The Last Good War

The Last Good War is a 2010 collection of portraits by the American photographer Thomas Sanders. Each photograph depicts an American World War II veteran and is accompanied by a brief account of the subject’s life and service, written by American biographer Veronica Kavass. The book began life as a school project, becoming an undergraduate project when Sanders went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study photography. Traveling to senior living centers across the U.S. to photograph as many veterans as he could, Sanders recognized that each vet had a moving story to tell. Kavass—of oral history non-profit StoryCorps—was brought on board to collect these stories.

Many of the book’s photographs emphasize veterans’ lifelong relationship with their experiences in the war, by showing them in remnants of uniform—a faded sailor’s cap, a fraying gas mask—or holding treasured mementos of service, such as brightly-polished medals. These items also serve to highlight the contrast between the weathered faces of the subjects and their younger wartime personas: one sailor still wears his cap at a jaunty angle, like a proud new recruit.

The veterans’ stories range from the amusing to the heart breaking to the incredible. Naturally, many of the stories feature terrible hardship. Randall Harris (US Army) was wounded in the lower abdomen: he used the strap of his canteen to hold his intestines inside his body so he could carry on fighting. Charles Hill (US Army) lied about his age and found himself recruited to fight in Europe at just 15. Singer and dancer Angel Adagio visited the wounded in the hospital with the USO: “Someone once cried while I was singing pretty—that was hard to take.”



Other veterans faced hardship due to the prejudice of fellow Americans. Cedrick Shimo was already enlisted as a private in the US Army when war broke out: instead of being allowed to fight, he was detained at Fort Leavenworth as an American of Japanese heritage. Another Japanese-American, Don Seki, was a young man in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Initially detained and set to work building fortifications, Seki joined the Army as soon as Japanese-Americans were permitted to volunteer. He trained in the South, where his commanding officer, at a loss as to the racial status of his new charge, told him, “You’re not white. You’re not black. But you are American!” Seki lost his arm fighting in Europe.

Edna Modisette Davis was one of the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots)—women trained to fly so male pilots could be deployed elsewhere. She and her fellow volunteers found themselves undermined at every turn by their male colleagues. Edna remembers that some male technicians refused to service WASPs’ aircraft. One of her fellow WASPs was killed in action: the military refused to pay for her body to be returned home, so Edna and her friends scraped together the money themselves. At the end of the War, the WASPS were sent home without notice, pay, or so much as a thank you. Ted Lumpkin recounts the prejudice he faced as one of the original Tuskegee Airmen—the first African-American pilots to be recruited by the Air Force.

Other stories blend humor and hardship. Louis Zamperini competed as a runner in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. While he was there, he stole a flag from the Reichstag as a memento. He was scheduled to run in the 1940 Olympics in Japan when war broke out—come 1940, Zamperini was indeed in Japan, but as a POW, having been captured during the war in the Pacific.



Many of the veterans’ stories feature remarkable heroism. Vito Murgolo was just 22 when he found himself at the center of a hailstorm of shells. He was stationed on an airfield in the Solomon Islands: the Battle of Guadalcanal had just begun. As Murgolo’s fellow soldiers dived for cover, the young sergeant ducked and ran to the planes. He managed to start two planes and get them on the runway so that pilots could take to the air and defend the airfield. Somehow still alive at the end of the battle, Murgolo was awarded the Silver Star.

The book’s stories reflect the enormous diversity of the 16 million men and women who served during World War II and the diversity of their experience. Native American, Hispanic, and African American veterans all feature, alongside the women of the WASPs and WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Their stories take place on the machine-gun strafed beaches of Normandy, the tank-trodden deserts of North Africa, the islands of the Pacific and mainland Japan, and on dozens of Allied bases across the U.S. One soldier even recounts his expedition to storm Hitler’s castle retreat. As well as the stories of those who fought, Sanders and Kavass collect stories from code-breakers, technicians, and signalmen like Bob Figueroa, who earned a medal for the all-day-and-all-night marathon of signaling needed to rescue a sinking merchant ship.