Morton N. Katz served in the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion of the famed 82nd Airborne Division. He fought in Algeria, Morocco, Sicily, France and Germany. (509th Parachute Infantry Association)
Morton Katz is approaching his 104th birthday, and that did not stop him from standing and speaking for nearly an hour about a new book.
It was personal.
The book, called “From Paratrooper to Public Defender,” was penned by Aaron Elson, after a series of interviews with Katz. The centenarian World War II veteran stood and spoke for nearly an hour at a Monday book release event at the Avon Free Public Library.
Elson said he was inspired to write the book after missing that opportunity with his own father, also a WWII veteran. He said his father also told stories often, and he always intended to record and write them, but regretted not doing so before his father passed.
“My father was a tanker in WWI. In 1987, I went to a reunion of his outfit. He had already passed away, but I found three people who remembered him, and all the stories he told when I was a kid…came back to life. I was so moved by those stories and the stories of the other veterans that they tell among themselves, but don’t share with their families. I just sat down and started recording their stories,” Elson said. “Since then, I’ve recorded close to 1,000 hours of interviews with veterans.”
Elson answered a Facebook post by David Glass, Katz’s nephew, who was looking for someone to help tell his uncle’s story. Glass received more than 1,000 responses, including Elson, who then interviewed Katz a few days later. The three-hour interview was followed up by two more, and then Elson began writing the book, almost a year ago.
“I transcribed the interviews. The book is not very long, but it’s word-for-word verbatim from his interviews,” Elson said. “I put them in chronological order and checked some facts. He had written a history of his unit in 2006. I included that in it’s entirety, except for a few sections he had covered in the interview.”
Katz was a first lieutenant in the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion of the famed 82nd Airborne Division. He fought in Algeria, Morocco, Sicily, France and Germany.
(Facebook)
While he never had to jump in combat, he shared a story about a practice jump in which his chute malfunctioned and didn’t fully open.
“I bailed out and apparently it opened all right, but I was going down very fast,” he said. “I passed two or three people who shouted ‘pull your reserve.’ It didn’t do any good. I came down kind of hard, but I did all right.”
While Katz survived his landing with just bruises, his friend who came down behind him broke his leg on the landing.
“He always accused me of ending his dancing career,” Katz joked, adding that his commanding officer told him to go back up on the next flight.
“He knew his business. I could see him running over to me and he had a parachute in his hand. He said, ‘Lieutenant, you’re jumping on the next stick. Here’s your parachute, there’s your airplane. Go.’ He was right – It was the thing to do. You fall off a horse, you get right back up again. The second parachute worked very nicely.”
Katz was present at the liberation of the Wobbelin concentration camp. He was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism on the Anzio beachhead. After his career in the military, he was briefly a college professor, and then had a second career as an attorney and public defender, from which he didn’t retire until he was 100 years old.
He also shared a story about how there was an unwritten protocol when a member of his unit lost his life, in which his fellow soldiers would go through his belongings to make sure there was nothing embarrassing. One young soldier who died, who Katz had suspected of lying about his age in order to serve, brought Katz to tears.
“What we would do after a casualty, we would go through his barracks bags and other things, just to make sure there was no obscene material,” Katz said, “or letters that might be embarrassing for somebody.
“I opened his barracks bag, and the soldier himself, I swear he was 15 years old. In his bag was a tan leather frame, with a photo of a pretty young girl about 13 years old — obviously a high school romance,” Katz said. “He had lied about his age twice. I just fell apart. There was a lot of that during World War II.”
“Reflections of a 103-Year-Old World War II Veteran” can be found on Amazon.com.
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