Oldest WWII vet celebrates another birthday

Lawrence Brooks at his 2020 birthday festivities

It’s been a year since we last heard about Lawrence Brooks. He’s up to eleventy-two years now (112 if you don’t Tolkien). The National WWII Museum helped host another drive-by celebration for the man who was born in 1909 and resided in Louisiana since 1929 (with a short stint away for the war naturally).

When Brooks was born, Taft was President, Edward VII (eldest son of Queen Victoria) ruled Great Britain, the Ford Model T had been in production for only one year, construction of the RMS Titanic had commenced in March, and the US Army bought the world’s first military airplane (the Wright Military Flyer) in August. He’s old enough to remember when street sweeper and lamplighter were actual jobs men held. He saw two world wars, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and wasn’t just alive on Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed, he was an adult!

As a black man growing up in the south, born just 43 years after the Civil War, he undoubtedly knew (and likely had grandparents or other close relations) who remember prebellum slavery or were slaves themselves.

Fox News reports this anecdote of his service;

Born in Norwood, La., in 1909, Brooks has lived in New Orleans since 1929. Drafted in 1940, he was a private in the Army’s mostly Black 91st Engineer Battalion, a unit that was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines and built infrastructure such as bridges, roads and airstrips.

In an oral history about his service posted on YouTube, Brooks also described how he was delivering a load of barbed wire to the front when one of the engines of the C-47 he was traveling in went out.

After they dumped the barbed wire to conserve weight, he made his way to the cockpit. He told the pilot and co-pilot that since they were the only two with parachutes, if they had to jump for it, he was going to grab on to one of them.

“We made it though,” he said laughing. “We had a big laugh about that.”

Keep laughing for many years to come, Mr. Brooks. Amazing life worth saluting.

Category: Army, Geezer Alert!