LENHART AND YVONNE HOFFMAN

"Life changed so drastically," Yvonne Hoffman declared about the affect World War II had on her and those around her. 

She was just ten years old when Hitler marched into Poland.  The man she was later to marry, Lenhart Hoffman, and another boy from the Ritzville area were the very first two men drafted in that area when the draft law went into effect six months before Pearl Harbor was attacked and war declared.  Yvonne and Lenhart's lives met a year after he got out of the service and they were married December 5, 1946.  But the war years took their toll on both of them.

According to an account Lenhart Hoffman wrote for the January 1998 Baptist Bugler, Oakesdale First Baptist Church's newsletter, he was born in an old hay shed on a farm his dad worked near Ritzville in 1920.  When he was five his dad went to work on the railroad and the family moved to Ralston where he started school and had to begin learning English.  His parents had emigrated from Odessa, Russia when they were just nine and three years old.  The communists had taken their land.

On October 1, 1941, when he was twenty-one, Lenhart was inducted into the Army.  After the war he went to Oakesdale where his family had opened a restaurant.  It was there that he met Yvonne.

Yvonne Harnoes was born in Rosalia in 1930, a descendant of French Canadians on her dad's side.  Her mom came from Tennessee.  Her memories of World War II survival are closely related to the house where she now lives in Oakesdale, Uncle Jasper Webb's house.  Her father died when she was young and she and her mother and siblings lived in Spokane with their grandmother.  The family spent summers with Uncle Jasper, a mail carrier for forty years, and his wife Buna.

Yvonne fondly remembers the day Uncle Jasper taught her how to stop being afraid of a cow that liked to try to push the little girl up against the barn.  He had Yvonne pick up a heavy piece of wood and smack the cow right between her eyes.  "From then on the cow didn't bother me a bit," Yvonne smiled,  "and when I went out to bring the cows into the barn, she came right along."

Her uncle and aunt raised cows, pigs, and chickens during the war. She recalls people coming to the house, leaving money and picking up milk, butter, and eggs that the Webbs had in abundance, with no ration coupons exchanging hands.  Her extended family was quite large and they did put their coupon books together to get sugar.  Then they would head to Penewawa, long before the river was dammed, and pick fresh produce and fruit.  They all worked together to can it and then stored it in the Webb's storage shed.  Uncle Jasper would fill his truck from time to time with eggs, butter, jars of cottage cheese, meat out of the freezer, and canned fruits and vegetables and take them to Yvonne's mom and grandma in Spokane.  "Everybody helped everybody," Yvonne explained.

One of Yvonne Hoffman's most vivid memories of World War II was hearing Hitler's voice on the radio, which her grandmother had on all the time.  Grandma also read the whole newspaper to the family, insisting that the whole household listen and of course the war was the main focus of the news.  As a young girl Yvonne was drawn by the charisma and fanaticism of Hitler, at the same time feeling deeply unsettled by his manner of speech.  She also remembers seeing sandwich boards on the streets of Spokane, one in particular showing a Japanese soldier holding a rifle pointed at the viewer, its bayonet dripping with blood.

Lenhart Hoffman saw that image of the war in person.  As a Tech V Sergeant his lot was drawn to go to the Pacific.  He landed first in Hawaii where he met a Hawaiian minister and his family who took him in and showed him such kindness he never forgot them.  He told later how he borrowed the family truck, backed it up briskly against an avocado tree, and a full load of avocados dropped into the truck bed.  He also saw a volcano erupt on the island of Hawaii.

But then he was assigned to a Cargo Division and charged with going onto islands, such as Iwo Jima, after the Marines took them to clean up the carnage and bring back bodies of fallen Americans.  He told Yvonne about going into caves where he saw dead bodies of men who had been tortured and mutilated by the Japanese.  He saw parts of bodies hanging up, having had their arms or legs cut off.  The first body he tried to pick up fell apart. 

"I started to run," he told Yvonne many years later.  "I ran and ran and ran."  But he returned to duty because he was honor-bound to stand up and sacrifice for others, a trait he carried with him all his life.

He also learned that when he was on a ship and it came time to land he either jumped in or was pushed, and he was not a swimmer.  In spite of that he came home unscathed, while two-thirds of his Division did not come back at all.

After his time in the war Lenhart returned to take up a study in mechanics under the G.I. Bill of Rights which also provided him with tools and ninety dollars a month to get him started.  He and Yvonne had three children, adopted two, and helped raise sixty-two foster children.  When the children all left home he and Yvonne decided it was time to earn GEDs (General Equivalence Diplomas) at the ages of fifty-seven and forty-seven.  They struggled and laughed their way through algebra and geometry, read, reviewed, got tested, and were presented certificates of completion at a Baptist Church service in front of all their life long friends.  Yvonne continues to take courses from the University of Idaho.

Lenhart passed away in 1999, after multiple health complications, just a little over a year after he wrote his story for the Baptist Bugler.  His closing comment in that article well expressed his life.  "God was and is my path from the time of my birth until this day.  Praise God!"