Recipes for Living Andy and Jack Jeffreys

The life story of Dorothy and Andy Jeffreys is in Volume 5 of Recipes for Living. It included a brief account of Andy's and Jack's military service. The following is the account of how both of them served the country:

After graduation from Osceola High School in 1942, Andy enrolled in the junior college on the third floor of the high school building. That was the last year of its operation. In 1943, on June 25, he joined the Navy 112 Sea Bees and was inducted in Des Moines. He had further training in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Maine. He was then put on a troop train to go across the country to Port Hueneme in southern California, and from there to Hawaii, where they were stationed for nearly a year building a hospital, which visitors' attention is directed to. It is a pink hospital that shows prominently from the top of a hill in Honolulu. But for his agility, Andy might have lost his life because a pipe, being sent in a chute down the hill, was coming directly at him. He jumped out of the way just in time.

The sailors were transported by ship to Tinian Island in the South Pacific, where they built an airstrip from which planes took off to bomb Japan. While Andy was on Tinian Island, he received word that Jack was missing in action. He went to his bunk and lay down. As clearly as though he were there, he could see Jack bailing out of his plane. The vision gave him assurance Jack had landed safely, and he sent word home accordingly.

Andy's unit was sent to the Japanese occupied island, Okinawa. When the American military came in, the Japanese retreated into the hills, where they lived in caves. The troops could see them on what they called "Sugar Loaf Hill." Trip flares were placed around the perimeter of the camp, and on many nights the Japanese tried to sneak in. The evidence was, a flare would go off, rockets would go up, there would be several gunshots, and everything would return to normal.

While Andy was on Okinawa, the unit experienced two typhoons. The first occurred while they were unloading the LST, which, according to Webster's dictionary was an "oceangoing military ship, used by amphibious forces for landing troops and heavy equipment on the beaches." Because of the intense wind, there was no way to control direction and they ended up within three miles of Japan but had no idea of their whereabouts. The second typhoon came while they were on the island. The strength of the wind demolished their Quonset huts, the rain came horizontally and it was impossible to stand. The men had to crawl wherever they intended to go. Their fare throughout the storm was raisin pie which had been baked previously.

As Andy thought back on the dangers of those days - the "Japs", the typhoons, their uncertain future, and all the others - none were as fearsome or loathsome as snakes. He took the long route around the camp to avoid meeting up with them, but they were everywhere. That repulsion carried over into civilian life. He preferred the penalty of a lost ball on a golf course rather than looking in an area where he might happen across a snake.

The intention of going to Okinawa was to prepare for an invasion of Japan, but while they were there, the bombs were dropped that ended the war. Japan surrendered, the treaty was signed, and the men were relieved of duty on the island.

They were taken from Okinawa by water jeep to the ship, which they boarded by rope ladder. Their destination was San Francisco, where they were discharged according to their length of service-time and dispersed to wherever. The screw-ups were plentiful. No attention was paid to where the men had come from. Men, who lived in Chicago, near the Great Lakes base, were shipped elsewhere. Some were sent back to Port Hueneme. Andy spent his last three months at Great Lakes.

Andy enjoyed recalling his job during those months. He was in charge of checking the heating in the barracks. He would seem to be doing that but often made up the numbers so he could take a nap. When he was called to the office, he expected to get his 'come-uppance.' Instead, he was commended for his good reports and put in charge of training others. His discharge came through in March 1946.

JACK

Jack's reluctance to talk about his war experiences caused the piecing together of what has been told by Dorothy and Andy, snippets of information recalled by friends, articles from the collection of Dr. Thomas Lower, Jack's obituary and a tribute paid him by the editor of the Osceola Sentinel, Stack Samuelson, in the Thursday, October 25, 1979 Sentinel.

From the obituary: "Jack Edwards Jeffreys, 58, died at the Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines on Tuesday, October 23, of injuries he received in a two-vehicle accident October 13. Funeral services will be held at the United Methodist Church in Osceola on Thursday, October 25, with the Rev. Richard Eis officiating at the 1:30 p.m. rites.

"Jack Edward Jeffreys was born December 24, 1920 in Des Moines, Iowa, son of Earl E. Jeffreys and Zula Marie Edwards Jeffreys. He graduated from Osceola High School in the class of 1939 and attended Simpson College and Drake University.

"He served in the U.S. Air Corps during World War II and was a prisoner of war for a short time during that period. Following his discharge in 1945, he owned and operated the Jeffreys Amusement Company.

