The Generation That Saved the World
They grew up in the shadow of World War I, a conflict so brutal and devastating that it was dubbed "The War to End All Wars." Little did they know they would soon find themselves embroiled in an even greater worldwide struggle against the oppressive forces of fascism and totalitarianism. 
As children of the 1920s, many were born into modest means, their early years subsumed by the austerities of the Great Depression. Yet this testing period of economic calamity and hardship instilled in them a fortitude and resilience that would ultimately forge their incredible strength of character. 
When the winds of war ripped across Europe in 1939, America's youth heeded the call to defend freedom and democracy on multiple fronts. From the blistering deserts of North Africa to the unforgiving vastness of the Pacific theater, this rising generation of ordinary heroes would redefine the meaning of valor, selflessness and moral resolve in safeguarding what President Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed "the Four Freedoms."
Tough as Woodstock
Consider the tribulations of Hartford, Connecticut's Leonard Kormanicki, who later served as a paratrooper in the elite All-American 82nd Airborne Division storming into Normandy on D-Day. During the Dust Bowl years, young Kormanicki trekked to Vermont farms at age eleven, earning 25 cents for each 16-hour day spent working as a farmhand. By age 14, he took a job at a brick foundry, weathering scorching furnace conditions for a dollar a day in wages.
The gritty tenacity honed from these merciless child labors would embolden Kormanicki to make innumerable parachute jumps behind enemy lines during WWII, eventually earning a Bronze Star and Infantry Badge. On June 6th, 1944, the 19-year-old would drop onto the Normandy countryside and help carve out an airhead for the largest seaborne invasion force in human history.
"Of the 19,000 paratroopers who descended upon occupied France that night, over 3,000 were killed in those opening hours. From the moment we jumped into the hellish anti-aircraft fire, every second felt like borrowed time—but drawing upon the sheer 'stick-to-it' grit instilled through those childhood hardships gave me an edge for that initial survival ordeal."
Kormanicki's ethos of mental stamina and unflappable resiliency in hellish combat theaters proved the norm rather than the exception for America's WWII fighting men and women. For many like Rose Abramoff, those survival instincts had been finely honed from the cradle. To hear Abramoff tell her story, the Great Depression almost seemed like a quaint suburban lark compared to her upbringing in a harsh remote village of the Ukrainian wilderness.
"We grew food to eat, made our own clothes and shelters, and rarely saw anyone else beyond our family for months," Abramoff recounts. "My mother birthed me as just another set of helping hands in eking out a bare subsistence living from the wilderness. By the time I was 8 years old, I'd learned to plow fields with a wooden trough behind mule teams, spin and stitch clothes, butcher animals, preserve fruits and vegetables—you name it, I'd mastered it."
In 1937, the Abramoff family fled Stalin's oppressive pogroms and emigrated to the United States with little more than the clothes on their backs. Young Rose Abramoff would spend the years of her teens toiling ceaselessly to help her parents eke out a hardscrabble life on farm fields throughout the Dust Bowl. She worked the plow lines dawn to dusk under the relentless Plains sun for meager earnings eked out solely through the sweat of her brow. 
"Dirt and sweat were all I knew until I graduated high school in Woodward, Oklahoma just as World War II broke out," says the indomitable Abramoff. "Staring down that plow blade for all those years put iron in my spine. By comparison, the United States Marine Corps seemed like a cake walk compared to chopping out an existence from the sun-blasted Oklahoma plains!"
Abramoff would enter Marine boot camp shortly after graduating high school. Her stamina and fierce self-reliance from frontier farm life allowed her to shatter multiple long-distance running records. The tenacious Ukrainian emigre would earn the distinction as one of the first female Marines deployed to multiple theaters of World War 2 in the Pacific front. 
By war's end, she'd logged over 60,000 miles hauling everything from ammunition to medical supplies aboard gargantuan transport aircraft from the aircraft carrier decks across the vast expanse of the Pacific islands chain. With each grueling mission came near misses from enemy fire and monsoon storms that could have easily overwhelmed lesser spirits.
