From the outside, Charles “Chuck” Blemler’s home looks like any other, but inside is a living museum: hand-carved wood figures, woven baskets, artifacts from another century. And tucked within those rooms is the story of a man whose life represents the grit, sacrifice, and resilience of America’s World War II generation.
Born on December 8, 1926, in Ohio, during a midnight snowstorm, Chuck Blemler came into the world. Having a childhood on the farm meant hard work, but it laid the foundation for the stamina and strength that would carry him through basic training and into war.
In 1945, fresh out of high school, Blemler was drafted. His older brothers were unfit for service due to infantile paralysis, and his younger brother was too young, making Chuck the only Blemler boy to serve in World War II.
At Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Blemler was introduced to the Army and found it a step up from farm life.
“Two of us, every evening, two hours before we were out training… we would have to run back to the barracks and light a heater that heated up the water,” Blemler said.
While others struggled, especially the “city boys,” Blemler’s years on the farm gave him an edge.
“I can’t complain,” he said of the Army food. “Too much spam… but they were good meals.”
His training soon escalated when he and a friend volunteered for paratrooper school at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was the boldness of youth.
“Fat, dumb, and happy,” he described himself. His mother, horrified, wrote him a letter: she didn’t think she’d raised “stupid kids.”
Jump school was challenging. Soldiers had to leap from 250-foot towers, climb long rope spans, and do calisthenics day and night.
“We had to go hand over hand all the way to that distance,” Blemler said, with nothing but hard ground below.
One friend, terrified before a jump, broke down crying inside the plane, he said.
Soldiers jumped in full gear: gas masks strapped to their legs, belts of M1 ammo, two rows of grenades, and rifles tied upside down to keep from snapping when the chute deployed. “When we trained to jump behind enemy lines,” he said, “we’d jump with a gas mask on our leg… a belt full of M1 ammunition… and two strips of hand grenades.”
Blemler’s unit was deployed to Japan, originally slated to be part of the mainland invasion. But fate and the atomic bomb changed everything. “We landed right down where they dropped the two bombs, and Japan gave up.”
With combat off the table, Blemler spent a year helping with postwar recovery. His job was cleaning, repairing, and shipping samurai swords to wounded paratroopers.
“I had to get a guy that knew swords, had worked on them, and he would… pick out swords, some of our swords, and polish them and clean them and repair them.” Working with a Japanese interpreter and swordmaker, he restored blades with reverence for a year.
Finally, with the war behind him, the Army asked Blemler to reenlist.
“I believed I had enough,” he replied. Instead, he hitchhiked back to Ohio. Today, Blemler is still as sharp and giving as ever. A proud member of the All Veteran Honor Guard, he fights for proper 21-gun salutes at every veteran’s funeral. He carves wood like his father, weaves baskets like a master, and fills his home with beauty, warmth, and history.
