I got out.

Murray: So you finished at Fort Holabird and you’re shipped out to France?

Harry: First to France, then to Germany.

Murray: And where were you stationed there?
 
Harry: In Germany for a while in Stuttgart [?], then in a little provincial town called Buchen, not far from Stuttgart, not far from a famous resort called Vadmerventine [?].

Murray: Now what is your job?

Harry: Well, you know, the basic job of counterintelligence was to investigate cases of sabotage, espionage, subversive activities, that sort of thing. But we, basically we were being used at the time for two purposes. One, to trace down wanted Nazi war criminals and to get evidence against them for use in war crimes trials. And the other one was to help build up a network of people who would continue to provide us with information. And, we were worried at the time about the increasing hostility with Russia. In the intelligence business, we were taught so much about the Nazi paramilitary organizations and all of their political organizations, etcetera, and we started taking lessons in the same things in regards to the Russians and the communists. So we were working on both trying to figure out what the communists were doing and also tracing Nazi war criminals.

Murray: Had you been promoted by now?

Harry: Just normal promotions, Corporal and Sergeant. They wanted me to go to officer candidate school, but I didn’t want to commit myself to a longer term in the Army.

Murray: But you must have impressed some people, you must have done well whatever you were doing.

Harry: Well, in those Army aptitute tests. And of course all the reports I wrote were models of English composition.

Murray: That’s because of the good education in Buffalo public schools.

Harry: I got to tell you that some of the officers couldn’t read or write English in my view.

Murray: You stationed in this small town in Germany all the time and traveling around?
How far away did you get?

Harry: I was sent on several missions. I spent some time in a DP camp trying to find these couple infiltrators.

Murray: Did you have some identified or just smelling around?

Harry: Smelling around mostly. Well we did have a few.

Murray: Was that over in the east part of Germany, toward Munich or in that area?

Harry: Yea, we were in Munich. There were Displaced Persons camps all over the area. I spent some time in one near Dachau, the concentration camp at Dachau. It set up a DP camp mainly for Jewish people, who couldn’t tell the difference between that and the concentration camps.

Murray: Right.


Harry: And I had a lot of interaction with them, who found that American Jewish soldiers were a breed apart.

Murray: Good or bad?

Harry: Good.

Murray: They didn’t think the other American troops were sympathetic or understood the problem?

Harry: Well, they didn’t know that Jewish people could be warriors or in the Army.

Murray: Did you speak Yiddish?

Harry: I had a little Yiddish. And German is largely or partly based on Yiddish.

Murray: That’s right. So how long was this duty?

Harry: A year.

Murray: Did you find it interesting?

Harry: Oh, fascinating. Now did you ever hear of the Jewish Brigade from Palestine? There were some Jewish guys in the Jewish brigade who wrote a book [book based on them] about their experiences. They were also chasing Nazi war criminals and finding them and killing them. And there was a period of time when my superiors were wondering if I was one of the guys who was finding them and killing them.

Murray: Now is this one of the times when you felt your officers were not sure about Jewish soldiers?

Harry: Not my officers, no, but others in the military government. You know, intelligence and military government were at odds with each other ...

Murray: Right from the get-go.

Harry: Right. And they did a lot of things that the intelligence community really wasn’t happy with. You may have heard how they brought over all the Nazi scientists, and we were against that.

Murray: I think the same thing in trying to fit them in the post war government.

Harry: True. We had started out with a de-nazification program and found out that many of the ex-nazis were being placed in responsible jobs.

Murray: Experienced bureaucrats.

Harry: Right.


Murray: I lived in Germany, I was a reporter in Germany. And this was still being talked about a long time afterwards. So you were there a year. Then what happened to you?

Harry: I came back, got discharged.

Murray: Got your points?

Harry: I guess so. It was after a year and a half they brought me home.

Murray: Where’d you muster out?

Harry: New Jersey.

Murray: Did you go back to Buffalo. Did you use the GI Bill at all?

Harry: Yes. I did, I used the GI Bill to get a commercial pilot’s license. I was working as a flight instructor and commercial pilot for a small aviation school in Buffalo called Mastercraft Aviation – until 1949, when we no longer had any students. The whole bottom dropped out of that aviation market. The post-war world was going to be a flying one, but it didn’t develop that way. And a friend of mine from the intelligence community called me and said we just got a new organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, and I’d like you come down and work for us.

Murray: That was brand new. Harry Truman did sign the papers for that.

Harry: Right. So I came to Washington, and they wanted to hire me, but what they wanted me to do was go overseas and be a spook. Now I had a brand new baby boy, and my wife didn’t want me to go overseas, I didn’t want go. So I turned the job down.

Murray: What did you do then?

Harry: I got a job at the Veterans Administration, and worked there for a year. And then I got a job with the Air Force in the Pentagon, a 90-day job with the Air Force. That was in 1950. And 36 years later I retired. A long 90 days.

Murray: What kind of work did you do?

Harry: It was the best job in the world. What I did in the Pentagon was put together compilations of news clippings about military affairs which grew and grew as more and more people were writing about the Department of Defense.

