The photo of my grandfather in 1977 honoring the memory of French partisans is etched in my mind. In front of a monument to three members of the French resistance killed by the Germans in 1944, grandfather stands at attention: feet together, shoulders squared, arms at his sides.
It was a pose I saw as a young boy in the 1970s and 1980s when my family visited my grandparents in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A flagpole stood in front of the one-story house at 6303 North Ocean Boulevard where they had retired. In the morning grandfather conducted the flag raising ceremony. As one of my brothers raised the flag, grandfather, standing ramrod straight, would hum the “reveille” melody while leading the rest of us in a salute. That same melody had signaled the start to his days as a covert war specialist during three military conflicts decades earlier: World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
At dusk, the scene would repeat. With the sun setting, grandfather would salute and hum “retreat” while one of us grandsons lowered the flag. Under grandfather’s watchful eye, two of us would then carefully fold the flag into a triangle, being careful not to let the flag touch the ground. We knew we had done it right when the last flap tucked neatly into the folded flag.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, 1980s. Back row, from l to r: Waller Booth, family friend Scott Simpson, Douglas Lilley, and family friend Alec Brogan. Kneeling, from l to r: George Witwer, Jeffrey Lilley, Sally Lilley and dogs Dofu and Joey.
Signs of his military career were evident around the house –a panel from the parachute he had used to parachute into France hung in the study above his typewriter – and grandfather kept himself busy writing articles for military journals.
Thankfully, he wrote about his war experiences, too. His memoir, which he drafted on the manual typewriter in his wood-paneled study underneath his parachute, was published in 1972. Titled Mission Marcel Proust: The Story of an Unusual O.S.S, Undertaking, the memoir recounts the two months he spent in France in the fall of 1944.
It’s curious to me that, out of a distinguished 15-year paramilitary career filled with risky undertakings in Puerto Rico, Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, France, Burma, Korea and Vietnam, grandfather chose to write about his short time on the ground in France.
Why France?
Because, I surmise, he wanted to recount the story of working beside brave and courageous French resistance fighters as they liberated their country from the Nazis.
But there was something else, too. Something he knew was important at the time but couldn’t have imagined how it would resonate 80 years later when, once again, a land war threatens Europe.
You see, in 1944, grandfather helped save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers. Pushing back against his U.S. Army superiors who were calling for the Ukrainians to be sent back to their homeland in the Soviet Union, grandfather insisted that the Ukrainians had earned their freedom by switching to the Allied side and fighting with Americans and French against their former masters, the Germans.
As he relates in his memoir, grandfather argued to a group of “solemn-faced brigadier generals and colonels” from the U.S. Seventh Army, who were insisting that the U.S. abide by an agreement signed with the Soviet Union, that it would be “criminal” to send the Ukrainians back to USSR after they had shed blood for the Allied cause.
The Ukrainians’ odyssey from the Soviet Red Army to German Wehrmacht to the French Resistance is a largely untold story of World War II. It includes a bloody mutiny against their German overseers and then helping the French resistance to liberate towns from the Germans. The mutiny has been called “one of most audacious feats in the bizarre history of underground warfare” – just the sort of warfare my grandfather specialized in.
Re-reading my grandfather’s memoir at a time when Ukraine is fighting for survival against Russia made me curious about the historical connection between Ukraine and the West. One came to the rescue of the other in the 20th century and then vice versa in the 21st century.
Questions bubbled up: What did the Ukrainian soldiers do to convince my grandfather to stand up for them? And what happened to them in the end? Did they survive? Did some remain in the West? Did they perish in Soviet labor camps after all? Are some of their descendants fighting today for Ukraine against Russia?
Armed with clues from my grandfather’s memoir, I set out to discover answers at a time when Ukrainians are, once again, fighting bravely to avoid national extermination.
Here’s what I found.
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 