Frederick Irving of Amherst writes memoir about World War II experience
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AMHERST - Taken on Aug. 8, 1944, the black-and-white photograph shows Frederick Irving as a dark-haired young man looking straight at the camera.
In an account he has written for his children and grandchildren, Irving, of Amherst, said the picture was taken by his captors the day after his plane was shot down over German-occupied Hungary during World War II.
"I was herded out with a rifle sticking in my back," he wrote, "and directed to a stone wall. I was made to stand at attention against that wall and they took an ID photo of me. I was then told that I would be shot."
The gun clicked, but didn't fire. Irving said he does not know to this day exactly what happened.
"Believe it or not, I wasn't scared, and I don't know why I wasn't," he said. "Maybe it was because I was 23 years old. The more they did to me, the more resolute I was."
Irving is 90 now and lives in an apartment filled with photos of a life fully lived. The pictures show him with his late wife, children and grandchildren, and with U.S. presidents and top officials he served during his 32-year career with the U.S. Department of State.
His surroundings may reflect the past, but Irving is still of the present, even as he deals with declining health and chronic pain. On a table near him as he talked was a copy of the latest Foreign Affairs. He reads three newspapers a day and watches the news on PBS.
Irving moved into his apartment in the Applewood retirement community in 2010. There he joined a writers' group, where people encouraged him, to record his World War II experiences, he said.
"Although I never hesitated to talk about my POW experience, I had never written about it," he wrote in a brief introduction. "Now that I am almost 90 years old, it is about time I put my experiences on paper so that future generations learn about this aspect of war."
Irving's decision to write his story is being repeated by many veterans around the country whose ranks are thinning. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, it is estimated that about 850 World War II veterans die every day. In recent years, a spate of books, oral histories and documentaries have been devoted to collecting their stories.
Irving said he hopes his story and those of so many others show "why we should do everything possible to prevent war. The horrible things that I and many others suffered - all of it came from a state of war."
Forced march
A brief summary of Irving's account begins on Aug. 7, 1944, when the B-24 he was navigating on a bombing mission was shot down over Hungary by German fighters.
After parachuting to the ground, Irving was captured by several farmers whose efforts to hang him were interrupted by German soldiers who took him prisoner. Shortly after he was threatened with being shot, Irving was transported by cattle car to Budapest, where he was kept in solitary confinement, beaten and driven through the streets while bystanders pelted him with rocks.
Near death, Irving was finally carried out of the truck.
Later, Irving and other POWs were loaded into a box car and taken to a larger, permanent POW camp in Sagan, Germany. There prisoners subsisted on a daily ration of bread - "it was 50 percent sawdust," he wrote - and "a cup of warm water called soup, I suppose, because there was usually something swimming around in it, and one small potato, half rotten."
One day, Irving discovered a pile of potato skins in the garbage. "I collected them and with what little fire I could muster, I heated the skins and ate them." When he told the others where more skins could be found, someone asked why he hadn't kept the hidden cache to himself. His answer was that he'd remembered his mother saying, "Share, it will make someone feel better."
The lesson had stuck, he said, perhaps because the family had never had much. Widowed at 32 with six young children to raise in Providence, R.I., Rebecca Irving had supported her family with the help of welfare and by taking in piecework from a jewelry factory.
By the end of 1944, Irving weighed scarcely 100 pounds.
That winter, word of the Soviet advance spread through the camp.
"We dreamed of liberation," Irving wrote. Instead, the Germans forced the POWs to flee with them through deep snow and cold.
"We were forced to march for 24 hours steadily... My feet were so swollen that I did not dare take my shoes off. ... Any POW who complained was shot. We encountered much red snow on the march."
About two weeks into their march, British prisoners with a radio learned President Roosevelt had died. "The American and British POWs stopped to pray," Irving wrote. "The German guards cheered."
Freezing, starving, and covered with lice, the group straggled into a camp in Nuremberg.
"We were so cold that we tore down our wooden bunks and burned them for heat," he wrote.
Two months later, as American troops were getting closer, the prisoners were moved yet again, this time to a camp in Moosberg. There, the German camp commander told the prisoners the SS was coming to kill them. Gen. George Patton, however, got to the SS first, and defeated them after a two-day battle.
