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Preserving Voices Of Veterans, Words Of War

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By BILLY COX, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: September 23, 2007

VENICE - Forget the intangible value it might have held for the family. Ted Koszarski wonders how much the filmed testimony of a Civil War veteran might fetch on the open market today.

'Can you imagine, half an hour with one of those guys?' says the Venice resident. In 1938, for instance, on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, 1,800 Civil War survivors showed up. 'That would've been such a great opportunity - they had sound on film in those days.'

So far as Koszarski can tell, the idea never occurred to anybody. But in an age in which recording technology is as accessible as a cheap cell phone, even more surprising to him is how many people today have never bothered to collect eyewitness accounts of battle from within their own families.

Koszarski hopes the PBS series 'The War' - premiering tonight with its eyewitness accounts of World War II - will sound a wake-up call to salvage the 'Greatest Generation's' memories before they vanish.

Koszarski, 66, never served in the U.S. military. But as the producer of a cable-access show in Staten Island in 1995, he began recording and preserving his guests' war stories in hopes of contributing to his favorite subject: history.

Koszarski's video library - ranging from VHS to DVD - is jammed with 550 personal retrospectives, 70 percent from World War II. The collection spans Desert Storm to World War I, and the entire inventory is stashed away in heavy boxes at his home.

Exactly how many people share his passion is impossible to say, but according to the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project Web site, at least 19 oral history collections on World War II are soliciting for material nationwide.

Most of Koszarski's eyewitnesses are New Yorkers. But after moving to Southwest Florida several years ago, Koszarski began coaxing local veterans into on-camera interviews via local veterans groups and the Newspaper In Education initiative.

The NIE is a national literacy partnership between local newspapers and school districts. In 2005, the Herald-Tribune sponsored workshops acquainting history teachers with World War II survivors who could share their stories in classrooms.

Along with his wife, Marjorie Al-Kadi, Koszarski runs a tiny nonprofit entity called Fifty Plus, which makes copies of the interviews available to veterans free of charge.

His long-range goals are to post the entire inventory on the Internet and find a responsible curator for safekeeping.

'This is so important, and I've got such wonderful material,' says Koszarski. 'I want to make it available to every teacher in every classroom in the U.S.'

For Venice High School Principal Candy Millington, Koszarski's project wasn't an academic exercise.

Mere months before her father, Dwight Swanson, died in 2006 at age 85, he went on record with Koszarski while visiting from Illinois.

A ball turret gunner shot down over Germany, Swanson made it to the border of neutral Switzerland, where he was interred as a prisoner of war. Swanson managed to escape into France with a first-class train ticket by bluffing his way through as a civilian.

The interview lasted only 20 minutes, but the riveting details of life during wartime are now 'a treasure to me,' Millington says.

'My father, in a sense, is frozen in time, and I can listen to his voice and listen to his laugh,' she says.

Millington pauses to let a swell of emotion pass, because the power of her dad's testimony is the gift of reflection. 'You really can remember,' she says at last, 'and learn about yourself.'

Koszarski has posted dozens of testimonials on Google Video under vetarchive. That's where New Yorker Patrick Connelly, for instance, recalls the steady, reassuring voice of actor-turned-general Jimmy Stewart leading a B-24 bombing run over Europe.

It's also where you can see Chester Sliwa (father of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa) reminiscing about deck-gun shootouts between his Merchant Marines freighter and German U-boats.

Maybe Wendell Anderson's collaboration with Koszarski personifies the greatest irony of Koszarski's endeavors.

The Sarasota resident is a natural raconteur, and he polishes the details of his time with the Navy Seabees into a fine sheen. An eyewitness to the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, Anderson recalls watching the clash of navies as a hail of spent metal clattered atop his helmet.

Anderson went on to become a pioneer in TV broadcasting. He produced the first network hookup from Chicago to New York in 1948. But his session with Koszarski was the first time he ever told his war stories on tape. 'Nobody ever asked me before,' Anderson explains.

Jim McCartney of Anna Maria Island wanted to use broader strokes when he agreed to his interview. McCartney spent most of his postwar career reporting on foreign affairs for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, where his coverage of American military interventions included, among others, Vietnam, Panama, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic and Grenada.

'When Ted asked me to talk, I wanted to call my subject matter The Grand Illusion,' says McCartney, who taught war/media studies at Georgetown University after retiring. 'Because it seems like one of the most unfortunate lessons we learned since our victory in World War II is that war is the answer to all of our problems overseas.'

McCartney got his fill of death with the infantry during the Vosges Mountains campaign in northeastern France in the winter of 1944-45.

Advancing through Appalachian-like terrain too hostile for armor support, U.S. troops fell to trench foot, frostbite and pinpoint artillery strikes by dug-in German defenders.

Though the cause was righteous, McCartney still looks back in horror. He says, 'It's made me anti-war ever since.'

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