“I wouldn’t take a million dollars to do it again, but I would give a million for the experience.” That is how Walter Sobel of Wilmette, Illinois sums up his service in World War II.

Now 88 years old and still at work, he is happy to talk about the battles in which he was involved as a naval officer aboard the battleship New Mexico in the Pacific. His ship took part in all the invasions of islands in that war theater except for two. The New Mexico served as what he calls “sea-borne artillery,” pounding the shore to soften the defending forces for the landing troops.

Never did his ship take a hit until the Philippines campaign when a Japanese kamakazi warplane dove onto the deck. Both Walter and his captain were wounded in this attack and extensive damage done to the ship.

Asked to sum up his dominant reflections about this wartime experience, Walter lists three:

1. The way that a group of 2000 people took responsibility and made the battleship function so effectively. He still marvels that such a diverse group of people became melded into a formidable fighting machine.
2. “The will of the Lord to let me live.” Another of the New Mexico’s captains was killed in action and Walter knows that could easily have happened to him.
3. “I feel grateful for having had the opportunity.” Already a practicing architect before the war, he did not enter the navy until he was 29. After a few months’ naval training at Princeton and Ohio State, he soon found himself an officer of the deck on a battleship.

Walter expresses surprise at how the world has changed since those days. “When I left the service, I had a great animosity for the Japanese,” he confesses. This feeling was strong enough to make him refuse opportunities to visit Japan in later years.

However, the time came when his wife told him: “Forty years is long enough to hold a grudge,” a sentiment that moved him to visit and develop friendships with former enemies. He now foresees a new world in which relationships will be transformed further.

Another veteran of epic naval encounters in World War II is Geoffrey Brooke, an 81 year old Englishman who is a long-distance friend of Walter Sobel, their friendship based in part on shared memories of shipboard warfare in the Pacific. Reached at his home south of London, Geoffrey spoke freely about his wartime adventures at sea.

Unlike Walter, Geoffrey Brooke was a career officer, serving in the British navy. When only thirteen years old, he went off to the naval college for training and was a midshipman at age nineteen when the war began. So psyched was he for the coming conflict that he says now, “I would have been disappointed if there hadn’t been a war.”

Steeped in this seagoing military tradition, Geoffrey has an encyclopedic knowledge of naval warfare and the lore of the people who made the British navy preeminent.

This fascinating gentleman describes his wartime experiences in two books, both of them published in the 1980s. The first, “Alarm Starboard!,” covers his entire war, with detailed accounts of his service on the battleships Nelson and the Prince of Wales, as well as on aircraft carriers and other ships.

His memory for events is truly remarkable, although he gives credit to his mother for having saved his letters home. His dramatic accounts of battles at sea, for example the encounter in which the Prince of Wales took on the formidable German battleship Bismarck, held this reader entranced.

Asking him the same questions that Walter answered, I received from Geoffrey one general conclusion and two detailed memories of events:

1. “I was incredibly lucky on about six different occasions to have survived at all.” He then lists the times when those about him were killed and he could have been easily killed himself.
2. “The cold on the Russian convoys.” When on a destroyer escorting merchant ships to the Soviet Union, he recalls shivering in the frigid temperatures.
3. “On the Prince of Wales when it was sunk.” Like other desperate crew members, he had to haul himself along a rope attached from the deck of the doomed battleship to a destroyer alongside. He vividly remembers feeling exhausted and tempted to let go and drop into the sea below. But “I looked into the water filled with black oil and I thought that’s not for me.” Shortly after he reached the destroyer’s deck, the destroyer captain had to order the lines cut, thus dooming many other crew members.

The two seasoned veterans I have chosen to write about here in honor of Veterans’ Day carry on a flourishing exchange of letters sharing memories of dramatic days. This correspondence will now, perhaps, take on a new resonance as the two old allies, the United States and Great Britain, take on together the daunting new challenges posed by international terrorism.

Richard Griffin