Time is running out for the last living U.S. veterans of World War II.
At 102 years old — “103 next month,” he said with a grin — Robert Heiss spends his afternoons playing cribbage and devouring murder mysteries at the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, where he’s lived since 2008. At first glance, he’s a cheerful centenarian enjoying the quiet routines of retirement. But as one of the last World War II veterans in the Bay Area, Heiss carries memories that still weigh heavily eight decades later.
Before he was drafted into the war, Heiss was just another young boy growing up in San Francisco, biking through the city, catching a new movie for a dime, and always making it back by 5 p.m. for dinner, just as his mother told him.
Then, he grew up a little.
On his 19th birthday, on Dec. 7, 1941, Heiss’s dad woke him up with the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. The United States would declare war on Japan the next day, marking the country’s entrance into World War II. His life changed in an instant, Heiss tearfully recalled.
“On the West Coast, we were all scared we could be next,” he said between sobs. “How could they get this far without our knowing?”
Capturing the memories of these witnesses to war has taken on a new urgency, even as they are remembered annually on Veteran’s Day.
The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, estimates that about 45,518 U.S. veterans of World War II are still alive, all now in their 90s or older. In California, there are an estimated 10,703 survivors — the most of any state. By 2030, the national total is expected to fall to just over 5,000, and by 2044, researchers predict there will be no remaining veterans of a war that reshaped the global balance of power.
For the institutions seeking to preserve the narratives of the war, some Bay Area veterans have much to share.
Heiss, who joined the Air Force after the Pearl Harbor bombing, was sent to England as an aircraft technician, serving from June 1943 until February 1946. After the war, he married, raised three children, and began to think about his legacy. His wife, Betty, who had served in the Navy, helped him write a book chronicling their wartime experiences, but when she died in 2009, Heiss found himself finishing the project alone.
“The book became a distraction for me as I was grieving,” he said.
The self-published book, “The Wonderful Life of Bob and Betty Heiss,” spans more than 500 spiral-bound pages, tracing the couple’s story from their preschool days to Heiss’s life today at the veterans home in Napa County. Heiss printed about 60 copies, distributing them to his three children, extended family and a few close friends. Now, he said, his stories can live on long after he’s gone.
“It makes me feel proud to be a part of the Greatest Generation,” Heiss said, tearing up again.
Steve James, a retired financial analyst and Vietnam War veteran, has made it his mission to preserve the history of his father, Ernest E. James, who served in World War II. Now the treasurer of the Contra Costa Historical Society, James recalled sitting around the campfire as a child, listening to his father’s vivid and sometimes gruesome stories from the front lines.
Decades later, those memories took on new meaning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, with quarantine keeping him at home, the El Sobrante native turned his attention to a large shoebox-sized container filled with his father’s wartime memorabilia. Inside were uniform badges, handwritten letters, maps, annotated prayer books, and yellowed clippings from a long-defunct newspaper, The Contra Costa Independent.
In the margins of one of his books, Ernest James described the moment he killed a German soldier, writing that he “shot him as he looked out of a window.”
“I was looking through the box at his stuff and said ‘this has to be preserved,’” James said.
James brought the container to the Contra Costa Historical Society in Martinez, which houses millions of historical documents and records from as early as the 1700s. When he brought it the memories of his father, who died in 2002, James said, Executive Director Leigh Ann Davis was ecstatic.
“I geek out on this stuff,” Davis said. “As a historian, it feels like a dream come true to be able to create a space where these documents can live forever.”
The urgency of losing firsthand witnesses to history inspired her to start the Archive Yourself program, which encourages county residents to preserve their families’ important documents and memories using the organization’s advanced digitization services.
While Heiss kept planes flying, fellow San Francisco native James A. Scott carried his paints into the Pacific. A former art student who enlisted in 1942, the 103 year-old former corporal sketched portraits of fellow Marines from his foxhole—images that many families would later treasure as the last glimpse of their loved ones.
Although the U.S. remembers its military veterans each Nov. 11, Scott, who also lives at the veteran’s home in Yountville, notes changes in the intervening years. “It was an important time in our history because everyone felt patriotic at that time and that’s something people don’t know about anymore,” he said.
In a previous interview with the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia, Scott recalled his wartime creativity. “It wasn’t unusual for complete strangers from other outfits to come to my barracks, foxhole or tent and ask for a drawing of themselves,” Scott said
The sketches that did not make it to families of veterans are now preserved at the Library of Congress.
