The Generation That Saved the World They grew up in the shadow of World War I, a conflict so brutal and devastating that it was dubbed "The War to End All Wars." Little did they know they would soon find themselves embroiled in an even greater worldwide struggle against the oppressive forces of fascism and totalitarianism. As children of the 1920s, many were born into modest means, their early years subsumed by the austerities of the Great Depression. Yet this testing period of economic calamity and hardship instilled in them a fortitude and resilience that would ultimately forge their incredible strength of character. When the winds of war ripped across Europe in 1939, America's youth heeded the call to defend freedom and democracy on multiple fronts. From the blistering deserts of North Africa to the unforgiving vastness of the Pacific theater, this rising generation of ordinary heroes would redefine the meaning of valor, selflessness and moral resolve in safeguarding what President Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed "the Four Freedoms." Tough as Woodstock Consider the tribulations of Hartford, Connecticut's Leonard Kormanicki, who later served as a paratrooper in the elite All-American 82nd Airborne Division storming into Normandy on D-Day. During the Dust Bowl years, young Kormanicki trekked to Vermont farms at age eleven, earning 25 cents for each 16-hour day spent working as a farmhand. By age 14, he took a job at a brick foundry, weathering scorching furnace conditions for a dollar a day in wages. The gritty tenacity honed from these merciless child labors would embolden Kormanicki to make innumerable parachute jumps behind enemy lines during WWII, eventually earning a Bronze Star and Infantry Badge. On June 6th, 1944, the 19-year-old would drop onto the Normandy countryside and help carve out an airhead for the largest seaborne invasion force in human history. "Of the 19,000 paratroopers who descended upon occupied France that night, over 3,000 were killed in those opening hours. From the moment we jumped into the hellish anti-aircraft fire, every second felt like borrowed time—but drawing upon the sheer 'stick-to-it' grit instilled through those childhood hardships gave me an edge for that initial survival ordeal." Kormanicki's ethos of mental stamina and unflappable resiliency in hellish combat theaters proved the norm rather than the exception for America's WWII fighting men and women. For many like Rose Abramoff, those survival instincts had been finely honed from the cradle. To hear Abramoff tell her story, the Great Depression almost seemed like a quaint suburban lark compared to her upbringing in a harsh remote village of the Ukrainian wilderness. "We grew food to eat, made our own clothes and shelters, and rarely saw anyone else beyond our family for months," Abramoff recounts. "My mother birthed me as just another set of helping hands in eking out a bare subsistence living from the wilderness. By the time I was 8 years old, I'd learned to plow fields with a wooden trough behind mule teams, spin and stitch clothes, butcher animals, preserve fruits and vegetables—you name it, I'd mastered it." In 1937, the Abramoff family fled Stalin's oppressive pogroms and emigrated to the United States with little more than the clothes on their backs. Young Rose Abramoff would spend the years of her teens toiling ceaselessly to help her parents eke out a hardscrabble life on farm fields throughout the Dust Bowl. She worked the plow lines dawn to dusk under the relentless Plains sun for meager earnings eked out solely through the sweat of her brow. "Dirt and sweat were all I knew until I graduated high school in Woodward, Oklahoma just as World War II broke out," says the indomitable Abramoff. "Staring down that plow blade for all those years put iron in my spine. By comparison, the United States Marine Corps seemed like a cake walk compared to chopping out an existence from the sun-blasted Oklahoma plains!" Abramoff would enter Marine boot camp shortly after graduating high school. Her stamina and fierce self-reliance from frontier farm life allowed her to shatter multiple long-distance running records. The tenacious Ukrainian emigre would earn the distinction as one of the first female Marines deployed to multiple theaters of World War 2 in the Pacific front. By war's end, she'd logged over 60,000 miles hauling everything from ammunition to medical supplies aboard gargantuan transport aircraft from the aircraft carrier decks across the vast expanse of the Pacific islands chain. With each grueling mission came near misses from enemy fire and monsoon storms that could have easily overwhelmed lesser spirits. "All of us girls, we were born with the same sheer moxie and steely perseverance our male counterparts had," she says with a wry smile. "The greatest generation wasn't a notion bred of some mystical fancy. It was born out of surviving desperate early years that felt more dire than any war ...
