Galesburg author Tom Colclasure set out to document his grandfather’s military service as a World War II paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne — and ended up uncovering a web of powerful stories about local people’s unique experiences during the war.
Those stories are collected in Colclasure’s book “Spokes of the Wheel: A Grandson’s Look at WWII, His Grandfather, and His Hometown.”
As a kid growing up in Galesburg, Colclasure would watch westerns and war movies with his grandfather, Henry Raymond “Ray” Colclasure. That’s how he learned that his grandfather had seen some of the heaviest fighting of World War II.
“We were watching the movie ‘The Longest Day,’ and as the paratroopers descend on the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, he said, ‘I was there.’ And I said, ‘What? This is real?’ From then on, I was interested in his war record,” Colclasure said.
In 1998, Colclasure sat down with his grandfather to start recording interviews about his service and experiences. But that was cut short when his grandfather died just months later. So Colclasure began searching for others who could help him understand his grandfather’s service with the 82nd Airborne.
“I started contacting other soldiers from his unit. I found some 82nd Airborne troopers here in Galesburg. I met with them, got their stories,” Colclasure said. “Then I started hearing all these other great stories about Galesburg and World War II, either people who left Galesburg, went out into the world, and had incredible experiences, or people who ended up here after the war.”
Colclasure calls these people the spokes of the wheel, with Galesburg being the hub.
He interviewed Jack McFall, a sailor aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, and Henry Fry, a former German soldier captured at Stalingrad who survived a Soviet gulag before eventually making his home in Galesburg.
He talked with a British war bride, a cadet who trained on the Knox College campus, the executive assistant at the Army hospital that sprung up on Galesburg’s north side, and longtime Knox professor Miki Hane, who had been incarcerated in an American camp for Japanese Americans.
“He was a revered professor at Knox, but he was born in Hollister, California before the federal order came down for Japanese citizens to be interned in camps. So he spent time in an internment camp. His story of how he left the camp — he didn’t escape, he left under official business — is really interesting,” Colclasure said.
Ray Colclasure’s own story is central to “Spokes of the Wheel.” Born in Beardstown, he moved to Galesburg when his father found work on the railroad. He was an athlete at Galesburg High School, but missed an entire year due to serious illness. Ray recovered, enlisting before graduating and receiving his diploma early in return.
With the 82nd Airborne, he had an extensive combat record.
“He jumped into Sicily in 1943. He participated in the Italian campaign briefly at Salerno. He jumped into Normandy and D-Day. He jumped into Holland during Operation Market Garden. He was trucked into the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge and then fought the rest of the way through the Central Europe campaign,” his grandson said. “So he really did see the heaviest and hardest fighting of the war.”
In 2023, Tom Colclasure followed the same path through Europe with a Dutch historian who helped pinpoint the exact places where his grandfather fought, which is also detailed in the book.
“He showed us the exact landing spots. He helped us find these intersections where the firefights were,” Colclasure said.
Colclasure said telling these stories now is vital — not just for history, but for families who may never have heard them. He said his father and aunt were a bit flabbergasted at some of the stories in the book because his grandfather didn’t talk much about it to them.
“For me, history has always been important because I look at what people have gone through throughout time. Any time, any period, any history, and I wonder how they did it. I wonder what it took. What kind of perseverance, what kind of character makeup it took to actually endure these things,” he said.
Colclasure said his grandfather may not have wanted the spotlight like this, but the stories needed to be told.
“I think that he was very modest. So I don’t know that he would want to be the centerpiece of something like this. But I wanted him to be,” he said.
Colclasure said the book shows how deeply the war connected Galesburg to the rest of the world, and while the main arcs of the war may be well known, these are the local, personal stories of it.
Meet the Author
“Spokes of the Wheel” is available at Wordsmith Bookshoppe, 235 E. Main St., or online.
Colclasure will sign copies of the book at Budde’s Pizza, 425 E. Main St., from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22.
He is also giving a slide presentation at the Galesburg Public LIbrary, 264 W. Main St., at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2, and will participate in the library’s local author fair on Dec. 13.
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