Murray: Did you have to get up at 4 in the morning?

Harry: Well, I did, actually at 2. We called it the Current News. Subsequently the earliest edition became the Early Bird edition. It’s still in existence.

Murray: It’s famous.

Harry: Yeah, and I was famous for a while.

Murray: Did you have any uniformed working for you?

Harry: In the beginning we had uniformed people, but, around the mid-1950s, early ’60s, till then we had uniformed people. As our job expanded see, we did more than put out news clippings. We also were writing speeches for the Secretary of the Air Force and also for the Secretary of Defense. So I had a small research outfit, mainly writers, and they were military people. Around the mid-’60s, they took all the military out, put them in a separate division. It was all civilian. I was the chief of that division from about the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s when I retired.

Murray: Well thank you very much, Harry. It’s a marvelous story. I appreciate your coming in.


I Googled the interviewer, Murray Seeger. He was a seasoned journalist and wrote the book “Discovering Russia: 200 years of American Journalism”. He passed away three years before Harry, at age 82.

Harry wrote novels, too

Harry in the early 1960s

Last year on this blog, I posted a slew of unpublished short stories Harry wrote during his life. Most I discovered in his boxed paper files, a few on his computer. He also left behind hard-copy versions of never-published fictional novels; or in some cases, partial versions. Several he may have drafted in the 1950s, when his Army experience was still fresh in his mind, and perhaps edited in the ’60s or later. To give you a taste of one, here’s the synopsis from his book proposal, plus the first few paragraphs of the novel’s introduction.

The book proposal

Synopsis

Clarence Webster, a commercial pilot and flight instructor before the war, joined the Army shortly before Pearl Harbor and eventually was assigned to fly artillery spotting missions and light liaison planes in the combat zone. When his unarmed plane is shot down and he is wounded and temporarily grounded, he is transferred to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. After the war ends he responds to an urgent appeal by the Army to stay on as an intelligence agent with the military occupation forces, at least for another year. Though he is eligible to return home, he agrees to stay, and subsequently extend the year for an additional six months. He finally returns to the States in December, 1946.

The story takes place in two main time periods – the last nine months of 1947 when he is a civilian in the States, and the last nine months of 1946, when he is winding up his tour of active duty in Germany. Like all veterans, he has had his fill of war, and of the Army, and of man’s cynicism and seeming inability to learn the bitter lessons of the war. He has returned to his pre-war profession as a flight instructor, but he is restless and dissatisfied, searching for some new answers, trying to “find himself”.

Though he is engaged to the “girl back home”, he cannot forget the girl he loved in Germany, even though she had betrayed his love. On the horizon is the growing threat which communism poses in a world hungry for peace and generally unaware of the full extent of the menace. A few people see the danger, but too few are doing anything about it. What, he asks himself, can one man do to help provide a greater measure of security for his country? In the end he breaks his engagement and joins the Air Force. Oddly enough he goes back into uniform for precisely the same reasons he joined up before World War II started, because his country is at war with the enemy – only the war has not yet been declared.

The writing makes extensive use of the flashback technique, contrasting his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1947 in Buffalo (the present) with his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1946 in Germany (the past), with occasional glimpses into his more distant past. The two women in his life are seen through his eyes, as well as the manner in which they help to shape his character and the effect they have upon his decisions. Though basically a love-adventure story, this is also a novel of a time so unique in American experience that it can never be fully recaptured on paper. It points up the conflict between one man’s desire for freedom and individuality, and that man’s concept of responsibility and obligation.

Introduction

The world of April 1947 was a curious place and a curious time. It was a time of tension and a time of relaxation. It was a time of anxiety and insecurity, and still, a time of hopefulness and aspiration. The aftermath of World War II was still being felt, strongly in some parts of the world, perhaps somewhat dimly in the United States. It was as though the war, like a giant hand from nowhere, had picked up the world by the neck and the seat of the pants and shaken it up a little, and the loose change had dropped out of its pockets and the buttons popped off its vest and everything was all jumbled up and confused and the pieces were still falling back but not in their proper places.

Of course, the confusion was where it had always been, in the minds of men. There was still a residual interest in the war, but it was too early to take an historical interest and besides, there were more important things to do – make money, mainly. So many odd and contradictory things were happening that reading the newspapers was almost frustrating and you could only keep track of the things that interested you.

In Germany, for example, the American Military Government, AMG for short, had just revealed that 3,278,000 of 11,825,000 Germans questioned in the U.S. zone were chargeable for Nazi activities.

This was one area in which Clarence Webster kept himself informed. He had more than a passing interest, too, in the eventual outcome of all the war crimes trials and the ultimate destiny of the men involved. In April, Rudolf Hoess was hanged at the Oswiecim extermination camp in Poland where 4,000,000 persons had been executed at his command. Gernand de Brinson, Vichy Ambassador to the German occupying forces in Paris, was executed as a traitor by the firing squad in Forte de Montrouge, near Paris. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who built up the Luftwaffe and was Hermann Goering’s chief deputy, was sentenced to life imprisonment for slave labor activited by a U.S. court in Nuremberg. Dr. Hjalmar Schact, on trial before a German denazification court in Stuttgart, denied having been a “major Nazi offender” and said he took part in 4 anti-Hitler plots from 1938 to 1944. Both Carmen Maria Mory and Dr. Percy Treite, under death sentence for the Ravensbrueck concentration camp murders, committed suicide. And Herbert Backe, Nazi Food & Agriculture Minister, hanged himself in a Nuremberg jail. ...
  
Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

Harry weighs in on scandals, in letter to old friend

We continue to learn more about Harry’s professional life and relationships through the following letter he wrote in 1997 to a long-time co-worker and journalist. He comments on scandals in the military and a scandal of sorts related to his government publication. And he gives a few updates on his personal life.


10 February 1997
Dear Ben:

By now you must realize that I am the world’s worst correspondent. For some reason I just can’t bring myself to sit down and write letters. I mean to write. I want to write. I keep composing letters in my mind to various friends scattered around the world. I just can’t seem to actually write them. In your case, I’ve been writing mental communiques to you for the past year or so, but today it came to me quite forcibly that time is slipping away and I better stop procrastinating and start writing. So – here goes with a number of things I’ve wanted to tell you.

1.  Of course, I read your article on the sexual harassment problem in the Army when it appeared in the Outlook section of The Washington Post just before Christmas. I wanted to tell you then, and I’m telling you now, that you hit the nail on the head. Since then, I’ve heard that the scuttlebutt around the Pentagon is that they’ve uncovered the tip of the iceberg, and that a lot more is going to be breaking in the next few months – not only in the Army, but in all the services, especially the Navy again. 

My own opinion is that as long as men and women are thrown together in stressful situations, there will be problems; and as long as they are thrown together in non-stressful situations, there will also be problems. There simply is no getting away from it – men and women will get together somehow, no matter what the circumstances are, and more often willingly than not. I don’t see how it can be avoided without complete separation of the sexes in the military, and of course, that’s no longer possible. So, from now on and forevermore, incidents are going to occur and recur, from time to time, just like cheating scandals at the military academies. These things are, in a manner of speaking, inevitable. 

So, the question is, how do you handle them when they arise? Like you said, the last thing we need is another committee to start an investigation. What they need is a top ranking General, three or four stars, to go out and look at the situation and then take some decisive action. Unfortunately, nobody asked me what to do.

2.  Remember Fred Hiatt about whom I wrote a critical piece that you were good enough to publish in the magazine? After he left the Pentagon beat, the Post sent him to Russia; they even gave him some language training and other schooling to prepare him to be a foreign correspondent. (Too bad they don’t give young Pentagon reporters some schooling, too.) Anyway, he’s now back in Washington and occasionally writes a piece for the Op-ed page. Obviously, he has matured into a respectable commentator and has written some very fine and thoughtful articles in recent months. So I wrote him a letter to tell him so, and got a nice response from him. I thought you’d be interested.

3.  Regarding the Current News files that were decimated by Maitre at Boston U., the final resolution of that problem was that the remaining files were shipped down to the Air University archives at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. Dr. Silber paid the freight, which I believe cost somewhere around ten grand. I think I mentioned to you that Dick Kohn, former Air Force historian and now a professor at North Carolina got into the act and helped make those arrangements. 

Meanwhile, Maitre turned out to be...well, as W.C. Fields said when he met Mae West, “There is less here than meets the eye.” You might say that all’s well that ends well, but every time I think of Maitre I get furious all over again.

[Note: Harry was referring to the Current News, a daily publication he managed during his Pentagon career. Other letters in his files show that the Defense Department turned over the Current News archives to a communications director at Boston U., after much research and requests from other organizations to keep the files for scholarly research. It turned out that the Boston U. director later disposed of them, infuriating Harry and others. Certain individuals eventually retrieved the archive.]

4.  I read your review of Colin Powell’s book with considerable interest. I know him, not well, but reasonably well, and there are some things about his book that “give me pause.” You did a masterful job with that review, and some of what you said echoed my own reservations. It should have been printed in the mainstream press, where it could get much wider circulation, but even so, enough Washington insiders saw it so that it made an impression. Have you had any comments?

5.  I celebrated my 75th birthday last June and my 53rd anniversary last August – in fair health. Did I tell you that for the past seven or eight years I have been taking courses at the University of Maryland – one or two each semester? (I’ve also been teaching English there.) Last semester I took a course in the political process for journalists, taught by two people; one is a former Maryland State Senator, a Republican lady, and the other is the former Democratic Governor of Maryland, William Donald Schaeffer. Both were a joy to listen to – fascinating, really. This semester I’m taking a course taught by Hodding Carter: Professional Seminar in Public Affairs Reporting. It should be interesting; certainly, as in all the other courses I’ve taken, I’m bound to learn something. I must say, Ben, the older I get, the more I realize how little I know, or, to put it another way, how little I’ve learned along the way.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Things you might not know about drones

Harry in the 1990s

Recently I read about a trending toy for kids and adults – a modular drone. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the inventors know anything about the history of drones, which I learned only after reading the following article. Harry wrote it in 1991 and filed it (untitled) on his computer. He may have submitted it for Defense Media Review, the newsletter he originated post-retirement. Of course, he would have kept up with the evolution of drones in later years. And, he probably predicted drones as toys.


