What does it mean to serve your country? Army Col. Edward Shames, the last remaining member of World War II’s “Band of Brothers,” certainly answered that question. He died last week at age 99.
According to his obituary, Shames was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 13, 1922. He answered the call to duty in August 1942, becoming a member of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, which historian Stephen E. Ambrose made famous in his 1992 nonfiction book “Band of Brothers.”
He made his first combat jump into Normandy on D-Day and fought with Easy Company in Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne. Because of his battlefield leadership, he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant on June 13, 1944. After the 101st entered Germany, Shames was the division’s first member to enter Dachau concentration camp, days after its liberation. A bottle of cognac he took as war booty from Adolf Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest later was opened to toast his oldest son’s bar mitzvah.
This week also marked the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s subsequent declaration of war against Japan. Roosevelt, addressing a joint session of Congress, declared Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” Germany and the other Axis powers promptly declared war on the United States. That declaration served as the call answered by hundreds of thousands more Americans like Shames to serve their country.
These anniversaries and Shames’ story got me thinking about the Greatest Generation, the term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw in his 1998 book with that title. “The Greatest Generation” refers to those who came of age during the Great Depression and served our country during World War II. Brokaw wrote that these men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was “the right thing to do.”