A Company of Heroes (34 page)

 

 

 

I am the oldest living relative of George Lavenson. I never met my uncle, and my parents and grandparents rarely spoke of him when I was growing up. But I knew of his existence when I was a boy, and in the years that have followed, our lives have connected in some highly unusual ways. It chokes me up today: it’s such a passion for me now to talk about his life. My uncle never had any children of his own, and I feel like I’m the only one to carry on for him. He was being forgotten, and I had to go find out about him because I didn’t want him to be forgotten anymore.

Growing up, I had what I’d call several “brushes” with my uncle’s life. There were occasional traces of conversation, little tokens of remembrance in our houses, that pointed to who he was.

I was the oldest boy in our family, and every once in a while my grandmother slipped and called me George by mistake. I didn’t really get it.

I was a kid in the 1950s, and once as a Thanksgiving present my grandmother gave me some brown combat boots. I really liked them and was fascinated by them, but there was never a story attached to them that she told me about, or an explanation of why she got them for me. I felt like a soldier whenever I wore them.

In a hall closet, my grandmother kept her son’s soft cap with the blue and white patch from the Airborne, and from time to time as a young boy I snuck in and wore it. I didn’t know why I was fascinated with it, but I always was.

My grandfather had taken up painting after the Second World War, and he had painted my uncle twice: once in portraiture, and once symbolically in a picture that showed a lightning bolt hitting a grove of trees and striking one down, leaving the rest of the grove of trees standing. There was never any specific talk about the painting, but each of the trees represented a member of their family, I knew that much. There were two big trees that remained, the parents, then two little trees left, his two brothers, then one tree was being struck by lightning. I was always curious about that painting, and what the story was behind the tree struck by lightning.

My dad spoke occasionally about his brother. Even then, very few details emerged. He described him as a blue-eyed, handsome fellow, very well liked, very physically strong. My father was a wrestler, a lieutenant, and could certainly hold his own in a fight against most men. But when his brother got back from training with Easy Company, George quipped, “I don’t think you want to wrestle me now.”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

My uncle snatched my father’s lieutenant’s bars off his shoulder and squashed them with his fingers. “That’s how I’m going to treat you if you wrestle me,” my uncle said.

My father told that story with great pride. His brother was a paratrooper, the best of the best.

Those were about my only brushes with my uncle until I was a grownup. Until recent years I never understood why they never spoke more about him. Now I know it was just too hard, too devastating. In 1985 I bought this summer camp in Maine. Camp Kennebec, it’s called. Little did I know that owning this camp would change everything I knew about my uncle.

For many years my father had worked for his father’s business, which had been his grandfather’s business, the Lavenson Bureau of Advertising. After that my father became the president of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Then he owned one of the top fifty resorts in the world in Montecito, California, called the San Ysidro Ranch. John and Jacqueline Kennedy honeymooned there, and Churchill wrote his memoirs there. As a result of my dad’s influence, I worked in the hospitality industry for many years.

I had another career influence as well. For many years my grandmother owned a children’s camp in Maine. In fact, Millie Strayer, the wife of Colonel Robert Strayer, (2nd Battalion commander) was a nurse who worked for my grandmother at the camp during the war. So I had grown up learning the insides of the camp business. I loved it and always wanted to go into it as a career. After I had worked in the hospitality industry, I knew it was time. I searched all over New England and stumbled on Camp Kennebec. It wasn’t the camp my grandmother had run, just another camp in the area. The camp was going through a hard time, almost empty, and available for sale. So I bought it and switched careers.

Here I was trying to resurrect this thing, and during my very first summer running it, early in the summer’s activities—July 4, 1985, in fact—I was charged with the responsibility of reading the names of all the young men who went to Kennebec as campers who had died in the wars. It was an annual tradition. On Independence Day all the campers gathered in a place on the grounds called the Belltower Circle, and the director read the names in tribute. No one ever went into this ceremonial area except this one time each year.