The SCUDs and the PATRIOTs got the lion’s share of media attention during the Gulf War, with the aircraft, the smart bombs and the tanks getting secondary billing. But there is another weapon that played a vital role – one that seems to have been overlooked by the public. The so-called drones – remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) – served as a critically important intelligence tool in spotting targets for both aerial bombardment and artillery.

The drone is not generally regarded as a high-tech weapon, but that’s exactly what it is. In earlier versions, it would fly over a target area carrying a camera and bring back pictures that had to be developed and studied by expert photo interpreters before commanders could make tactical decisions. By that time, the target situation on the ground may well have changed. Present-day drones, however, are equipped with sophisticated night-vision sensors and television cameras mounted underneath the fuselage to provide an unobstructed view of the ground. They send back information in real time while overflying the target area, thus enabling commanders to make immediate tactical decisions.

Ironically, considering that Iraq tried in vain to draw Israel into the conflict by lobbing 39 SCUD
missiles into Israeli population centers, the drones used by the American forces were purchased from Israel. IAI (Israel Aircraft Industries) is a world leader in the field. The impetus for the development of its drones came from the 1973 war in which Syria’s Soviet-built SAM missiles inflicted unacceptable losses on Israeli aircraft. Israel decided at that time that it would make better sense to use relatively cheap unmanned planes for reconnaissance, rather than the very expensive manned aircraft, to say nothing about the lives of its pilots.

Beginning in 1974, the Israelis invested substantial resources in developing a pilotless aircraft that could make the best use of the rapidly evolving technologies involved in radio, television cameras, computers and communications. By 1982, during the Lebanese operation, Israel’s drones made it possible for its Air Force to eliminate Syria’s SAMs in the Beka Valley in one day with no Israeli losses, a remarkable performance, which the American military studied with considerable interest.     

The U.S. Army in the 1970s tried to develop its own RPV, but after investing some ten years and around a billion dollars, it gave up. The U.S. Navy didn’t really become interested until the mid-1980s, when it lost two of its planes to SAM missiles in Lebanon. After sponsoring an international competition, which IAI won, the Navy bought Israel’s RPV, called the Pioneer system. Modified by IAI for use from battleships instead of land bases or aircraft carriers, these drones were used for the first time by the U.S. in the Gulf War.

At first they were used to monitor Iraqi deployments and fortifications, both in Kuwait and across the border in Iraq. After the fighting started, they were used as artillery spotters for the big guns on the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin, as well as for Army and Marine batteries. Their transmissions showed the gunners exactly where their rounds were hitting, enabling them to adjust their sights for specific targets with devastating accuracy from a few miles to as much as 30 or 35 miles away.

Two people operate the ground facility controlling the RPV system, one to “fly” the vehicle with radio controls, the other to monitor the camera, the night vision equipment, and the communications gear. The payload technician can zoom in on targets without regard to the direction of the drone’s flight, although the two operators must for the most part coordinate their efforts. The effective range is ordinarily no more than about 125 miles, depending on the altitude of the drone, since radio communication between the drone and the ground controllers is by line-of-sight.

Given the spectacular, though largely unsung success of these drones, it seems most likely that the Army and the Navy/Marine Corps gunnery planners will start acquiring more such systems for future use. The Air Force, on the other hand, seems to have little interest in the notion of planes without pilots.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Harry the poet -- yes, he was that, too

How long do you save old letters and poems from others? (Or emails in today's world.) When I started this blog in May 2015, several of Harry's friends told me they would look for the poem he'd written in their honor, "if I can find it," they said. One of these friends was referring to a 61-year-old poem (shown below, to Alice). 

Sure enough, I found a copy of their poems in Harry's files. He saved them all -- poems he'd crafted for countless family and friends on a variety of occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, fundraisers), for submission to publications, and for folks in his workplace, where he was dubbed the "Pentagon Poet Laureate."

I discovered in Harry's keepsakes that he wrote poems as far back as 1945, so it’s likely he rhymed even before then. Below are six of the earlier poems; I’ll post others in the coming weeks -- but be forewarned, he saved hundreds.


This first one was in a pile of yellowed, delicate news clippings, in a folder with Army memorabilia.

September 1945 
USO Newsletter – G.I. Journal

Harry, winter 1945

POET’S CORNER
Written by Pvt. Harry Zubkoff

When I was a civilian,
And it seems so long ago
I always used to wonder
Where the soldiers used to go.

And then I used to wonder
If the folks who didn’t know
Were doing all they could
To help some G.I. Joe.

The average civilian

Original newsletter, fragile and torn

Is the same as I was then.
He really doesn’t understand
But he wonders now and then.

But there are some civilians,
A special kind I guess,
For whom I call on God above
To cherish and to bless.

