STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Memorial Day is not just about playing “Taps” and watching a flyover.

Those gathering today in the Hailey Cemetery will be honoring 450 known soldiers who called the Wood River Valley home. And others will gather at the cemetery in Ketchum to honor even more.

All those soldiers have a name. All those soldiers had family and friends. And all of them had a story to tell.

One of those, for instance, is the late Bob Mendelsohn, who was 90 when he passed away in 2014.

You might say that Mendelsohn, who lived with his wife Sue in Ketchum’s Warm Springs neighborhood, saw every side of World War II.

Mendelsohn fought in the Pacific Theater. Then he turned around and fought in Europe. And he would have gone back to the Pacific Theater had the war not ended in a nuclear cloud over Hiroshima.

Born in 1923, Mendelsohn came of age during the Great Depression when his father worked seven days a week pedaling fish door to door in Bellingham, Wash., to provide for his family. Bob was 13 when he got his first job to help his family.

He went on to sell ladies shoes to pay for varsity tennis team during high school.

“Everyone old enough took a job,” he recalled. “Life in the Thirties was pretty rough.”

When America entered World War II, Mendelsohn finished out his senior year, then volunteered for the Army with his cousin. They’d seen posters promising they would be kept together but, five days after they joined, they were separated.

Mendelsohn, who was 19, was sent to Oklahoma for field artillery training. His training included breaking down Howitzer cannons into smaller pieces and packing them onto mules, along with ammo and other supplies.

“We were a special service force,” he said. “We’d pack the cannon barrel on one mule and the wheels on another. The idea was to take them to places where trucks couldn’t go and set them up in a spot where we could shoot at the Germans and Italians. We’d generally travel between five and 30 miles a day.”

It was quite the experience, he added: “There were kids from Brooklyn and New Jersey who’d never seen mules before.”

After 13 weeks of basic training, Mendelsohn was sent to Camp Hale, Colo., for a boot camp that included a 10-day, 170-mile hike to Camp Carson. On Aug. 15, 1943, he was sent to the Aleutian Chain—one of 32,426 soldiers sent to take over the island of Kiska from the Japanese.

But the 602nd Battalion of which he was a part found no enemy. The Japanese, knowing they couldn’t hold the island, had snuck off the island under cover of dense fog.

Still, there were a few casualties, thanks to friendly fire. Soldiers situated in foxholes and blinded by the fog shot at their own men when they heard a sound and thought it was a Japanese soldier.

“Some of the guys were trigger happy. Everything they saw move they shot at. You could hear gunfire and it was pretty unnerving,” Mendelsohn recalled.

Mendelsohn and his fellow soldiers stayed on the island four months to make sure the Japanese didn’t try to retake the island. It was an unpleasant experience, given the rainy, foggy weather. Even the winds seemed against them, blowing tents away.

“The weather and circumstances in which the soldiers were living during those four months were explained by my grandpa with one word,” said Bob’s grandson Zach Mendelsohn.  “Hell!”

Mendelsohn’s battalion returned to Seattle that winter. The Bering Sea was so rough that he was confined to his bed for the entire two-week journey by seasickness.

He had been promised a furlough but was told to report for duty as soon as he got home. He and his fellow soldiers rode a cattle car across the country to Norfolk, Va., where they were shipped to Naples, Italy, on Feb. 1, 1944, on a Liberty ship.

A month later, after rough winter seas and chow that made for queasy stomachs, the soldiers were greeted by Mt. Vesuvius’ red flaming glare. The angry volcano sent cinders up into the air that coated everything, including the food on their mess plates.

They bedded down temporarily in buildings that had served as German barracks. Then they headed out to the King’s summer home where they picked up Italian mules at a huge series of horse stables and resumed their life of grooming mules and polishing leather.

Reins in hand, they trudged along mountainside goat trails so rough the mules had to be put on a special diet to recuperate.

The men didn’t get equal treatment, noted Bob’s fellow soldier Art Helmers: “We were supposed to be tough!”

Mendelsohn and his fellow soldiers created cover while other battalions moved. They used smoke shells to hide the moving of tanks.

Then they marched off to Rome, taking a mountainous route and participating in a few minor battles enroute as they ferried ammo via mules. They suffered from colds, stomach disorders, foot trouble. At one point two men shared a single K-ration a day.

