James Bohun

Twenty-four-year-old Private First Class Borys Bohun was among the American troops who marched to their army camp from a landing ship in Oran Harbor, Algeria. This port and others in Morocco and Algeria were captured after three days of intensive battle in early November 1942. The offensive in North Africa was the first great Allied military effort against European Fascism.

Along the march, Borys constantly thought of his fiancée, Martha Boretsky. They shared the same facial characteristics of blue eyes and brown hair. Martha filled the void in Borys’s life that he had in early adulthood. Without Martha, his life was empty of the love and happiness she provided him. Borys hoped she would receive the letter he had written aboard the troop transport, and she eventually did:

My Dearest Martha,

Please forgive the writing and paper because it’s the best I could get and it’s slightly hard to write on board ship.

I’ve left England and am now somewhere on the ocean going somewhere and don’t know until we reach our destination. I don’t know when and if you’ll receive this letter, so I pray if this letter gets to you it finds you and everybody back there well and happy. Martha darling, I’m asking you to write my folks if you receive this letter and let them know I’m well and have left England. Please explain I’ve only had one stamp [air mail] and had quite a job getting it.

… I don’t expect you to stay home every night because it isn’t fair to you to be miserable and worried. You can have a good time and still be true to me. …when I get back to marry you then we’ll both stay home and settle down with Patrica. [Martha and Borys previously agreed to that name for their first child.] I can only look forward to one thing and that is to be with you and married to you.

Regardless of what you think or say, I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have a girl like you, and I’d give anything I could ever have to be with you right now and see and hold you once again for that minute, but if everything turns out the way I’m hoping I’ll be with you once more, only this time it’ll be for good, Okay Mrs. Bohun….

Give my regards and love to everybody, especially to my wife Martha and don’t forget to tell Martha that I love her ever so much and tell her I think she’s the sweetest girl in the world and I love my girl/wife Martha… when I kiss her, Oh Boy she just makes me go dizzy with love and aside all that she’s the sweetest girl I’ve ever met and the only girl I’ve ever honestly could or ever love.

Always remember darling I’ll always love you and will try to be a good husband when that lucky day comes. Am now closing.

God bless your sweet heart Darling and every body back home.

Loving You Forever,
Borys

 

Borys was an industrious youth, a trait he inherited from his parents, who emigrated from Eastern Europe and became naturalized American citizens. His name was misspelled on his birth certificate. As one of the oldest of nine children, he performed menial jobs to earn a few cents, a necessity during the 1930s Depression since his family lived in poverty, like tens of millions of other Americans. One of his favorite tasks was to go summer blueberry picking with his father in the woods. They would gather buckets of blueberries and sell them to local bakers; his mother also made blueberry pierogi and pies.

Borys dropped out of high school after the eleventh grade to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a government-funded program, so his family could have some income. He made thirty dollars a month and was required to send twenty-five home. He sent home twenty-seven or twenty-eight bucks a month and kept the other couple dollars for personal items such as soap and candy.

While in the CCC, Borys performed duties as a lumberjack in the Oregon wilderness, thousands of miles from his home in Fall River, Massachusetts, a textile-producing city also known for the 1890s gruesome axe murders of Lizzie Borden’s parents. He worked on forestry projects, such as flood control, and built firebreaks to help control forest fires. Borys’s ruddy complexion laid testament to the strenuous outdoor labor he had done the past several years.

Borys, whose nickname was Butch, had been in the Army Coast Artillery three years before the war, beginning in August 1938. His enlistment had come up two months before the 7 December 1941 unprovoked Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That was the peacetime army, and Borys had never been in combat.

After his military service, Borys returned to Fall River and obtained a well-paying defense industry job but gave that up to reenlist in the army after the Japanese attack on US Armed Forces. Now that he was in the army again and had met Martha in Brooklyn, New York, during March 1942, Borys’s greatest fear was that he would never return home and unite with her if the worst happened.

As a member of one of Battery C’s 90-mm gun crews, part of the 62nd Coast Artillery Antiaircraft Regiment (AAA), Borys and the rest of the team performed the backbreaking task of digging their nearly ten-ton gun into a tactical position for defense of the Port of Oran against Axis aerial attack. Having the cannon’s platform in the earth provided stability when it was fired. Additionally, protective revetments (i.e., barricades or walls) consisting of sandbags surrounded their position.

The sky was quiet the first week that the 62nd AAA occupied Oran. Suddenly, at 2042 hours on the night of 22 November 1942, an air raid alert sounded. All antiaircraft batteries engaged unseen aircraft with radar control at 2050 hours.

Antiaircraft artillery shells ineffectively hunted hostile aircraft over Oran that night, even as the searchlight battalion explored the gloomy sky to illuminate an enemy target. The conflict heightened when .50-caliber machine guns and 40-mm guns joined the fight. Their tracer ammunition could be seen rummaging around the heavens, unsuccessfully searching for their foe. No claims of destroyed or damaged enemy aircraft were made on 22 November 1942. The raid was turned away, with no damage inflicted on the port. When the firing ceased, all eyes watched the sky, lit by the glow of a full moon, until the all-clear sounded at 2320 hours.

As dawn broke the following morning, Borys washed up, taking care to attend to a hand injury he received the previous night while loading artillery shells.