They didn’t stand and wonder
The way some others do,
If a soldier had a place to go
Or anything to do.

Harry and Jeanette, November 1945

No, they arranged a place,
Where all G.I.s could go;
They arranged a darn good place
And called it USO.

So, I no longer wonder
The way I used to do,
If soldiers have a place to go
Or anything to do.

For whenever we’re in town
And have no place to go,
We know we’re always welcome
At the SA-USO.

And of one thing I’m certain,
This I surely know,
There’s a special kind of Heaven
For the FOLKS of USO!

_________________________________________

December 19, 1949 (Details unknown)
A Toast to All 
 
Oh, I'm working on a message,
That is full of hope and cheer,
But I can't get in the spirit,
Not without a glass of beer.

Mr. Noble says make merry,
For the Yuletide Season's here.

Harry with Jeanette and Earl, 1949

But as sure as my name's Harry,
How can I, without my beer!

I suppose I ought to wish him joy,
But how can I revere,
Anyone who won't allow a boy
To have a glass of beer!

Oh, I wish I had a nickel now,
for everybody here,
Who will celebrate this Friday,
But without a glass of beer!

Now if Mr. Noble's bosses

Are the kind of men I think,

First winter in Greenbelt, MD

They will celebrate this Friday too,
But not without a drink.

They will bring enough fine liquor
For a battleship to sink,
Then they'll lock their office doors and,
They will have themselves a drink.

They will make the rounds like gypsies,
And at everyone they'll wink,
Then they'll ship into their offices
And have another drink!

They will hang around the mistletoe
Like Romeos, they think,
Then with every kiss they manage,
They will need another drink.

They will put away enough, you know,
To fill a pair of floats,
I don't wish them any harm,
But may it stick inside their throats!

For while they're behind their office doors,
All dishing out good cheer,
We'll be celebrating Christmas dry,
Without one glass of "Beer"!!!!

 ________________________________________

Lament of Harry Z. (Undated, though likely the 1950s, long before I noticed that my father was a proponent of equal rights for women.)

The zaniest girls you'd ever see

Harry (far left) at an office celebration, 1950s

have organized to comfort me.
They fetch my coffee, milk or tea,
They smile so very prettily.

And when I'm blue, or seemingly,
They cheer me up so beamingly.
And when we're busy, flappily,
They follow orders snappily.

And when I think, so fleetingly,
They treat me so entreatingly,
And when I'm gazing ceilingly,
They hold my hand so feelingly.

And when I'm scared, so fearingly,
They soothe me, so endearingly,
And then, of course, occasionally,
They also do some work for me!

 ________________________________________

December 1954
Alice C. (Brown) Price

In each one's life there comes a time
To bid his friends farewell,
To leave a job, a place, a gang,
And tell them it's been swell.

It's not Alice, but here's Harry with associate, circa 1954

So now the time has come for you,
To say your sad good-byes,
And we won't look if one or two
Small tears get in your eyes.

We know you'd rather not depart
This citadel of strife,
And yet, you're eager now to start
A wonderful new life.

And if you miss us now and then,
Remember this - and smile,
We'll remember you, my dear,
At least a little while! ! ! !

So pass once more, your office door,
And walk on down the hall,
For always and forevermore,
We love you, one and all! ! ! ! !

Harry and Alice stayed in touch for life. 

________________________________________ 

Vintage photo of the pool in Greenbelt, MD

An article in memory of Harry, in the June 5, 2014 Greenbelt (MD) News Review, displayed the next poem. According to the article, “… vandalism by local youth was a recurring problem in Greenbelt’s early days and Zubkoff was particularly provoked by random acts of destruction. In addition to editorials bemoaning these occurrences, he expressed his ire and wit in columns,” such as this one in 1950.

Revenge

This is to advise a guy
In no uncertain terms,

Harry with Jeanette and Earl at the pool, 1950

That I will catch him, by and by,
And feed him to the worms.
For pranks are pranks, and jokes are jokes,
And boys are always boys,

But you will agree, won't you folks
That clotheslines aren’t toys?
Yet every time we look around
(It’s happened once or twice)
We find our clothesline on the ground,
I ask you, Is that nice?
I am sure that everyone in town
Will wish me all the best,
The day that I catch up with,
And eliminate this pest.
This I say and this I mean
And you can mark it down,
That someday I will catch the guy,
Who cuts my clothesline down!

 Does anyone know if they caught the bandit?

_________________________________________

This poem (actually two on the page, titled I and II) was one of many saved on thin carbon copy paper (who remembers that?)! Harry’s penciled note on the bottom of the paper says: Sat. Eve. Post 9/2/55

I

Harry and Jeanette in new Jewish Community 
Center in Greenbelt, 1955 (Photo by Mike Ratzkin)

I cannot see why it should be,

I cannot understand it,

Your constant use of clamjamfry,

Must be because you planned it.

How frequently, increasingly,

I find upon these pages,

Incessantly, distressingly,

No “wisdom of the ages.”

