In honor of Veterans Day, The Men’s Breakfast Club of Newtown Senior Center hosted former Newtown First Selectman and World War II veteran Joseph Borst as its guest speaker on Thursday, November 6. The Breakfast Club meets the first Thursday of each month at 9 am, sharing a light breakfast and conversation.

Mr Borst shared his reminisces on his time in the service with club members, including several who are also veterans.

Arthur Zierzow served with the Marines in Vietnam. Bud Ullmann was stationed on Governors Island in New York, a sergeant in the Army. John Obyrne and Jack Robb served in the US Army, as well. Mr Robb is a veteran of the Korean conflict. Dominick Barillari, Sr, is a World War II veteran, and served in England and Africa.

By the time 17-year-old Joseph Borst finished training in August 1945, the war in Europe had ended. Mr Borst had enlisted at age 16, caught up in the “nationalistic attitude” that was present at that time. Every man who could, wanted to enlist, he said.

The war’s end meant that his intended pilot’s training with the Air Force would not take place. Instead, he soon found himself on a Liberty ship, headed for assignment in American-occupied Germany. The troops landed first in France, he recalled, ironically the same town in which his own father had been during World War I. From there, the men went by train to Fursten-Felbruck, Germany.

“That place was a wreck,” he remembered, as were so many cities in Germany at the end of the war. “I always remember passing through one town. It was all agricultural fields. Then, all of a sudden, it was fields full of P47 fighter planes and tanks, ready to be scrapped.” The scrap would be used to help rebuild the fallen German cities.

Mr Borst arrived in Hanau, outside of Frankfurt, where he was assigned to cutting up 20 ml cannons from fighter planes, for scrap. There, he worked alongside German men who had served in the German army. He found all of those men, and the German people in general, to be very pleasant. Those men, he pointed out, “were just like us. Many had been drafted into service [in the German army]. They were glad the war was over.”

Housed in relatively comfortable barracks at a former Luftwaffe fighter base, the men lacked only one thing, Mr Borst said: a club. So they patched together their own club, using old parachutes from the attic to make a canopy, and hiring a German band for music. Trucks sent up to Brussels, Belgium, returned with liquor that they sold for 10 cents a shot, with a Coke chaser.

Responding to one an inquiry from one the Men’s Breakfast Club members, Mr Borst laughed and said that the club was not men only. Women from the nearby displaced persons’ camp frequented the private club. The women, whose countries had been occupied by the Germans, had been forced to work in munitions factories, he said. One woman shared with him that so opposed were they to working there, that they would take turns pouring boiling water on each other’s hands, so that they were not able to work.

He finished his tour of duty in a city near Nuremberg, Germany, returned to the United States, and was discharged in 1947. Five years later, Mr Borst reenlisted for another tour.

Of his years of military service, Mr Borst noted that he was proud to have served.

“It was my job. It’s all our jobs,” he said.

Mr Ullmann noted briefly, following Mr Borst’s remarks, that like so many wars, World War II was a war of ironies. The Japanese had intended three runs to destroy the American Navy, when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

“They were looking for the Lexington and the Yorktown, aircraft carriers out on maneuvers at the time Pearl Harbor was bombed,” he said. “They told our aircraft carriers to go silent,” he said. When the Japanese could not find the carriers on the second run, they decided against a third run, suspecting the American ships might be coming up behind them, Mr Ullmann said. Had the third wave of bombing by the Japanese happened, “It would have been devastating. Think how much further back it would have put us,” he said.

Another irony of World War II, he added, was that while the German tanks, known as Tigers, were far superior to the American Sherman tanks, they were operated by teenagers with no training.

“That’s the reason American tanks could even take them out,” Mr Ullmann pointed out. “We won by attrition, and many, many ironies. The country that makes the least amount of mistakes,” he said, “wins the war.”

The Men’s Breakfast Club welcomes all men to the monthly gathering, held in the main room of Newtown Senior Center, 14 Riverside Road. For more information call 203-270-4310.