(Washington) America’s oldest veteran, Lawrence Brooks, died Wednesday at the age of 112, the WWII Museum in New Orleans said.
The museum “will always cherish the memories we shared with Lawrence Brooks,” museum director Stephen J. Watson said in a statement.
“He was a dear friend, a man animated by a deep faith and a great kindness and a source of inspiration for those around him”, he added, stressing that at 112 years old, he was the most old of the 240,000 surviving American WWII veterans.
Born in 1909 in a Louisiana village at the height of segregation to an African-American family of 15 children, Lawrence Brooks was called up in 1940, joining the 91e Engineer battalion, an African-American unit.
He was stationed in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. He was the cook of the white officers of the battalion, and therefore far from the front lines, but he escaped death on two occasions: when the plane on which he was carrying food ran out of fuel above the ocean, and when a Japanese sniper shot dead a soldier a few yards away.
Demobilized in 1945, he did not benefit from the “GI Bill,” a law that allowed veterans to attend university for free, since African Americans were excluded. He became a worker in public works.
He then recounted his memories at the New Orleans Museum, of which he became a figure: every year, he celebrated his birthday there, with military honors and jazz ensembles. For the past two years, because of the pandemic, processions had been organized in front of his home.
In her filmed testimonies, the veteran recounted being surprised by the lack of racial segregation in Australia, when she was still very present in the United States military, where black soldiers did not share the same tent and did not eat at the same table as their white comrades.
“I was treated much better in Australia than by my own white fellow citizens,” he said.