re: World War 2 soldiers who went on to be famous

Charles Schultz

He served as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division in Europe during World War II, as a squad leader on a .50 caliber machine gun team. His unit saw combat only at the very end of the war. Schulz said he had only one opportunity to fire his machine gun but forgot to load it, and that the German soldier he could have fired at willingly surrendered.



Andy Rooney



Rooney began his career in newspapers in 1942 while in the Army where he began writing for Stars and Stripes in London. He was one of six correspondents who flew on the second American bombing raid over Germany in February 1943, flying with the Eighth Air Force. He was the first journalist to reach the Ludendorff Bridge after the 9th Armored Division captured it on March 7, 1945. He was 32 km (20 mi) to the west when he heard that the bridge had been captured. "It was a reporter's dream," he wrote. "One of the great stories of the war had fallen into my lap." The bridge capture was front-page news in America. Rooney rated the capture of the bridge as one of the top five events of the entire European war, alongside D-Day.

He was one of the first American journalists to visit the Nazi concentration camps near the end of World War II, and one of the first to write about them. During a segment on Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, Rooney stated that he had been opposed to World War II because he was a pacifist. He recounted that what he saw in those concentration camps made him ashamed that he had opposed the war and permanently changed his opinions about whether "just wars" exist.