The oldest American war veteran, Lawrence Brooks, died yesterday Wednesday at the age of 112, the Museum of World War II in New Orleans announced.
The museum will always “honor the memories it shared with Lawrence Brooks,” the museum’s director, Steven Watson, said in a press release.
“He was a dear friend, a man of deep faith and kindness, a source of inspiration to anyone close to him,” he said, adding that at 112 he was the oldest of some 240,000 American World War II veterans still in Zoe.
Born in a Louisiana village in 1909, at the height of racial segregation, a descendant of an African-American family with 15 children, Lawrence Brooks enlisted in the Army in 1940 and joined the 91st Engineer Battalion, a unit of mostly African Americans.
He has served in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. He was a cook for the white battalion officers, therefore far from the fronts, but twice escaped death: a first when his food truck ran out of fuel over the ocean, a second when a Japanese sniper dropped dead. his fellow soldier a few meters away from him.
After he was demobilized in 1945, he did not benefit from the GI Bill, a law that allowed war veterans to study for free at university, as African Americans were excluded. He became a worker in public works.
He would later describe his experiences of the war at the New Orleans Museum, a city where he had been transformed into a figure: every year, his birthday was celebrated there, with military honors and music by jazz bands. For the past two years, due to the pandemic, honorary ceremonies have been held outside his home.
In his film testimonies, the veteran said he was amazed at the lack of any racial segregation in Australia, and the practice was ubiquitous in the US military, with black soldiers unable to share the same scene or to dine at the same table as their white soldiers.
“I was treated much better in Australia than I was by my white compatriots,” he said.
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