So this very first summer I’m listening to myself speak the names of all these young men, and all of a sudden I come to a familiar name: George Lavenson. It was unmistakable. The realization hit me like a load of bricks. My uncle had gone to this very same camp when he was a kid—the camp I had just bought—and I didn’t even know it. All these boys for years had been hearing his name read to them in honor. My family couldn’t even speak his name out loud because of their grief. I saw my uncle’s name on the page and couldn’t continue. Right there, I started to cry. It was more than I could take. The ceremony ended early. Immediately I went to my office and phoned my father.

“Dad!” I said. “Did you know that Uncle George went to Camp Kennebec?”

“Yes,” he said. “I went there with him when we were boys.”

“How come you never told me this, particularly when I just bought the place?”

There was a silence on the phone. Some habits are hard to break.

“My brother was my best friend, you know . . . ,” he said at last. Dad still couldn’t talk about his brother in any detail, even so many years later.

Little by little, the story came out. Kennebec had been started in 1907. My grandfather had helped out at the camp in the 1920s, then my dad and uncles went there as campers in the 1930s. I searched around and found pictures of my uncle in the camp’s yearbooks. His favorite activity was canoeing. He had been voted “best athlete” and “best looking.” The camp was a traditional, old-time, rough-and-tumble, teach-people-how-to-be-resourceful-in-the-outdoors type of camp. The kids learned a lot of outdoor and survival skills. My father and uncle loved the place and it made many special memories for them growing up.

Here’s the other twist to the story. As I talked with my father, he said that he and his two brothers had decided to run the place one day as a canoe camp. Not only was this a camp they had gone to as kids, this was the very same camp they had dreamed of owning one day.

I had bought the very camp that they wanted! I was living my uncle’s dream!

From that moment on, I started doing everything I could to find out more about my uncle. I wanted to know as much as I could.

My uncle, George Lavenson, was born in Pennsylvania, graduated high school, and went to Haverford College in Philadelphia where he studied journalism. Before he enlisted he worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia. All the family lived near each other not far from my father’s farm. They were very close.

As young men, my uncle and my father both considered themselves pacifists. When war broke out, they initially talked about going off and holing up somewhere in the backwoods of Maine until the war was over. They figured they could come back then and start their camp—what they really wanted to do. But the tone in the country then was one of strong patriotism, and my father and uncle realized they needed to protect their country. It had been attacked, after all, and if they didn’t step up, who was going to? They enlisted.

They both went to Officers Candidate School (OCS). My uncle heard about a new elite outfit, the paratroopers, and volunteered. He proved a capable, qualified soldier. He was one of the original Toccoa men. Winters notes, “Senior commanders only assign the most talented officers to headquarters staffs. Colonel Sink and Major Strayer were no exception,” and within the first eight months of the company’s existence, my uncle, along with Lieutenants Matheson, Nixon, and Hester, were all assigned to 2d Battalion staff.
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There, my uncle became the battalion adjutant, a staff officer who assists the commanding officer in issuing orders. It meant he was often near the battle front.

Information trickled in over the years. Then, in the early 1990s, the book
Band of Brothers
came out. My father got a copy and gave it to me. I read it from cover to cover. It contained accounts of my uncle’s life and death and added more fuel to my fire. My hobby turned into an obsession, and I called all the people who knew about my uncle, including Stephen Ambrose. I couldn’t even find a number for Ambrose, only a fax number, so I sent him a fax about my uncle, and he was kind enough to call me back right away. I had collected some stories about my uncle by then, and we both shared information. The story I told Stephen Ambrose made him gasp.

When my uncle first went to volunteer for the paratroopers, the waiting room was filled with soldiers all hoping to get in. The recruiter went through his list, then told the men, “It’s all filled up this month, come back next month.” Next month when my uncle came back, the captain again looked through his list and said to my uncle, “Sorry, you can’t join. You’re a Jew.”

