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Mary Cooke and Joe Synakowski talked about their experiences on the Honor Flight, and Synakowski discussed his life in the military shortly after World War II ended.
Mary Cooke and Joe Synakowski talked about their experiences on the Honor Flight, and Synakowski discussed his life in the military shortly after World War II ended.

Witness to history: Joe Synakowski's story, part I

Fri, Jan 24th 2025 07:00 am

Story and Photo by Alice Gerard

Senior Contributing Writer

At the age of 94, Joe Synakowski is considered to be among the youngest surviving World War II veterans. Synakowski joined the U.S. Army in 1945 and was part of the Occupation Forces in Europe after the end of the war.

“I entered the service before the end of the war. So, they designate you as a World War II veteran,” Synakowski said. “I lived the Army life for three years, and I did my duty, and I came home without a scratch.

“I was a young lad. My birthdate is April 22, 1930. So, that made me 15 years old at the time. I took it as something I could do for my country. I had the spirit. I had the get up and go. And I did.”

Synakowski used his brother’s baptismal certificate to prove that he was 18 years old.

After entering the service in Philadelphia, Synakowski was sent to a few military bases for testing and to sign up for a three-year enlistment. He was then sent to Fort McClellan, Alabama, adjacent to the city of Anniston. The fort has since been decommissioned.

“That’s where I did my basic training for 13 weeks,” Synakowski explained. “From there, they sent me to do advanced riot training and so forth because they were afraid that maybe some of the Germans might act up, and they had to have you ready to sort of quell them down. So, they sent us for four weeks of advanced riot training.

“So, then, they sent us from Fort Pickett, Virginia, to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, which is a POE (Port of Embarkation). And they shipped us over. Two weeks on the water and we landed in La Havre, France. We were there for about a week and a half or so. Then, they put us on a train, and they sent us to Marburg, Germany. That was the replacement depot. Any replacements they needed in any place in the German area that we covered, they would ship you to Marburg, get all the statistics, and then, they’d assign you to a base.

“They had parachute school opening up in Frankfurt, Germany. I volunteered, and I became a paratrooper. The unit I served in was the honor guard for the top generals and so forth. We were a high-class outfit, I could tell you.

“We had three battalions and we’d take turns. Two months on and then take field training, two months on. And then, we’d have two months to just do our regular duties. We came back home. They brought us as a unit back to the states. They told us we were going to stay together. But that was a little fib they told. They gave us a two-week leave. After the leave, we went down to Fort Bragg. North Carolina, and joined the 82nd division in their home base. When we were in Fort Bragg, they split us up into wherever they needed personnel. They broke us up all over the Fort Bragg area.”

Synakowski said he and the group he served with were not happy about being split apart after being told they were to remain together as a group.

“We were together for so many months. But they did it and we had to take … you follow orders. Let’s put it that way,” he said.

“I had a year and nine months to serve yet on my enlistment. So, I said, ‘Well, either I stay in Fort Bragg or I go back overseas.’ So, I decided to go back overseas. I left Fort Bragg. When I got overseas, again to the Replacement Depot, they asked for volunteers to interpret Polish in a prisoner of war camp, the German prisoners of war.”

Synakowski said he was able to volunteer for this job because he spoke Polish as a young person growing up in Buffalo.

“I went to parochial school, and I knew my Polish pretty well,” he said. “That’s the reason I got the job.”

Synakowski said the prisoners of war claimed they were not German: “They were Polish or they were Ukrainian or they were other nationalities. That was a ruse they used because a lot of them were SS men, and they didn’t want to get thrown into prison. The SS men were the elites in the German Army.

“We had to interpret different questions to see if they were actually Polish or German or what. That was my job. I only had about a six-month tour in that job. That was in the Dachau Concentration Camp (approximately 12 miles north of Munich, Germany). That’s where they put the German prisoners of war. By this time, the camp was pretty well cleaned up. There were no bodies around. They just used it for the German prisoners of war. We had to interrogate them to find out if they were actually German or whatever they were.

“A lot of people don’t know that the Germans, when they invaded these countries, forced these people to join their army. They claimed that they were Polish, but they were in the German Army. That’s why we had to distinguish between them, whether they were Polish or they weren’t Polish. We did our job. We interrogated them.”

After Synakowski’s time was up with that job, he moved on to another position that also utilized his Polish language skills.

“I went to a unit called the 301st Military Intelligence, and I worked with them for a while,” he said. “It was just normal work. If they told you to go to a displaced persons camp, you went and you did your questioning and trying to find out where these people belonged. There were a lot of displaced persons. They really had a job separating these people from the enemy. You had to do it because, otherwise, they could have maybe formed a group. They didn’t know what was on these people’s minds. So, they had to take precautions. Once you were in the Occupation Army, you had to be watchful. You had to do your duty and that was it.”

Toward the end of Synakowski’s three-year enlistment, the focus shifted from Germany being a hostile power to the former Soviet Union.

“Luckily, the Germans at the time used their heads. They didn’t cause any problems. They worked along with the United States and, in our zone, the United States zone … there were four zones: Russian, French, English, and the United States. So, in our part of the country … people loved to come where the U.S. was because we were good to them. The others were a little stricter with them. The Russian area on the east end of Germany was actually a hellhole. They didn’t have food. They were short of everything in the Russian zone.

“The Russians closed the borders. Due to the fact that they couldn’t move the trains, they couldn’t move the cars, trucks or anything, we had to fly everything into Berlin. All the food and milk and whatever the people needed, we gave them. We made sure they had enough stuff to keep on living and subsistence. It was a very big operation, that Berlin airlift.”

“When the Berlin airlift was over, that’s when I left Germany, and I came back to the United States. Subsequently, I was discharged from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

With his military service over, Synakowski returned home.

“I came to Buffalo,” he said. “I stayed here for a while, couldn’t find a job. I went back to Philadelphia, and I got work there. I stayed there for about a year. Then, I came back to Buffalo. I went from job to job. No seniority. I did just about every job you could think of. I did aircraft work. I drove trucks. I did restaurant work. I was a jack of all trades. That was about it.

“Finally, I decided I wanted a job that pays a pension, so a couple of my friends worked for the city in the water department. There was an opening, and I applied for it with the Civil Service. I got the job. I went from there to other jobs that had more pay. I climbed the ladder. I was finally old enough to retire.”

After retirement, Synakowski moved to Grand Island.

Next time: Synakowski’s work for a memorial for Medal of Honor recipient Charles N. DeGlopper; and Synakowski’s experience on the Honor Flight with Mary Cooke, his guardian for the trip.

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