08-05-2025
A V-E Day love story
World War II and the global fight against fascism offered them the opportunity — for education, adventure, danger, and the chance to serve their country. Through the wartime ordeal, they discovered who they were and what America stood for at a moment of global peril. They also discovered each other.
Mary Anderson left West Virginia
to train as a psychiatric nurse at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and, when the war started, enlisted in the Army Nursing Corps. By 1944, she was a lieutenant stationed in England to prepare for the mental trauma that soldiers fighting in D-Day and the allied invasion of Europe were sure to face.
George Dorval as a flight school student in 1943; Mary Anderson in England in 1944.
Christopher Dorval
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In October of that same year, Lieutenant George Dorval, a US Army Air Corps P-47 fighter pilot, was shot down in Italy while flying his 45th combat mission. He had already participated in a number of battles on the island of Elba and the Italian mainland, and the invasion of Southern France.
George was flying low to the ground to attack the Nazi-controlled airport at Bergamo, in Northern Italy, when German gunners opened fire with an 88-caliber cannon and hit his P-47 Thunderbolt. With his cockpit on fire and his hands severely burned, he struggled to release his safety straps. But he managed to eject before his plane crashed. His fellow pilots, engaged in fierce air combat, didn't see him bail out. He was presumed dead.
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But he survived, landing in an empty field. In shock and deep pain, his clothes charred, his hands and legs badly burned, George was quickly captured by Italian fascists and turned over to the Germans. He was hospitalized, then shipped by cattle car first to a POW camp in Austria, and finally to Stalag Luft 1 in Barth, Germany. The winter of 1945 was harsh. German civilians and POWs alike were starving.
Not only did no Red Cross parcels reach him, but none of George's letters from the camp ever made it to Waltham. A Boston Globe article from February 1945, four months after he was shot down, recounted how his parents learned that he was still alive: from a chance encounter with the family of a Waltham friend of George's who had seen him in the Austria POW camp.
On the last day of April, as the Russian troops advanced west, the Germans abandoned the POW camp and left the prisoners in charge. A few days later George was liberated by the Russians. On May 12, 1945, the allies airlifted 9,000 POWS, almost all of them from the Air Corps, to Camp Lucky Strike in France, one of the massive staging areas for returning POWs and soldiers from the entire European theater.
Desperate for normality, George maneuvered to get two-week passes to London in late May 1945 for himself and a buddy. On his first night in town, George — 45 pounds lighter than when he was shot down — went straight to the officer's club at the Piccadilly Hotel on Piccadilly Circus. Within minutes he spotted Mary, who was on weekend leave, and asked her to dance. She accepted and, as they say, the rest is history.
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George and Mary were my parents. They are gone now, resting together in Arlington National Cemetery. I'm still learning and applying what they taught me. They saw the world with all its good and bad and taught me and my siblings to engage with it and never retreat. They taught us to make a difference. I know that they did.
I am confident of few things, but of this I am sure: They would be ashamed at the way our government today is dismantling the world they fought for 80 years ago.
For both George and Mary, World War II was a life-changing experience. They saw death, destruction, suffering, and cruelty alongside kindness, friendship, and inspiration. They volunteered and proudly served their country and their country returned the favor: George went to Boston University on the GI Bill; Mary was one of the first women in Massachusetts to secure a GI loan to buy a home.
They experienced more than the hollers of West Virginia or the depression of Waltham could have ever provided. They were young and unworldly when they left. They returned from war older and wiser — just 22, with long lives still ahead.
