How Long Islanders helped win WWII: Local servicepeople who fought, sacrificed 80 years ago

August 1945. News broke the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Also making national news that day was the story of Tech. Sgt. Kurt Joachim Hermann II, a 26-year-old from Long Island missing in action and presumed dead. A month earlier, on his record-breaking 108th bombing mission, Hermann's Boeing B-29 bomber had been shot down on a raid over Kochi, Japan.

On Sept. 2, 1945, 80 years ago Tuesday, the Japanese signed surrender documents aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, marking the formal end to World War II. The announcement came just months after the German surrender on May 9, 1945.

The latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs suggest fewer than 50,000 of the 16.4 million Americans who fought the war remain alive in 2025, fewer than 3,500 New Yorkers among them. Some local historians fear many Long Islanders don't know the crucial roles young men and women who hailed from their towns played both at home and abroad in helping the United States and the Allies defeat the Axis powers to win World War II — the Long Islanders who were part of "The Greatest Generation."

Long Islanders who did their part

Little-known Hermann, who is the only serviceman in World War II to have been involved in bombing all three Axis capitals — Rome, Berlin and Tokyo — was from Wyandanch Avenue in Babylon, a graduate of Babylon High School.

Another Long Islander was the tail-gunner aboard the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped that first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Though a Brooklyn native, George R. (Bob) Caron had moved to Lynbrook before the war. Caron, who took the historic photos of that first atomic mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima, worked at Republic Aviation in East Farmingdale.

"Talking to kids today about World War II, it's like talking about the Roman Empire,"  said Joshua Stoff, curator and historian at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City. "But, every community on Long Island contributed people to the armed forces in World War II. Every little town, every big town ... the whole community was just absorbed in the war effort."

As Town of Babylon historian Mary Cascone said: "Any part of any conflict in World War II we can find someone who is from Long Island. We sent Long Islanders around the world — we have them in every branch of the service, serving — and, for some, the world still has them. They didn't come home. ... Long Islanders are a part of everything."

A high profile gunner from Long Island

One of those Long Islanders was the only son of first-generation Dutch immigrants. Hermann was born on Sept. 26, 1918, and grew up on Wyandanch Avenue — blocks north of the Long Island Rail Road station — before venturing off to Yale University and then Hollywood, where he landed roles in a handful of 1930s movies before becoming a merchant mariner at the beginning of World War II.

Torpedoed off South America, Hermann spent 26 days adrift in an open lifeboat with 35 crewmen, then rescued, badly burned, spent a month in a hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Released from the hospital, Hermann joined the U.S. Army Air Force, graduating aerial gunnery school first in a class of 385.

A waist gunner on a B-17 stationed in North Africa, Hermann shot down a German Messerschmitt then transferred to a B-26 bomber crew — shooting down three more enemy fighters. Forced to bail out after a raid on Sardinia, Hermann earned a needed furlough, making national news when he hitchhiked home aboard a 19-day-long series of military flights that took him from Tunisia to Algeria, England, Scotland, Iceland and Nova Scotia before landing at LaGuardia Airport and taking the train home to Babylon.

Despite completing 50 missions, Hermann begged to continue service in England with the 8th Air Force — also flying missions in his free time with the British Royal Air Force. Completing 75 official missions and countless unofficial ones, Hermann convinced the European Theater air commander, Gen. Carl Spaatz, to send him to the Pacific. There, he shot down a Japanese fighter and was on his 108th mission, breaking the 107-mission record of Tech. Sgt. Lewis L. Coburn, of Niagara Falls, when his B-29 was shot down over Kochi.

His plane, Miss Hap, was one of just four bombers lost on the 502-plane raid on July 4, 1945.

In a last letter to his father, Hermann, who earned the Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart, wrote he wanted to complete 110 missions, then come home to Long Island.

"I am tired of getting shot at ... can't help but think that it would be sort of silly of me to get killed now."

As Cascone said: "Most don't know the individual stories. But, you think about the ones who didn't come home, about their families — and how it affected them. What they might have been. How our communities could've been better for having them."

A diverse force goes to war

The American war effort was waged at home and abroad by a force as diverse as America itself.

