Veterans Oral History
By Brian Burnes
Stories Saved, Tales Transcribed
More than 16 million Americans served during World War II.
Over the course of 10 years, Gary Swanson sat down with more than 1,000 of them. “Every one of them had a story to tell,” he said recently.
Evidence of that can be found today in the Truman Courthouse in Independence.
In 2000 the Library of Congress, through its American Folklife Center in Washington, sponsored the national Veterans History Project, established by Congress that year. Its purpose was to secure the personal stories of veterans while it was still possible to hear those stories told by the veterans themselves.
While the program, as established, sought interviews from veterans of conflicts ranging from World War I through the Persian Gulf War and beyond, much of the concern driving the legislation was the status of World War II veterans.
In 2001, for example, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that World War II veterans - the approximately 5.4 million members of the “Greatest Generation” - were passing away at a rate of 1,100 per day.
Swanson responded to the moment.
Between 2000 and 2010 he resolved to record as many of those stories as he could.
The Jackson County Historical Society maintains its Veterans History Project interviews at its archives in Independence.
The Jackson County Historical Society, meanwhile, served as a “partner archive” of the Veterans History Project. Today Swanson’s interviews, housed in the Society archives in Independence, represent perhaps the largest collection of World War II oral histories in the country, according to Swanson.
“The thing that I am most proud of is that today we have the greatest collection of World War II stories in one particular city,” Swanson said.
“New York doesn’t have what we have. Philadelphia doesn’t.”
That would be newsworthy enough for Veterans Day, November 11. However, the Kansas City Public Library, over the past year, has been working on a project that will make these recordings easier to access online, and also provide transcripts of the individual stories. That project could be complete by next summer.
That the collection exists at all is due largely to one tireless volunteer – Gary Swanson of Leawood.
Not bragging
Swanson’s project began almost by accident.
“At the time I was a retired IBM executive and I had time on my hands,” Swanson said. “I wanted to do something that I thought was meaningful.”
Swanson wasn’t a veteran – at least not in his own mind. Swanson did serve, he said, a stint in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
“I had a uniform on at one time,” he said. “But I don’t claim to be a veteran.”
He bought his own video equipment and got going.
“I embraced it,” he said. “Once I started, I didn’t stop.”
With some of the initial World War II veterans he spoke with, Swanson came up with a strategy.
“To each person I would interview I would say “I’m going to send you a copy of this – but you owe me,’ ” he said.
What the veteran owed him, Swanson added, was the phone number of another World War II veteran.
“I never ran out of people to talk to,” Swanson said. “I know exactly how many interviews I did – 1,063 of them.”
Anyone listening to his interviews today can hear Swanson’s disarming method.
While focusing his video camera on the subject, he would cite the veteran’s name, list his or her service branch, along with the various locations or actions the veteran was stationed at or present at.
“Tell me where you grew up as a kid,” Swanson would say.
And so the interviews would begin and then continue, usually for close to an hour. Often veterans told Swanson stories they never had previously mentioned to friends or family members.
After the interviews were completed, Swanson said, spouses listening off-camera routinely told him they had never heard those stories before.
Gary Swanson conducted more than 1,000 interviews for the Veterans History Project.
So prolific was Swanson that in 2005 officials at the Library of Congress invited him to Washington and honored him for being one of three individuals across the country who had conducted the greatest number of interviews. He also instructed other volunteers in effective ways of speaking with veterans.
“Nobody has done more interviews than I have done,” said Swanson. “I’m not bragging – just prove me wrong.”
And yet Swanson’s more than 1,000 interviews was not the full extent of his service to the Kansas City area community of World War II veterans.
Beginning in 2008 he also helped organize Honor Flights from Kansas City to Washington, D.C. and back. These flights offered World War II veterans free transportation to visit the World War II Memorial, dedicated in 2004 at the east end of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Before these flights, Swanson often would convene organizational meetings at public halls like Truman Memorial Building in Independence, drilling the veterans on the protocols of the trip, how early they would have to be at Kansas City International Airport, and when they would return later that same evening.
Then, on the day of the trip, Swanson would report to the airport well before dawn to organize the veterans, some of them using wheelchairs, and get them aboard the aircraft.
Often the airline would get into the spirit of the event, decorating the airport gate with flags and tri-color bunting.
Then, many hours later, the children and grandchildren of these veterans would gather at the appointed KCI gate– worrying aloud about their elderly parents or grandparents - and then be amazed to see them arrive wide awake and radiant.
If these veterans had anything in common, Swanson said, it was their concept of duty. He admired their lack of bravado about their war-time service and sacrifice.
“They didn’t come back home and brag about it,” he said,
“They did their jobs, survived, came home, got a job, got married, had babies and often had great lives.”
Enduring monument
Currently, visitors to the national Veterans History Project website (www.loc.gov/vets/) will be able to find information regarding what appears to be more than 900 interviews conducted by Swanson.
The information will list the veteran’s service branch, where he or she served, the highest rank achieved, and so on.
However, only a comparative few of Swanson’s interviews have been digitized to allow online access.
The Kansas City Public Library is currently working on a project that will make local veterans oral histories easier to access.
But the project currently being undertaken by the Kansas City Public Library will make many of the Jackson County Historical Society interviews much easier to access – and also will include transcripts of the interviews, which is no small thing.
Transcriptions will render the interviews “full-text searchable.” That means that any topic discussed during the interview can be identified online by a user without having to listen to the entire interview. The transcripts also will allow those with hearing impairments access to the interview content.
The project is being funded in part by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Missouri State Library.
When completed, the locally-based site will make it easier for people to find interviews with veterans in the Kansas City area, while the transcripts will make it easier to search and discover subjects of interest.
In this way the library site could grow over time, encouraging discovery for community students and researchers.
The completed site also would represent an enduring monument to Swanson’s achievement, said David W. Jackson, former Jackson County Historical Society archivist who worked closely with him.
“Plenty of people talk about doing this, or needing to do that,” Jackson said.
“Few follow through or act. For someone who is not a veteran himself, Gary Swanson answered a call and over the course of a decade recorded about 1,000 veterans’ stories for them and their families.
“What a legacy.”
Government officials believe about 240,000 World War II veterans remain alive today. (Photo courtesy of National Archives.)
Today Swanson can look back with satisfaction upon the stories he saved. Many of the veterans he interviewed, he believes, have died since he spoke with them.
Today, in 2021, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 240,000 World War II veterans remain alive, dying at a rate of approximately 234 a day.
“My object was to have more interviews than anybody,” Swanson said.
As he says – prove him wrong.
Obtaining Interviews
Oral history interviews, conducted as part of the Veterans History Project at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, are available for download from the Jackson County Historical Society. Anyone interested in obtaining a video will receive a digital file by email in exchange for a $20 donation. For more information, go to https://www.jchs.org/the-veterans-history-project
Brian Burnes is president of the Jackson County Historical Society.