WWII Veterans Give Students a Lesson in War’s Toll

As 50th anniversary commemorations of the end of World War II go, the one Thursday at Beverly Hills High School was a stunner.

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Students in the community known for its wealth and prestige were jolted to learn that 86 of their small school’s graduates were killed--and 11 others were prisoners of war--during the conflict.

The tally was offered by a dozen grandfatherly men who returned to the campus to remind teen-agers that the Beverly Hills High war casualties were almost their ages when they marched off to die.

“We think of ourselves as safe being in Beverly Hills, where nothing can happen to us,” 15-year-old Deborah Eshaghian said. “This certainly gives us a better perspective.”

About 600 somber-faced students met with the war veterans. Many of the youngsters wondered why so many from such a small place (Beverly Hills High had an enrollment of about 1,000 at the time) gave so much.

The old-timers knew.

“The word patriotic comes to mind,” said Robert Wolff, a 1940 graduate who is a retired insurance man living in Oxnard. He was captured by Germans in 1943 when his bullet-riddled B-17 swerved around a French church steeple before ditching in the English Channel.

Luck had a lot to do with it too, said former POW Marshall Draper, a member of the class of 1937 who lives in Woodland Hills. He was held captive by the Nazis for three years after his Douglas A-20 bomber was shot down over the North Sea on the first American air raid of the war.

“I guess we got it because we got in first,” said Draper--who recalls being surprised at regaining consciousness underwater in the nose of his sinking plane “and seeing all the bubbles over my head.”

Carroll Trego of the class of 1938 agreed with the bad-luck part. He spent 45 months in captivity--a month longer than the war itself lasted for the United States. That’s because he was part of a small detachment of Marines stationed on Wake Island when Japanese troops invaded a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“We fought for 10 hours until we ran out of ammunition,” said Trego, now of Chula Vista. His voice broke as he told students he was “spared” death on Christmas Eve, 1941, and spent the remainder of the war working as a slave laborer in Japan and Korea.

The record of Beverly Hills war casualties was compiled by former Army flier Robert Jones, a 1941 graduate and retired phone company manager who lives in Anaheim. He studied military records and old newspaper files and interviewed former classmates before determining that 101 Beverly Hills High alumni were killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“It was a different time back then,” Jones said of the early 1940s. “Almost everybody volunteered. People didn’t wait to be drafted.”

But the Beverly Hills casualty list is still staggering.

“It is hard to believe that many had died from that small a number of students here at the time,” said alumni association vice president Justin McCarthy, a 1941 graduate who lives in Westlake Village.

Students in the high school’s Little Theatre auditorium listened as Stanley Bowen--class of 1941 and former Marine--explained that they were witnessing perhaps the final get-together for veterans now in their 70s.

“War’s the stupidest thing mankind can get involved in,” said Bowen, a retired Laguna Beach insurance executive. “I just hope you value your liberty as much as these people did.”

And he hopes the Beverly Hills High teen-agers remember another thing too, Bowen said.

Those fighting half a century ago “were people like you, not old guys like those of us you see up here,” he said.

Sophomore Aner Ben-Artzi stayed behind to thank the old soldiers.

“This personalized it--it’s something you don’t get from history books,” said the 15-year-old.

“The number from Beverly Hills High was much higher than you’d expect. But they’ve given us the image of humans, not numbers.”