II

A pseudo-dialectologist

Appears with regularity,

A semi-semasiologist

Who deals in slangularity.
And magazinistic essayists

Who dabble allegorically,

Discursive dissertationists

Who write commontatorially.

While readers and semanticists,

Reject them categorically!

_________________________________________ 

Harry's talent for poetry rubbed off on some of us. Yes, I'd written many to him, as well as to others. So, too, his granddaughter, who says it was easier to write poems to eulogize her grandparents than to write the ordinary way. And, his grandson, who penned lyrics for his movie musical score, and so on. I think you'll agree when you've seen more, however, that Harry's poems are in a league of their own -- and some might blow your mind.

'I'd rather be flying'

This photo was the only one like it in Harry's files, so I'm guessing he's the pilot -- notice the close-up below -- do you agree? It might have been taken when he was a flight instructor for a flying club while working for the Department of the Air Force.

Flying was Harry’s great love (not counting Jeanette), as we learned in the posts on this blog on May 23 and 29, 2015. In those essays, he wrote about his fascination with the sky since childhood and his knowledge about clouds later on. (By the way, many decades ago, Harry wrote articles about clouds and more for encyclopedias, including Americana, Collier’s, and World Book. But it seems they are nowhere to be found.)

Below, Harry gives us a few more details about his flying days, as a young adult in the DC area and as a youth in Buffalo. I took this story from a casual email he wrote in 2009 to a teenager who was dear to him. At the end, you’ll see his encouraging words to her about writing things down -- aren’t we glad he took his own advice?


I tried playing golf for a while, but I was never very good at it, and I always had the feeling that I would rather by flying. When we first moved down to the Washington area from Buffalo [1949], I used to rent an airplane once in a while just to keep my skills sharp. There were half a dozen or more little airfields around Washington in those days. Sadly, almost all of them are gone now. The land became more valuable for real estate developments.

Anyway, I was working in the Pentagon for the Air Force and the Dept. of Defense, and the Air Force started a flying club, which I joined. Then they needed some instructors who could teach both the flight part of flying and the ground school subjects, like navigation (it’s no use flying if you don’t know how to get from one place to another, and it’s not the same as a road map with street names and route numbers) and meteorology for pilots (you better understand the weather and its effect on your airplane if you want to survive in the air) and other things that you have to know about airplanes if you want to fly them.

So, for some 30 years, I did a lot of flying and made some extra money that way, but mostly I got paid in flying time. For example, depending on which airplane you use, it could cost anywhere from about 15 bucks an hour to fly a two-seater plane, to about 35 bucks an hour for a four-seater, to 60 or 80 bucks an hour for a six-seater – the biggest one we had in the flying club. So if I wanted to take my family on a weekend jaunt that would require ten hours of flying time, that would cost about $350, so that would take care of my teaching time for two evenings and a Sunday in a week.

It was worth it to me because otherwise I couldn’t afford to do much flying. In fact, the only way I could do all the flying I wanted was because I got paid to fly. It’s the greatest hobby – much better than golf. Have you ever been in a light plane? It’s not at all the same as an airliner and certainly not the same as a jet plane.

Discovering Harry's pilot logs brought back memories of our plane rides. Several times he flew me and friends over the sights in Washington, DC, and above our Greenbelt, MD, home so we could wave to the neighbors. (Not allowed anymore, of course.) He took several of his friends on farther excursions. Harry recorded these outings in the red log book, along with our family trip to Buffalo in 1957 ("Family vacation" entry in snapshot below). My brother and I will never forget that flight; I didn't feel so good up in the air, and we stopped overnight in Pittsburgh due to rain. In the green book, Harry recorded his flights from 1942 to '48, while still living in Buffalo. From 1947 to '58, he most often flew a Cessna, the plane we knew was his favorite.

Earlier in Buffalo
When I came home from the war – I had stayed on in Germany for a year and a half after the war ended in May 1945; I was hunting down Nazi war criminals wanted for crimes against humanity – so I came home in December 1946. I had done a little flying in the Army after the war, too, and I wanted more than anything to get a job with the airline, any airline. While I had my applications in at all the airlines, I taught flying at the Buffalo airport, which was just a little airfield at that time – not at all the huge place it is today. My break came through in June 1947 when I was hired to fly for Capital Airlines – a company which went out of business long ago. Two weeks later I was fired – or let go – because I had just passed my 26th birthday, and their policy was not to hire anyone 26 or older. So I continued working at the flying school at Buffalo airport.

I also did other things. Did you ever see the airplanes towing huge advertising banners along the lake shore at Crystal Beach? They do that at all the many beaches everywhere in the country. Well, I did that. I got paid pretty well for that. I also towed gliders into the sky at the gliding capital of the world which, at the time, was Elmira, NY.

Another thing I did was fly charter trips. In the summer, fishermen would hire our company to fly a plane equipped with pontoons to a lake in Canada just to go fishing. Canada has hundreds, maybe thousands of little lakes teeming with fish and accessible only from the air – that is, no roads so you can’t drive to most of them. In the winter when the lakes were frozen over, we had planes equipped with skis to land on the ice and the fishermen would chop a hole in the ice and sit there and freeze their fannies off and drink beer, while I sat in the plane and listened to the radio or wrote in my journal.