"He was a veteran of World War II, mayor of Osceola for 12 years, member of American Legion Post 69, active in Chamber of Commerce, a charter member of the Clarke County Development Corporation and a member of the United Methodist Church in Osceola. He won the community service award in 1969.

"Survivors include his brother, Andy Jeffreys and wife, Dorothy, of Osceola; aunt, Zelma Freel, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; niece, Laurie Jones and husband, Fred, of Indianola, and cousin, Allan Brunett, and wife, Sally and daughter, Sheryl, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

"He was preceded in death by his parents and one niece."

Andy told: Jack joined the Air Force and became a tail gunner on a B17. He trained in Flagstaff, Arizona and in Florida before being transferred to Italy. Their mission was the bombing of Germany. On about the sixth mission, Jack had lost his oxygen mask when they were attacked by fighter planes. The order was given to bail out. On the way down, the crew was strafed by German guns. Jack wasn't struck but when he hit the ground and got out of his parachute, the Germans were coming. They tried to hide but the Germans found them and, along with others, Jack was taken to a prisoner of war camp. He tried to tell them that he was part German because their grandmother had been German. It made no difference. He was finally transferred to a camp in northern Germany, and in time the Russians came from the east and liberated them. Jack was reunited with his unit and spent the remaining time in Paris. From there he was flown home.

He was taken to a prison camp, where he said as long as prisoners were quiet and obedient, they were not mistreated, but anyone who stepped the least bit out of line was shot at once. The man in the cell next to his managed to scratch a hole through the wall in order to communicate with Jack. If the Germans had found it, they would both have been shot.

Jack was liberated by the Russians, who probably thought the prisoners would be angry enough to annihilate any German they might contact. Jack talked mostly about the bad food. He said dog food from a can, such as Bus fed his hunting dogs, looked more edible than the fare offered to them. The worst part of it was to watch how the prisoners would scramble for the stuff.

"Chick" Marvin and Jack were close friends. Chick said just one time Jack talked to him about being held in Buchenwald, which is described by some of the men who went in to liberate the prisoners at the close of the war. This reveals why Jack preferred to forget.

From a collection of material by Dr. Thomas Lower's father: One article tells that Buchenwald was the first concentration camp to be breached by the western Allies. It had been built high on the hills above Weimar, capital of the defunct democratic Republic and not far from an imperial Schloss known as Wilhelmshohe. Approximately 238,000 prisoners, many of them Jews, but also non-Jews, Poles, Russians, and dissident Germans had been incarcerated in Buchenwald since its dedication. Even before the war exploded in Europe, it was serving the coercive purposes of the Nazis.

"Legendary CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow described the scene at Buchenwald when he entered the camp after liberation: There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were still smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing.

"I asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.

"They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book - nothing more - nothing about who had been where, what he had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242 - 242 out of 1,200, in one month.

"As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it.

"In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said: 'The children - enemies of the state” could see their ribs through their thin shirts.

"We went to the hospital. It was full. The doctor told me 200 had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: 'tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.' He pulled back the blanket from the man's feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.

"I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge...showed me the daily ration. One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each 10 men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added: 'We're very efficient here.'

"We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised; though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little.

"I arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another 50, but it wasn't possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed.

"But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys had died there during the 12 years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?

"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry..." There is a footnote "They Died 900 a Day in 'The Best' Nazi Death Camp," PM, April 16, 1945."

There are other articles included in the packet but unsigned, confirming what Edward R. Murrow reported. These are excerpts of what had been written by the forward platoons of Americans who arrived on the morning of April 11, 1945, when only about 20,000 prisoners remained:

Some of the first Americans to enter the camp vomited as their eyes beheld what their minds could not absorb - bodies stacked in obscene anonymity, the barely living whimpering among the corpses, bunks full of shaven-headed, emaciated creatures that had wizened into skeletal apparitions. American soldiers put on film the scenes in rooms full of naked, unburied corpses, piled ten feet high.

Soon after the take-over, General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, arrived. He wrote, "I have never felt able to describe my emotional reaction when I came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of human decency. Up to that moment, I had only known about it generally, or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock."

A young man nineteen years old, Harry Herder, Jr., a P.F.C. (Private First Class) in the U.S. Army, wrote 50 years later, the experiences he had been unable to shake from his mind. He wrote that every spring, some small trigger will set off the memories that began April 11, 1945, when he was part of the liberating forces that entered Buchenwald. They had driven up a gentle valley with trees on each side, made a sharp left turn, and there it was! A great barbed wire fence at least 10 feet high, with high guard towers every 50 yards or so. Beyond the fence were two more barbed wire fences so finely meshed no one was going to get through. The U.S. tanks broke through them and one of the three was electrified.

