“Peter Michael Janiszyn, Gone to War”

My father, Peter Janiszyn, was born in the autumn of 1915 in Montague, Massachusetts. He died at my home in Springfield in the autumn of 1997. In between he became the most famous member of our family living in America. I can’t imagine that his fame and legend will ever be superseded by any family descendant, though each person in this world has a story to tell and great deeds to accomplish.

My father’s story is one of action, labor, war, struggle, sweat, blood, toil, and eventual triumph. And his tale is dominated by World War II. When he was 16, Peter enlisted in the United States Army. He was assigned to a battalion of Coastal Artillery and sent to Panama--not a bad tour of duty, since he entered the service to warm and clothe and feed himself. I’ve seen old snapshots of Peter in Panama, riding mules, and transporting heavy guns, and looking for all the world like he was ready to jump on horseback and dash off with Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. After Panama, my father was stationed in New York City--he was a staff sergeant by that time in the late 1930s, and he commanded a small artillery crew that was a part of the coastal defense for the city.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor late in 1941, my father was not drafted or enlisted in the service. He was already regular army. And off he went to Scotland in 1942 for more training for the coming conflict with Adolph Hitler and the German war-machine, then a brief cruise with the huge Allied Forces that hit the beaches of North Africa and started the slow rupturing of the Third Reich that would not end until April 1945.

Think about that for a moment. My father was a soldier in war, serving for almost three years under such estimable military commanders as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton.

To understand this, imagine that you went to war when you entered your freshman year at Springfield High School and didn’t leave the war until sometime during your senior year. In between you would find only campaigns, battles, fighting, killing, assaults, utter destruction and devastation, the face of the enemy and the twisted dead. In between, if you were Peter Janiszyn in World War II, you would remember names like Algiers, Tunis, Kasserine Pass, Bizerti, Palermo, Rome, Arno, Southern France, the Rhine River, the Battle of the Bulge, and the finally the jewel in the crown of the God of War, Berlin in flames and the utter dismemberment of the Thousand-Year Reich. My father told this story of World War II Biblical Apocalypse to me in bits and pieces of narrative through our 23 years of farming together. It is an epic tale of courage and sacrifice that would top anything that Aragon, Achilles, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, or Odysseus could spin around the campfire at night.

When World War II in Europe ended in 1945, Peter Janiszyn was a First Sergeant. He was as highly trained as any professional soldier in the U.S. Army has ever been--war does that for you--and he was prepared for the invasion of Japan. That invasion never took place, Japan surrendered in August 1945, and my father came home in the fall of 1945, married my mother Anna Tysiak, who he had met in New York City before the war, and came north to Westminster, Vermont, to farm a stretch of the Connecticut River Valley with his older brother, Jacob Yanizyn.

So Peter Janiszyn left the military and entered civilian life. But the war continued in his stories and his thoughts. When we farmed together in 1997--he died from lung cancer in the fall--Peter was still talking about that tough bastard Patton, and anti-aircraft artillery ordnance, the frozen doom of the Battle of the Bulge, and his fear of Japan in 1945 and the invasion that was predicted to claim over a million and a half American soldiers if it ever took place.

After 1945, my father was at war for the rest of his life. And he had photos, and certificates, and letters, and discharge papers, and honor patches, and parts of old uniforms to prove it. But the war rang most true in the stories and recollections that sprinkled into his conversation--and his effort and heroism showed itself in the visions that he carried night and day, waking and dreaming.

My father--Peter Janiszyn--could speak Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. He once greeted Rosalynn Carter at his vegetable stand. He received personal, cordial greetings from two presidents. He ran for public office. He fought off alcoholism. For a while, he worked two jobs, night and day, to support a family of four children, one son suffering with severe mental retardation. And he fashioned a small vegetable business, a retail and wholesale establishment known hither and yon as Pete’s Stand, out of nothing but sweat and labor and dreams and a stable of Kubota tractors.

By all these civilian and domestic standards, Peter Janiszyn, my father, was a hero. But he was, first and foremost, a soldier. And his position in the United States Army, a rank he served with honor, discipline, sacrifice, and distinction, makes him the most famous member of our family, now and forever more.

Pete with grandson, John, who is wearing Pete’s hat from the Army

Michael Janiszyn
10 December 2003