Things to write about
I know all this reminiscing is boring you, but it just illustrates to you that you can write and write and write about all kinds of inconsequential things and never run out of things to write about. And just because you haven’t been around as long as I, does not mean that you don’t have lots of things to write about and stories to tell. What’s your most embarrassing moment? What makes your heart swell with pride? What brings tears to your eyes? Do you cry at sentimental movies? Some people never shed a tear. Some sob out loud. I’m very sentimental and am easily moved to tears in sad movies.


Well, that last sentence is true for me, too -- do you think it's hereditary? Concerning Harry's piloting days, did you or a family member ever fly with him? Please tell us what you remember. (If you're not able to post a comment on the blog, feel free to send me an email and I'll post it for you.) 

If you're especially interested in flying and planes, you might like the book Harry co-wrote in 1994:

 Flights: American Aerospace ... Beginning to Future

Harry recounts McCarthy-era case in our Greenbelt (Maryland) hometown – Part 2

In 1954, Harry was enjoying an active community life with his family and friends in Greenbelt, MD. He had been working at the Pentagon for only a few years when he stepped up to testify on behalf of fellow Greenbelters.

In my previous post, I shared the first part of Harry’s informal account of a McCarthy-era case in Greenbelt, MD. I left off where Harry was sworn in to testify on behalf of men dismissed by the Navy as security risks. Harry was friends and community volunteers with these men. He wrote this account in February 2010 when he was 88; I found it in his files in 2015, a year after he died.

The first half hour was just chatter, so to speak, when the tape ran out, and then the Assistant Secretary said to me, if you’d like to say anything off-the-record, while the tape machine is not working, feel free. So … this may not be exactly verbatim, but this is pretty much what I said to them – and I have told this to very few people before. …

I told them I felt proud and privileged to be working for the Dept. of Defense, but that I was intensely and profoundly ashamed of the Navy for its action in dismissing these five people as security risks. The fact that they were all involved in organizing the residents of Greenbelt into a cooperative housing group to buy the community from the government should have alerted their investigators. The fact that the accusations of communist leanings or similar vague assertions all came from the same sources – people who were opposed to the sale of the community to residents – should have alerted them. The fact that all of the dismissed persons were Jewish should have given them pause and caused them to ask if there was some anti-Semitism involved – actually there was, but I considered it a minor thing, more of a coincidence than a causal factor. (But for the Navy, it had the appearance of anti-Semitism.) And finally, the Navy investigators had taken the accusations by the accusers, and the Navy Dept. had acted on them, without ever actually investigating and interviewing others in the community to confirm or refute the allegations.

They had branded the newspaper that I was the Editor of, as a communist rag without ever interviewing me and my associate editor as a communist fellow traveler, also without ever talking to me. And I was ashamed of the Navy for having caved in to the witch hunt that Sen. McCarthy was conducting, and I said flat out that anyone who considers my associate editor as a communist sympathizer or a security risk ought to have his head examined. Now the Navy is being subjected to public scrutiny because of the case I mentioned before – the guy who went public – and you need to find a way to back down without appearing to back down. The three guys who aren’t fighting it – that’s moot over with and gone – but these two, you ought to just clear them and let them get back to work. It’s my guess that if you reinstate them, they’ll resign gracefully and disappear from public view. After all, why would they want to continue to work for the Navy after this experience?

About then, the tape recorder guy said the tape is up and running again and the Assistant Secretary called the meeting to order again and said to me, we’re back on the record. Then they asked me a few more questions, touching on the things I had just unloaded on them but not in depth. My feeling was that it was all just a formality, that they had already made up their minds and were just going through the motions. Anyway, it took another year before they announced that the two guys had been cleared and reinstated in their jobs.

So, my associate editor, who was very grateful to me, told me that during that two-year period, he had had several jobs, selling shoes, selling cars, and finally, working for the Park and Planning Commission as an urban planner – and he thought when he was cleared and reinstated he would get all his back pay – two years’ worth. Not true. What he got was all his back pay minus what he had earned in other jobs during that time. It amounted to only a few thousand dollars, most of which went to the lawyer. Both guys, by the way, resigned two weeks after they were reinstated.

After I testified, Secretary Talbott called me in and asked how it went and I told him what I just told you – all I had said at the hearing. He told me that the whole subject of those security dismissals had come up at the weekly meeting of the Service Secretaries with the Secretary of Defense, several times, and he had personally told the Secretary of the Navy about me, that I worked for him and that he fully supported me.

Many, many years later, when Fritz Kramer was a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army, he told me that a Navy investigator had come to see him when he was still in Army Intelligence to ask about me and that he had let the guy know in no uncertain terms that the idea that I might be sympathetic to communism was ludicrous. And he asked me what that was all about, so I told him the whole story, too. Well, most of it. The whole story is much too complicated. I have tried to condense it here which necessarily leaves out a lot of pertinent information. It’s ironic, by the way, that Secretary Talbott had to resign under a cloud, so to speak. As I understand it, he had used his office as Secretary of the Air Force for some personal business. Still, I remember him with gratitude for his support when I needed it.

