WWII sergeant is first woman to take Lake County Honor Flight Residents of London never knew when one of Germany’s V-2 rockets might slam into their neighborhood during World War II. Irene Charcut, 95, of North Chicago, was lucky living in London while serving in the Women’s Army Corps. Some girlfriends convinced her one day to not follow her normal Sunday morning routine, which was to go to the office and write letters to home. “I would go after church, but friends convinced me to go to church early and there was something going on in Hyde Park to go to. That day a bomb landed right outside my office. The window frame was blown and was right on top of my typewriter. We were in the thick of it there,” Charcut said this week from her favorite chair in the living room of her modest brick home in North Chicago. She was Irene Witek in 1943 when she enlisted. Basic training was at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, which was the largest training center for the Women’s Army Corps in WWII. Her brother, Joe, told her that “she’ll never make it.” “That’s because I was a homebody,” she recalled with a gentle laugh. Charcut was stationed in Texas “and the Mexican border was right there, but we weren’t allowed to go there,” she said. So Charcut decided to sign up for overseas duty. “Then I said to myself, ‘Why?’” said Charcut, laughing again because her brother was somewhat right, though she decided to go for it anyway. Her first assignment was in Paris and she enjoyed it. “There was a big night club on top of one of the buildings and you could see the beautiful city,” she said. Then Charcut was sent to London, where she was assigned office work. She remembers a superior, maybe a major, who gave her a big book of airplanes and told her to study it. “I start to look at it and then I’d just fall asleep,” she said with a chuckle. The same major continued to assign her more books, which were stored in boxes. With the collection in disarray, Charcut took it upon herself to reorganize the office with a numbered shelving system. “He was so impressed. He couldn’t believe how organized it was,” she recalled. Throughout this time, bomb sirens would go off sending everyone to a nearby train station which served as a bomb shelter. Asked if she saw a lot of damage, she replied, “Oh yea.” “I worked my fanny off and my bosses were very impressed. They said I deserved to be a lieutenant, but I couldn’t without college. I was a tech sergeant, one before a lieutenant,” though she later enrolled in business college at night. Charcut’s grade school education was in North Chicago, where she moved at 5 years old from Chicago. There was a polish school in town that her parents wanted her to attend. One of her classmates through high school was a man named Ed Charcut. When she returned after serving three years in the military, they were reacquainted at a social gathering. Not long after, Irene and her mother had two tickets to go to an ice show in Chicago, but her mother backed out at the last minute. She decided to ask Ed and he did. “A couple of months after that I had a ring. He had a brother in Texas who was a priest and he said he’d come in August to marry us,” Charcut said of the whirlwind romance. “He was a great husband,” she added. Together they had four children of their own and raised another three foster children that they treated as their own. Charcut worked as a stenographer at Johnson Motors in Waukegan, and this so-called homebody has never slowed down. Because she speaks Polish fluently, she has helped countless Polish woman find jobs as caregivers over the last 25 years. She keeps their names on cards in boxes lined up on a shelf near her favorite chair in the living room. Paper, pens and a telephone are always within arm’s reach. For the last 32 years she has volunteered 3,243 hours of service on Sunday mornings at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, where she also offers her skills as a Polish interpreter if needed. Charcut’s longtime friend and constant companion, Lottie Sieka, 64, has volunteered 1,955 hours over 23 years. On Saturday, Charcut will become the first female veteran to travel to Washington, D.C. through the Lake County Honor Flight program, which takes local veterans to see the Capital’s war memorials. “I’m so excited,” she said, adding that Lottie is going with her. “I also like that Lottie gets to see more of America.” Charcut will be travelling with seven other World War II veterans, eight from the Korean War, and three from the Vietnam War, at no cost to the veterans.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:47:23 +0000
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