RUTHFULLY YOURS

When young John Freely asked his mother if they belonged to the working class, she answered, “We would indeed be of the working class if your father could find steady work.” Mr. Freely was born in 1926, the son of two Irish immigrants struggling to gain a toehold in Brooklyn. By the onset of the Great Depression, his father had failed as a trolley-driver and longshoreman. His mother kept the family from starvation with overnight work as a Rockefeller Center cleaning woman, but endured many humiliating evictions until his father finally caught steady work as a gravedigger in Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery.

On two separate occasions in the early 1930s, Mr. Freely’s mother took him and his younger sister back to Ireland to live with her people on the Dingle Peninsula. The young boy imbibed the Celtic lore of his grandfather in the primitive and poverty-stricken landscape that gained wide fame in the Great Blasket memoirs of Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers and Tómas O’Crohan. “The House of Memory,” the nonagenarian author’s account of the first quarter of his life, might be considered his contribution to the canon of the impoverished Irish, though life would soon carry him far from his upbringing.

A polymath educated on the G.I Bill, Mr. Freely would earn a Ph. D. in physics and spend his academic career teaching at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University, somehow finding the time to write more than 60 books on topics that include Turkey, Greece and the history of science. He first acquired the rudiments of an education at Fourteen Holy Martyrs School and Brooklyn Tech, but it was outside of class that he developed his especial fondness for Homer; young Mr. Freely dreamed of sailing the world in the wake of Odysseus. Soon he would: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pushed the United States into the war, though not until the middle of 1944 was Mr. Freely old enough to join the Navy. Mr. Freely volunteered and was placed in “Amphibious Roger Three,” a Navy unit (considered one of the precursors of the Navy’s modern SEAL teams) that was being sent to China to train elite forces in the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

After training in demolitions, scouting and weapons, Mr. Freely and his unit embarked from San Pedro harbor in the spring of 1945. They sailed southwest across the Pacific, landing in Calcutta and continuing to Assam, in northeastern India. From there, Mr. Freely and a detachment of his unit made a tortuous, monsoon-soaked, 1,000-mile truck journey across northern Burma and southwestern China to Kunming, capital of the Chinese province of Yunnan. Along the way, Mr. Freely met many of the predominantly African-American soldiers in the pre-integration Army who built the road, and he saw—and smelled—evidence of the brutal fighting that wrested control of the route from the Japanese. CONTINUE AT SITE