"Slowly a ragged group of human beings started to creep out of and from between the buildings in front of us. As we watched these human beings, timidly, slowly, deliberately showing their hands, all in a sort of uniform, or bits and pieces of a uniform, made from horribly coarse cloth with stripes running vertically, the stripes alternating a dull gray with a dark blue. Some of those human beings wore pants made of the material, some had shirt/jackets, and some had hats. Some only one piece of the uniform, others had two; many had all three parts. They came out of the buildings and just stood there.

"Sergeant Blowers told us this was what was called a concentration camp, that we were about to see things we were in no way prepared for. He told us to look as long as our stomachs lasted, and then to get out of there for a walk in the woods. This man had seen everything I could imagine could be seen, and this place was having an effect on him. I didn't know what a concentration camp was, or could be, but I was about to learn.

"Three of us headed through the gate..., slightly apprehensive of what we might see. We had barely made the turn, and there was (the building) in front of us a good bit, but plainly visible. The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood - all of them dead. All of them stripped. The corpses all seemed to be male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high; maybe a little more. They extended down the hill...for fifty or seventy feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal...all face up. There was another aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were...I have since seen a movie made about Buchenwald. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink.

"A group of guys from the company...said, 'Wait till you see in there.' They pointed to a long building about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end...and the doors were standing open...We moved through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors ...in sets, three high. Most of the doors were closed but a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor. I had enough. I couldn't take it any more. We left the building and as we passed through the door, someone said, "The crematorium." Until then, I didn't know what a crematorium was. It dawned on me much later - the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays - and the Germans still couldn't keep up."

There are more pages but this will suffice to depict something of where our friend Jack was sent. We do not know when, for how long, or precisely what he endured. However, Martha (Young) Wade has a letter written on May 23, 1945 by her grandmother's sister to Martha's cousin telling that Jack had been released and how excited they were to hear it! There is no way to know how long it took for news to reach home. The above report of American soldiers going into a prison camp was written on April 11, the Edward R. Murrow report of visiting Buchenwald was probably on April 16. Surrender of all German forces in N.W. Germany, Holland, and Denmark was on May 4, and VE-Day (Victory in Europe) was celebrated on May 8, 1945. That gives somewhat of a time frame when Jack was freed.

Stack Samuelson wrote a tribute to him, printed in the Osceola Sentinel, October 29, 1979: "The city of Osceola is poorer this week - poorer because it no longer has the services of one of its citizens who cared deeply about his community and the people who lived there.

"The untimely death of Jack Jeffreys was a shock to residents, for he was known for his interests in tennis, in hunting, and in keeping physically fit. And to have a person who was vitally interested in being able to play a fast set of tennis at the age of 58 tells something of the priority he set on keeping physically fit. He enjoyed living.

"This writer recalls an occasion some 14 years ago when he was first introduced to Mayor Jack Jeffrey's thought processes. The city was in the midst of a sewer program and a large hole had been excavated on East Logan Street and had remained open for several weeks. Rains had partially filled the hole and it posed a safety threat for small youngsters. I was called by Jack and informed that a new lake was in existence and that fishing was good - bring your camera. The picture I took was one of Jack fishing in the hole and was used to call attention to the fact that the project needed to be finished - it was shortly thereafter.

"For those who were aware of the time and concern given to city business, Jack rated at the top. Paving projects were inspected religiously by Jack, possible monies to be used for city programs were sought, concern for those who might have difficulty paying for improvements was voiced, jobs for young people rated high on his priority list. And not only were these thoughts and concerns expressed - they were acted upon.

"This is not to eulogize Jack, for we are all human. It is to pay tribute to one of our citizens who felt a true concern for his city. The city of Osceola is poorer this week because of his passing."

Gary Lamb was Osceola's mayor at the time of Jack's death, but Jack's friends had persuaded him to run again. His name was on the ballot and state law provides that no name can be removed from a ballot once it has been placed thereon. The outcome of the election showed an unusually high voter turnout. Gary Lamb was elected but Jack received 491 of the 1400 votes cast. Mickey Thomas promoted renaming Hyland Drive in West Osceola, Jeffreys Drive, and so it remains.