So many hours, so many nights, I wasn’t going to watch “The War.” Once I started, I couldn’t look away from Ken Burns’ monumental World War II documentary.
Having spent all those hours, I’ve been enriched and greatly moved. The riveting public TV series taught me how much I didn’t know. And personally, the film clips, photos and oral histories shed a startling light on what my father lived through but rarely mentions.
Encouraged by the Sno-Isle Libraries’ effort to record veterans’ memories of World War II, I hope to gather stories from my dad, whose Army experience took him from Utah Beach after D-Day to Nazi Germany’s Dachau concentration camp.
Closer to home, there’s one name from World War II — and from Snohomish County — that I now know something about, thanks to Burns’ film.
One night last week, I was watching “The War” when the narrator mentioned Gen. Mark Clark. It was a segment on the Allies’ push through Italy. Mark Clark, I knew that name, but not from World War II. I knew it from driving on Highway 532 between Stanwood and Camano Island — over the Gen. Mark W. Clark Memorial Bridge.
From the film, I learned of Clark’s involvement in the invasion of North Africa, then under France’s Vichy regime, and how he led the U.S. 5th Army on a tough campaign to drive the Germans out of Rome in 1944. Through Sno-Isle Libraries’ online Biography Resource Center, I learned that the New York-born Clark left the Army in 1954 to become president of the Citadel Military College of South Carolina. He retired in 1966 and died in 1984.
He wasn’t from Snohomish County, but he did have ties to the area, said Almira Jones, who works at Sno-Isle’s Stanwood Library.
“He owned property on Camano, in the Madrona Beach area on the northwest side of the island,” Jones said. “I don’t know if he ever built a house there.”
Clark’s presence on Camano is mentioned in “Camano Island: Life and Times in Island Paradise,” a 1994 history of the island by Arthur Kimball with photos by John Dean.
“As early as April of 1946, The Twin City News had reported that World War II hero Gen. Mark Clark and his wife were planning a Camano home,” the book says. “Fittingly, the new bridge was dedicated to the general, by then an island dweller — albeit only temporarily.”
Built in 1949, the bridge replaced a 1909 span. It connects the mainland in Stanwood with Leque Island, crossing the North Fork Stillaguamish River. Just west of it on Highway 532, a smaller bridge spans Davis Slough, connecting Snohomish and Island counties.
Last month, the state Department of Transportation detailed its plan to replace the Gen. Mark W. Clark Memorial Bridge in 2009 with a wider, safer bridge. The current bridge is just 26 feet wide.
“It will be wide enough for two lanes, one lane in each direction, and striped to match the road,” said Patty Michaud, a Department of Transportation spokeswoman. She doesn’t know whether the new bridge will automatically be named after Clark.
Michaud said there are two ways bridges or parts of highways are named, one by action in the Legislature, the other by people in the community writing letters and working with the Department of Transportation.
At Stanwood’s American Legion Post 92, 83-year-old Army veteran Bob Westphal said Tuesday he’s been closely watching “The War.” Although the seven-episode series began more than a week ago, it’s not too late. The first installment, “A Necessary War,” airs tonight at 9 p.m. on KCTS, Channel 9, and more reruns will follow. For information, go to www.kcts.org/thewar. The series also is now available on DVD.
“I’ve learned a lot about the war that I didn’t know, things they couldn’t put in the newspaper,” said Westphal, who lives on Camano. Beginning in 1944, he spent 14 months in Europe. “I was an artillery man,” he said.
No one I asked at Starbucks in Stanwood knew who Mark Clark was, although they’d crossed the bridge countless times. Before last week, I didn’t know.
Westphal knew without hesitation. “When he went ashore in North Africa, he was the Army’s youngest brigadier general,” he said. “He was quite a guy.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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