Winthrop Rockefeller by John A. Kirk

Author:John A. Kirk [Kirk, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610757638
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Winthrop (reclining) hospitalized in Guam after the kamikaze attack on his ship the USS Henrico, smoking a cigar with bandaged hands alongside friends from the Third Marines. Robert “Bob” Kriendler from Manhattan’s 21 Club sits to his immediate right. April 1945. Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture.

Staying at Rivers’s home was one of the happiest times that Winthrop experienced overseas during the war. Stray letters finally caught up with him, and he spent three to four days reading through over three hundred of them. More friends popped out of the woodwork, including Mary Jean Kempner, who was assigned to Guam as Vogue magazine’s overseas war correspondent.85 “Every day I continue to run into more and more people that I know!” Winthrop reported home excitedly, estimating that in all he ran into twenty-five to twenty-eight people in Guam that he had known in civilian life.86 The day before his thirty-third birthday, Winthrop went to the beach with some friends for a picnic. On the day itself, May 1, 1945, Rivers had his cooks bake a special birthday cake for him.87 As he began to recover, despite the wonderful time he was having, Winthrop found his nagging Rockefeller conscience calling him back to duty. He started to talk with Rivers and others about returning to the 305th.88 Rivers remained cautious about the prospect, noting that the rapid succession of pneumonia, hepatitis, and the flash burns that Winthrop had received “must have been a considerable shock to his whole physical and mental setup.” Rivers did concede, “He is young, in good shape and has shown a remarkable ability to bounce back to normal.”89

Not long after Winthrop’s birthday celebrations, on May 8 the Allied Forces in Europe accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany as the war there officially came to an end. Victory in Europe (V-E) Day provided an indication that World War II was slowly but surely drawing to a close. With his recent experiences of home comforts in Guam and news about the conclusion of hostilities in Europe, Winthrop’s mind increasingly began to focus on the prospect of returning back to civilian life in New York. It was a difficult and trying time: the end seemed tantalizingly close, but there was still plenty of work to do in bringing the war to a conclusion in the Pacific. A long and circuitous road home lay ahead. In the first instance, Winthrop was destined to head in the opposite direction, back to the front lines.

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