Records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Archives and the New York State Military Museum and Research Center show that of those millions of Americans who served, more than 1.5 million were African American, Puerto Rican and Asian American, as well as women who served in noncombat roles as nurses and ferry pilots in the Army, Navy and Coast Guard.

And 44,000 Native Americans also served: men like Lubin Hunter, who died in 2022, a B-17 navigator and Southampton High School graduate born on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in 1917.

New York had more servicemembers than any other state, with 1,052,268 New Yorkers in the armed services — almost twice that of the next-closest states, Pennsylvania (583,132) and California (579,052).

Though the exact number of Long Islanders who served is not available, records show 1,180 Long Islanders died in the war: 855 from Nassau, 325 from Suffolk.

Stoff estimates far more than 100,000 Long Islanders were involved in the war effort: as soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, merchant mariners and Coast Guardsmen; as members of the Civil Defense and Civil Air Patrol, and, as homefront factory workers.

Aircraft manufacturers Grumman and Republic produced more than 40,000 planes used in all theaters of the war, among them Grumman Wildcat and Hellcat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers and Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. Manufacturers like Sperry and Liberty built parts and weapons systems.

Mitchel Field served as a staging area for U.S. Army Air Force bomber crews headed overseas with their B-17s and B-24s, while anti-submarine patrols flew from bases in Nassau and Suffolk.

There were scrap metal drives in Bay Shore to gather materials for wartime recycling. Anti-aircraft batteries lined the South Shore, stretching from Brooklyn to Montauk. A 1942 Freeport-based war bond drive raised money to subsidize a B-29 bomber christened Spirit of Freeport. It served in World War II and in Korea. A segregated African American Coast Guard group performed anti-sub patrols and rescue missions from a station in Southampton. The United States even had an internment and prisoner of war camp, Camp Upton, in Brookhaven.

Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis was its most famous armed guard.

"New York State contributed the biggest number of troops, sailors and air corps in World War II," Stoff said, "and Long Island is really a major force in contributing manpower to all the armed services in World War II. The amount of manpower on Long Island — and the amount of hardware that came out of here and the impact it had all over the world? Nothing like it has ever been seen before — or since."

Contributions from the forgotten

While the contributions of Long Islanders to the war effort were wide-ranging, many are long-gone, their names and stories now reduced to the barest details — monthly government reports on those missing or killed in action — reported in local papers:

U.S. Marine Pfc. Frank E. Tlockzkowski, 19, Floral Park, Purple Heart recipient, wounded in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Sewanhaka High School grad Pvt. Joseph B. McGonigle, 19, Valley Stream, and Cpl. Joseph D. Cascone, 35, Elmont, killed in action on Okinawa. Pvt. Russell Raynor, Bridgehampton, wounded by shrapnel from a German Luftwaffe Stuka bomb burst in North Africa, 1943.

Merchant Marine Nunziato L. Ceroli, Huntington Station, killed with all 40 shipmates; his Liberty ship, SS Meriwether Lewis, torpedoed by the German submarine U-634 while part of a North Atlantic convoy bringing supplies to our Russian allies in Murmansk on March 3, 1943.

The late Anna Bolik, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, sent sons Milton and Joseph off to war: One was killed in the South Pacific, the other in the June 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy, France.

Two former Newsday employees — sailors Seaman 1st Class William J. Kaiser, 19, of Wilson Avenue, Westbury, and Seaman 1st Class Harold Knop, 31, of Elmont — were part of the victorious Allied fleet that sailed into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender.

Knop had been a Linotype operator on the very first edition of Newsday in 1940.

Sixty-eight men from New York — a handful of those, including Roslyn Heights native Tech. Sgt. John Tucholski and Staff Sgt. Peter Passalacqua, of Malverne, from Long Island — flew the daring, ill-fated low-level mission to bomb the German-held oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania. . Of the 178 B-24 bombers that left on the 13-hour round-trip mission to Ploesti on Aug. 1, 1943, 53 were lost. And 446 of the 1,763 men who crewed those planes — 18 of them from New York and Long Island — were killed or went missing in action.

Tucholski died in 2008; Passalacqua in 2003.

One mission survivor, Manhattan native Leon Klinghoffer, would make international news when he was shot, killed and thrown overboard from Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro hijacked by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985.

One mission commander, Kansas native Leon Johnson, would later become base commander at Mitchel Field.

