“Send a Birthday Greeting to the United States’ Oldest Living WWII Veteran” Smithsonian Magazine

Panicking, he, the pilot and co-pilot lobbed loads of wire into the ocean in hopes of stabilizing the craft. Brooks remembers joking that if the pilot jumped, he’d grab onto him. After all, the plane was only equipped with two parachutes.

“It was a scary moment,” he recounted in a 2015 oral history interview. “But we made it.”

Brooks survived that close call. Now, the 110-year-old is believed to be the United States’ oldest living World War II veteran. And in just over two weeks, on Saturday, September 12, he’ll turn 111.

For the past five years, Brooks has celebrated his birthday at the National World War II Museum in his home city of New Orleans. This year, with partygoers unable to gather in person due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the museum is taking a different approach: namely, asking well-wishers to send the supercentenarian birthday cards via mail.

In 1940, 31-year-old Brooks was drafted into the U.S. Army’s 91st Engineer Battalion. As Talia Lakritz reported for Insider last year, he was stationed mainly in New Guinea and the Philippines, working as a support worker and eventually achieving the rank of private first class.

National Geographic’s Chelsea Brasted notes that Brooks, who is black, served in a battalion predominately made up of African American soldiers. For a time, he even worked as a servant for three white officers.

During World War II, black soldiers faced discrimination both at home and abroad. A particularly egregious example of racism within the military was the preferential treatment afforded to German prisoners of war, who were allowed to dine in restaurants across the Deep South even as African American soldiers were forced to eat out of sight in the kitchens, writes Matthew Taub for Time.

“We went to war with Hitler, the world’s most horrible racist, and we did so with a segregated army because, despite guarantees of equal treatment, this was still Jim Crow America,” Robert Citino, a senior historian at the WWII Museum, tells National Geographic. “African Americans were still subject to all kinds of limitations and discrimination based on the color of their skin.”

Brooks’ time in the Army drew to a close in 1945—a full three years before President Harry S. Truman officially desegregated the U.S. military.

“I had some good times and I had some bad times,” Brooks tells National Geographic. “I just tried to put all the good ones and the bad ones together and tried to forget about all of them.”

After the war, Brooks worked as a forklift operator. He retired in his 70s and now lives with his daughter and caretaker, Vanessa Brooks, in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. He enjoys doting on his 5 children, 5 step-children, 13 grandchildren and more than 20 great-grandchildren, per Ryan Prior and Lauren M. Johnson of CNN.

Brooks’ wife, Leona, died in 2005 following the couple’s evacuation by helicopter during Hurricane Katrina. The storm “took everything I owned, washed away everything,” he later reflected.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, just 389,292 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II were still alive in September 2019. On average, 294 veterans die each day.

Smithsonian Magazine