On one occasion, Mendelsohn put up the mules in a lovely pasture. The next day, the Pope’s officials informed him that it was Papal land. The Army paid for its use.

As the war accelerated, the soldiers couldn’t keep up with battles with the mules so they got rid of them outside Rome, Mendelsohn said.

There, the battalion traded their so-called “four-footed flops” for “flying egg crates” as they became part of an airborne glider mission during an enormous glider invasion of southern France.

It was an amazing sight as gliders by the score descended from every direction. But the mission proved costly to Mendelsohn’s battalion. Nine soldiers, including a friend from Bellingham, were injured when they crashed their low-flying gliders, which were made of cheesecloth, plywood and metal tubing. Five landed so far away that they were missing for days.

Mendelsohn was spared—he was sick with malaria at the time of the raid.

“There were a lot of swampy areas there. I was out two weeks and then I came down with yellow jaundice or what they called hepatitis,” he said.

When he improved, he found himself not far from the French Riviera where his cohorts stayed for a year. In Cannes they lived on beautiful estates with a view of Monte Carlo. Some of the men played golf on the Monte Carlo golf course, even though shell holes pockmarked the green.

It was pretty plush, Bob said, except for the fact there was a war going on.

“A couple years ago, we took a Mediterranean cruise and went through a lot of villages that Bob recognized,” said Mendelsohn’s wife Sue.

From Aug. 15 through Sept. 14, 1944, Mendelsohn took ammunition to the guys at the front lines as they planted themselves in the French Alps, lobbing shots onto the Italians.  At first, he shared his job with another soldier; then one night that soldier told him it made more sense to take turns ferrying the supplies—it wasn’t necessary for both to go.

That night the truck was blown up, injuring Mendelsohn’s partner and killing the driver. It was difficult to know whether shells were outgoing or incoming in the blackout.

“Overall, the battalion was quite lucky, suffering only 11 casualties,” he said. “That’s a small number—but, still, it’s large considering you fight with them daily. You tend to realize that each casualty could have been you.”

When their work in the Alps was done, Mendelsohn’s battalion headed to Munich, Germany, where they captured fleeing Germans. It was there that Mendelsohn saw some of the concentration camps.

“Overwhelmed,” he said.

“He didn’t understand the cruelty between humans,” said grandson Zach. “Being Jewish, my grandpa could only look in awe at what had been done to people of his own background.”

As the war in Europe wound down, Mendelsohn and his battalion received orders to go back to the Pacific Theater—this time to Japan. Fortunately, he said, the war ended.

Mendelsohn returned home in 1945 after 33 months in the Army with a dozen medals and a “never look back” attitude. He went into the plumbing and heating business with his father—a venture so successful they had 25 workers working for them at one point.

In 1949 he became reacquainted with a girl who had been only 14 when he left for the Army.  Sue was at the wedding to cheer on a sorority sister; he was there to wish his cousin well. Bob and Sue were married that same year and went on to celebrate 65 anniversaries until Bob’s death.

Shortly afterwards, the couple moved with their two sons to Vancouver, B.C., where Bob and his brother Jack started a shirt manufacturing company.

“It was a competitive business. There was so much competition we had a saying that if you couldn’t deliver your new design on Friday, it would be worthless by Monday,” Mendelsohn said.

While living in Vancouver, Bob, Sue and five other couples founded the city’s first reformed temple. It now has more than 700 members.

Eventually, the family returned to Bellingham where Bob continued in the family business and Sue worked as a caseworker in every kind of venue from nursing homes to an Indian reservation where she found salmon hanging in the yard.

The couple moved to Sun Valley in 1985, lured by the skiing, lovely summers and friendly community. Sue helped get the Sun Valley Symphony Orchestra, now the Sun Valley Music Festival, off the ground.

She helped start the Wood River Middle School orchestra program. And she recruited many of her violin students for what is now the Wood River Community Orchestra.

Bob, meanwhile, enjoyed skiing golf and travel. He also was a founding member of the Wood River Valley Jewish Community and a member of Rotary International.

“We’ve had a great life here,” said Sue shortly before her husband’s death. Sue would pass away herself three years later in 2017.