On July 4, 1929, the Pensacola News Journal ran a photo accompanied by an article about four little cousins playing “war” and waving their American flag during the 4th of July celebrations downtown. In the photo, the boys appeared from left to right as Walter Frederick Brockmann, John Edward Brockmann, William Gunn Peterson, and Raymond Reinhardt Holm. Now twenty-three years later each of the four boys was playing war for real in the South Pacific. Each of the boys went their separate ways in the military, but all wound up in the same theater of the war. Walter enlisted in the US Navy in August 1942 and a week later his brother John followed him. Walter was assigned to a carrier for the Battle of Leyte Gulf and John to the cruiser USS Salt Lake City for the invasion and bloodbath of Tawara. Their cousin William Gunn Peterson went a different route and enlisted in the US Marines the following month after his cousins.
The fourth little boy Raymond was carrying the flag in the 1929 photo. He was the first of the four to enlist by joining the Navy in January 1942 shortly after Pearl Harbor. By 1945, he was a hospital corpsman stationed aboard a battleship in the Pacific. All saw some of the bloodiest combat of the war from Tarawa to Leyte Gulf. A fifth cousin and Raymond's brother, Lt. John Angus Holm Jr. was killed in action with the Army on Okinawa on April 21, 1945. Only two of the cousins in the photo crossed paths during the war. The two brothers John and Raymond ran into each other after their ships happen to share the same port. John would retire from the Navy on July 5, 1962 before going to work with the Charlotte Aircraft Corporation for twenty years. Raymond was the cousin to pass away in 1967 followed by William Peterson in 2000.
Their passing was followed by the Brockman brothers John Edward’s death in Cary, North Carolina on October 22, 2008 preceded by his twin sister Dorothy Brockman Schwandt in 2007. Last to pass on was Walter Frederick Brockmann in 2012 after a twenty-year naval career. Thus, four patriotic little boys came full circle from playing war to winning the greatest global conflict the world has ever seen! May our children and grandchildren never see another one of its like!
Pensacola News Journal, July 4, 1929
Left to right: Walter Frederick Brockmann, John Edward Brockmann,
William Gunn Peterson, and Raymond Reinhardt Holm
Pensacola News Journal March 18, 1945
Walter Frederick "Fred" Brockmann (1923-2012)
John Edward Brockmann (1925-2008)