"All of us girls, we were born with the same sheer moxie and steely perseverance our male counterparts had," she says with a wry smile. "The greatest generation wasn't a notion bred of some mystical fancy. It was born out of surviving desperate early years that felt more dire than any war could throw at us. As we women liked to say while barreling through yet another Pacific typhoon, if it doesn't kill you, it just makes you tougher!"
Hard as Nails, Genteel in Spirit 
From the opening salvos of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his military strategists recognized that outright force alone would never secure decisive victory against the Axis powers. As crucial as America's industrial and military might would become in overpowering the enemy, the more quintessential factor for triumph required forging a new generation of ordinary Americans into extraordinary exemplars of higher ideals—virtue, honor, self-sacrifice and commitment to preserving humanity's noblest values at all costs. 
This calling for moral fortitude was valiantly heeded by millions upon millions of America's youth, many of whom had cut their teeth surviving the Great Depression's brutal lessons in self-reliance and deprivation.  From the sands of North Africa to the grim warzones of the European theater, it was their indomitable spirit more than advanced technology or superior force of arms that routinely propelled the United States and her Allies to triumph. 
This spiritual ethos of honor and duty was particularly embodied by the stories of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen—America's first all-black aviation unit deploying countless fighter and bomber squadrons across the European and Mediterranean theaters. Their exemplary service in the face of long-standing prejudice and injustice set shining standards of excellence and valor against which the entire notion of the "Greatest Generation" was defined.
Consider the incredible journey of Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., the decorated Tuskegee commander who flew a staggering 43 combat missions and 149 bomber escort sorties during his three deployments between 1943-45.
"I didn't join up to fight Hitler and the Nazis so much as I did to fight the ignorance, hatred and racism still far too prevalent back home," Stewart reflects. "We were sons and grandsons of slaves and sharecroppers, raised to never expect anything but lives of manual labor and constant discrimination. But our leader Benjamin O. Davis Jr. instilled in us an ethos of showing the world how excellence and honor could be cultivated even among people the nation had relegated to live as third-class citizens."
Utilizing the heroic exploits of the 332nd Fighter Group as their great motivation, the Tuskegee Airmen compiled an exemplary combat record that would soar into legend. During their 1800 missions over Europe, the "Red Tails" as they were known destroyed or damaged over 1,000 enemy aircraft while safeguarding over 200 Allied bombers scattered across pulverizing German flak. They routinely returned home bearing vivid silhouettes of anti-aircraft shrapnel perforating their P-51 Mustang fighters with surgically precise patterns—symbols of the constant enemy fire they had endured.
"We knew everything was on the line to prove the concept of being an all-black unit a success," Lt. Col. Stewart recalls. "The only way we'd open the door for black Americans to earn equal standing and opportunities was through exemplary service and sacrifice far beyond what even our white counterparts delivered. We made it a sacred obligation not to disappoint the legions of young black folks counting on us to change the world's perceptions forevermore."
The Tuskegee Airmen's selfless valor and dedication to the highest ideals of our democracy over abject discrimination routinely earned the eternal esteem of their commanding generals and other fellow airmen. Across the US and Allied theaters, their bravery under fire and unblemished conduct became illustrative of all that defined that unique generation of America's "greatest." 
According to retired Gen. Merril A. McPeak, the Tuskegee Airmen became "one of the most respected and highly motivated units in our air corps." They accrued a breathtaking operational performance that settled once and for all the notion of blacks not possessing the necessary intelligence or motivation to operate highly complex machinery. Or worse, the ridiculous notion of lacking courage and patriotism under duress."
The enduring heroic example of the Greatest Generation manifested across ethnicities and in virtually every major theater of engagement from the Coral Sea to the shores of Normandy. From the most horrific death camp atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis to the senseless brutality of the Pearl Harbor bombing, the American spirit at its finest refused to succumb to even the most inhuman acts of depravity. 
The ethos of "grit" perhaps shone most vividly in American POWs enduring untold deprivation and torture at the hands of sadistic Imperial Japanese and Nazi German captors. For these men like Ben Skardon, the example of their own moral character and dogged persevera