“What of it?” my uncle said.

“You can’t be in this outfit,” the recruiter, a captain, said. “Jews don’t have enough guts.”

My uncle was furious, grabbed the recruiter from behind his desk, punched him, and knocked him down. He was immediately called into the general’s office. The general really ripped him up and down and said, “Don’t you realize that you can be put in Leavenworth for the duration of the war, and even worse, for striking a superior officer during wartime? If you had been on the battlefield, you’d be shot!”

My uncle didn’t say anything. The general calmed down and added, “Privately, I admire what you did, so I’m approving your papers, and I’m sending the captain off to be reassigned someplace else.”

Ambrose was actually crying after I told him this. “My God,” he said. “Fighting his way to get in—this is the kind of people we had back then!”

The original story was told by newsman Walter Winchell on his Sunday night radio broadcast. A Philadelphia area women’s group picked up the story and decided to honor my grandmother for her son, who had the courage to fight his way into the outfit.

It was good to talk with Ambrose. I asked him why I was so obsessed with finding out information about my uncle. Was it just me, or did others feel the same way?

“We’re all this way to one degree or another,” Ambrose said. “It’s a staggering thing to find out the last words, the last thoughts, the last breath, of someone who’s disappeared so far away in combat. Of course you’re going to wonder about your uncle. All men ultimately want to know two things—‘To whom do I owe thanks that I should live in such opportunity?’ And, ‘Will I have the courage when the time comes?’ Knowing about your uncle helps you answer those two questions.”

The heart-wrenching story about my uncle is that he actually survived being shot in combat. After he was wounded, he was all set to return to the States and pick up with his wife where they left off.

He had met his wife, Joanne, when the men marched from Toccoa to Fort Benning, Georgia. She was stationed in Atlanta as part of the Red Cross. Her job was to welcome the troops when they arrived in the city. He met her there at the end of the hike, and they fell in love.

Herbert Sobel was my uncle’s best man. I don’t know what type of relationship he had with Sobel, but evidently it was good enough. Sobel gave them a forty-eight-hour leave. My uncle and his new wife were together for two weeks. Then he was shipped overseas.

I’ve spoken with my uncle’s widow. She resented my grandmother for not allowing her the possibility of having any children with George. My grandmother convinced her to use birth control. They were only married for two weeks before he left, but at least it would have been possible for them to have conceived. She later remarried.

My uncle was shot just outside Carentan in the early morning of June 12, 1944, immediately prior to Easy Company attacking the town. The men were taking a break, and my uncle went to relieve himself. Colonel Strayer noted that George was out of position. A colonel observes the attack, and my uncle should have been next to the colonel, far away, observing the battle. But George apparently wanted to be as close to his buddies in Easy Company as he could. He was taking a crap in a field between E Company and F Company when a German sniper shot him in the butt. Ambrose notes the hour, that my uncle was hit just before six a.m., and the whereabouts, a field near the last one hundred or so meters of the road by the T junction leading into Carentan.
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My uncle was taken to England to recuperate. He was going to live, but evidently it was a serious enough wound that his fighting days were over. Then, flying back to Bangor, Maine, the Red Cross hospital plane he and twenty-one others were on was shot down, somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia. You can imagine the emotions my family went through—hearing that he’s been shot, which was a shock enough, but also a relief that he’s still alive, then not being able to visit him when he’s in the hospital in Europe, then the joy at hearing he’s coming home, then the horror that his plane is lost over the Atlantic on the way home. It’s like he was lost twice.

Newspaper articles describe the exhaustive search for the plane that followed. The wreckage was never found. It was the only Red Cross plane lost during the war. Authorities believe the plane was shot down by a German U-boat. Eventually it was discovered that a U-boat in that area had a habit of sending SOS signals. Planes would fly down low to see if they could help, then the U-boat would shoot them out of the sky. The date of my uncle’s death is listed as July 26, 1944. There was a memorial service held for him back in America.