 A longtime resident of Melville, the late Meyer Steinberg, a chemical engineer who grew up in Astoria, Queens, was part of the "Manhattan Project" — the team of scientists led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer that built the atomic bombs.

A handful of now-deceased Black Long Islanders — Vincent R. Long, of Hempstead; Richard Warren and Robert Harding, both of Roosevelt, and, Charles Anderson, of Westbury — trained with the segregated U.S. Marine Corps unit known as the Montford Point Marines.

And, of the almost 1,000 men who ultimately saw combat with the segregated African American Tuskegee Airmen, five were from Long Island.

They included 2nd Lt. Samuel G. Leftenant, of Amityville; 2nd Lt. Joseph B. Bennett, of Halesite; Flight Officer George A. Lynch, of Valley Stream; Flight Officer Lee A. Hayes, of East Hampton, and Flight Officer Thurston L. Gaines Jr., of Freeport.

Gaines was on his 26th combat mission when his P-51 Mustang fighter, one of the infamous 99th Fighter Squadron "Red Tails," was shot down over Germany on April 15, 1945. He ended up a prisoner of war.

Leftenant was shot down and killed escorting U.S. bombers on a raid over Sankt Veit, Austria, on April 12, 1945.

Awarded the Air Medal and Purple Heart, in 2016 Leftenant  was given a military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery — though his body was never recovered. His name is among those on the fabled "Tablet of the Missing" in Florence, Italy.

Amityville residents James and Eunice Leftenant were the children of slaves. But, five of their six sons served in World War II and three of the six daughters became wartime military nurses. One daughter, Nancy Leftenant-Colon, who died in January at age 104, would attain the rank of major — making history as the first Black nurse commissioned into the integrated U.S. Army Nursing Corps in 1948.

Bayport historian Reynard Burns, public relations officer for the Claude B. Govan New York Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen, said despite the success of all those Black Americans in the face of overt racism, much of their history remains untold today.

"They worked, they went to school the same as anybody else," Burns said. "Some lied about their age so they could get [into the war] sooner. ... They were fighting an attitude that they were expected to fail. And, knowing they were expected to fail, they fought even harder. They had to fight just to get into the fight."

A promise to a fallen friend

Raised on Kennedy Avenue in Rockville Centre, Pfc. Benedict G. Schmitt barely got the length of a football field into his very first battle when he was killed in Geilenkirchen, Germany, on Nov. 19, 1944. He was 22.

Manhattan native and longtime Baldwin resident David Marshall, 100, became fast friends with Schmitt during stateside military training, the two assigned to the famed 334th Infantry, 84th Division, Railsplitters.

Last month, Marshall recalled a conversation the two had on the eve of that first battle.

"He said to me: 'If anything happens to me you got to go visit my parents,'" Marshall recalled. "First words out of my mouth were, 'There's no way in hell I'm gonna do that. I can't do that, I'm not cut out for it.'"

Finally, Marshall said, he relented and he and Schmitt, who he called "Smitty," made a promise: That if either of them got killed, the other would visit their family after the war to explain what happened.

"The next day," Marshall said, "he's dead. The very next day ... the first minute he stepped [into battle]."

As Marshall said: "I wanted to stay with the body for a while. But, they were shelling us so hard that I had to keep moving if I wanted to stay alive."

Finally, Marshall, who was part of a mortar team, found a foxhole — and crawled in. 

Marshall later fought in the historic Battle of the Bulge — and helped liberate Bastogne, Belgium.

It was early in 1946 before he summoned the courage to go to Kennedy Avenue and meet the Schmitts.

"When I had that conversation with Smitty the day before he got killed, it was my impression nothing bad was going to happen to either of us," Marshall said. "They don't know how to spell my name and put it on a bullet — so they can't get me.

"By the end of the war I knew how lucky I was."

Marshall has often visited the American cemetery in the Netherlands were Schmitt is buried. He plans to visit his friend's grave again this month. On those treks — and, ones he's made to the D-Day cemeteries in Normandy — Marshall offers prayers at many graves.

Why?

"Because," he said, "I owe it to him, I owe it to them. ... They're the ones that won the war, those were the kids that won the war. They should be mentioned. We should know that, everybody should know that."