 You can read more on this case and about Greenbelt history in “Greenbelt, Maryland, A Living Legacy of the New Deal” by Cathy D. Knepper. The book includes several quotes from Harry.

Harry in 1951 above, 1953 below (with me)

  Copyright 2015, Elaine Blackman


The (mostly) fabulous '50s

In 1949, the Zubkoff family of three left Buffalo and moved to an apartment near the "Center" in young Greenbelt. In 1953, the family of four moved close by to a row house at 17-H Ridge Rd., where we lived till 1963, when I was 11. I have an early memory of one night watching Harry and a few others working on the newspaper at the dining room table. Maybe they were discussing the outcome of the McCarthy case that had upset the whole community for the past year or more.

 

Despite the turbulence of the McCarthy case, and I'm guessing many more crises to come, Harry often claimed he "had the best job in the world" for 36 years at the Pentagon. Here are a few 1950s-era photos of Harry at work: getting an award; gathering with associates at an event (by the time I worked for the government, alcohol was not allowed on the premises); and posing with a group of young adults, possibly interns or the flying club he taught.

'If I tell you, they’ll kill me'

Harry Zubkoff was a true storyteller, but he never would tell us one story in particular. We knew that he hunted down Nazi criminals during his stint in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps after World War II ended. However, even in his old age, and of superbly sound mind, he wouldn’t divulge many details.

“Zadie, you’re 92, you can tell us, no one will find you,” his granddaughter insisted during a hospital visit in 2013. 

But he stuck to his story:  “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.” He did, however, encourage friends who showed an interest in his military experience to read “The Brigade” by Howard Blum.

The following excerpts (slightly paraphrased in spots) from Harry’s recorded interview with the U.S. Veterans History Project, give us some insight. 


The basic job of counter intelligence was to investigate cases of sabotage, espionage, subversive activities. … We were being used to trace down Nazi war criminals to get what they could use in war crimes trials, and to help build a network of people who could help us get information.

Harry's ID card

We were worried at the time about the increasing hostility with Russia. … In the intelligence business we were taught so much about the Nazi paramilitary organizations and their political organizations, and we started taking lessons in the same things with regard to the Russians and Communists. We were working on both figuring out what the communists were doing and the Nazi war criminals.

I was sent on several missions, and spent some time in DP, displaced persons camps. … We set up DP camps for Jewish people, and I had a lot of interaction with them. … They thought the American Jewish soldiers were a breed apart from the other soldiers. They didn’t know that Jewish people could be in the Army.

Now, did you ever hear of the Jewish Brigade from Palestine? Some of the guys wrote a book. They were also chasing Nazi war criminals, and finding them, and killing them. … There was a period of time when my superiors were wondering if I was one of the guys who was finding them and killing them. … Other officers (not mine) were not sure about Jewish soldiers. They did things the intelligence community really wasn’t happy with. They brought over the Nazi scientists to the U.S. … We were against that.  … We found out that many Nazis were being placed in responsible government jobs.


More on "The Brigade"
In Harry’s old boxes, we found some disturbing Nazi photos of a concentration camp, postcards with German notes on them, and posters of Hitler, etc. We also found news clippings Harry saved over the years about WWII veterans and then-secret missions. I learned more about the book "The Brigade" from the following note we found on his computer.

The Brigade is the story—the true story—of how the Jews of Palestine formed a Brigade of some 5,000 men to fight as part of the British forces in WWII. In part it is the story, through the eyes of three men, of fighting against the Nazis, of seeking out Nazi war criminals, and of organizing a massive effort to spirit the remnants of Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. I spent a year and a half in Germany after the war ended in May 1945, hunting down war criminals who had gone to great lengths to hide their identities and their whereabouts. So, a part of this story is closely related to a part of my story.

But, the best part of this account is the brilliant efforts of the Palestinians (in those days, the Palestinians were the Jews, not the Arabs) to smuggle the survivors out of Europe under the eyes of the British, and to get them into Palestine. Too few Americans know the story of this Brigade. And almost nobody of the current generation, the young Jewish families of today, knows about this period of Jewish history.

So, if you will bear with this old man, I keep doing my best to inform everybody I can reach with this story. This story of the Brigade is as important as the story of the Exodus, which became such an inspiring movie a generation ago. I hope you will read it and treasure it as a part of your history as Jews, no matter how far removed it is from your own personal experience.

 Harry with older brother Hymie in Hartford, CT, 1945

Does Harry's essay make you want to read “The Brigade” or learn about the 970th Counter Intelligence Corps missions? FYI, the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project has a page on stories from the Jewish Veterans of World War II.

Harry and his younger cousin Harvey Rogers were thrilled 
to run into each other in a hotel in Germany, 1946.

(This post is the first published by Harry's daughter, Elaine, in 2015. Harry wrote and published all previous posts in 2011.)