"We were liberated!" Irving wrote. "The date was April 29, 1945."
Barbara Jean Irving, a registered nurse who lives in Amherst, said her father's account added details and depth to what she had known already.
It allowed her to experience, for example, her father bailing out of his plane, to fully appreciate "the decisions, the courage and the terror" of the moment, she said. "It added to my sense of him as a person."
Her five children, ages 13 to 25, "are very devoted to him," she said. Having the pages he wrote will be like "having a living piece of him."
Career diplomat
For two years after coming home from the war, Irving said he was able to eat little more than barley soup and toast as he recovered from malnutrition. Although the pain in his back, neck and legs never healed, he said he felt fortunate to come home emotionally and psychologically in good shape.
His war experience prompted Irving to choose a career dedicated to peace, not war. After the war, Irving, who had graduated from Brown University in 1943, enrolled at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford.
During his years working for the U.S. Department of State, Irving earned a string of senior titles and positions, handling a host of assignments and posts in Washington and abroad. He served as U.S. ambassador to Iceland from 1972 to 1976 and as ambassador to Jamaica from 1977 to 1979.
In Iceland, site of a NATO anti-submarine naval air base that tracked the Soviets, Irving was responsible for negotiating numerous issues related to the base, which played a strategically crucial role during the Cold War. In Jamaica he was asked to repair the strained relationship with a country the State Department feared could become, he said, "a second Cuba on our doorstep."
With him throughout was his wife and high school sweetheart, Dorothy, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College. A teacher and educator, Dorothy Irving's people skills, intelligence and warmth made her an effective bridge-builder in her own right, her husband said. In her book, "This Too Is Diplomacy," Dorothy Irving wrote the behind-the-scenes story of the diplomatic life, with its incidents large and small, funny and serious, that she and her husband shared.
Dorothy Irving died in 2010, just as she and her husband were packing up their house in Belmont to move to Applewood to be close to their daughter in Amherst.
Near the desk in his den, Irving keeps a small photo of his wife's gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery. He will be buried with her there when he dies.
"I really miss her," Irving said. "She would have loved it here. The people are very, very nice." Whatever their personal trials, everyone at Applewood is interested in the world beyond, he said. "We talk politics, education, what's going on in the world."
Photo gallery
Along with all the family mementoes in Irving's apartment are rows of photos taken during the years he and Dorothy and their family lived in Washington and also hop-scotched the globe for the State Department. The couple had three children - Susan, now of Washington, Richard, who lives in Andover, and Barbara.
A framed black-and-white photo shows Irving in a meeting in the Cabinet room at the White House with then-President Jimmy Carter during Irving's long career as a State Department diplomat.
"He was a very kind man," Irving said.
Another, a portrait of former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance is signed "with warmest best wishes and many thanks for a superb job." A signed picture of Henry Kissinger hangs there as well.
A 1971 Page One story from the Washington Post identifies Irving as the State Department official sent to greet the returning U.S. table tennis team that had visited China - a breakthrough visit that set the stage for President Nixon's opening the door to China.
"Irving said he hopes the Chinese will soon reciprocate by sending a team here and that there would be further exchanges," the story reads.
Although he served under presidents Nixon and Ford, Irving said he "never voted Republican in my life."
He points out, though, that he's had reservations about foreign policy decisions - including the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia - made by presidents of both parties.
Irving said he admires and supports President Obama, but would like to see a quicker exit from Afghanistan.
"We're staying too long," he said. "I think we've really got to get tough with the leaders of Afghanistan and mean it. If we take a bolder stand, I don't think that much harm is going to be done to us."
Although he is no stranger to pain, having dealt with it daily since the war ended, Irving said he was nonetheless taken aback when doctors recently found a tumor at the edge of his pancreas.
He is now in the process of deciding his next step, he said, but doesn't want major surgery.
"I'm not afraid of death," he said. "I've been through too much already. I've also been an eternal optimist all my life." He has told his doctors that he may outlive them all, he said. And if he doesn't?
"Well, here's how I look at it. If there is a heaven, what a happy situation this will be if I saw my wife and we started up again. And if there isn't, and there's just plain darkness, then I'll be without pain. So how could I lose?"
