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Hudson was a military photographer in 1943,
While deployed in Egypt, Jim Hudson carried 'short snorters,' or foreign currency stapled together. Celebrities would autograph the currency. Jack Benny signed these bills.
Hudson served
Post Oak resident Jim Hudson, 90, was an Army postal officer and photographer, then served |
By CATHY DYSON
Jim Hudson says he was just an ordinary guy from Philadelphia until World War II dawned and average people like him were thrust into incredible situations.
But Hudson's missions, which varied from photographing world leaders to spying behind enemy lines, aren't the only amazing feats for the man who lives in the Post Oak area of Spotsylvania County.
Hudson is 90, but his memory is as sharp as the dagger he carried into war.
In 1944, after three years as a paratrooper, postal clerk and photographer, Hudson became an undercover intelligence officer in Albania with the Office of Strategic Services.
He'd heard about a group of American nurses whose plane crashed behind enemy lines. He volunteered for the mission, envisioning himself as a knight who would come to the rescue. (See accompanying story.)
But Hudson needed a crash course in combat training, so a British officer showed him how to hold the stiletto's handle as daintily as a demitasse cup.
That way, the weapon would become an extension of his hand, if he ever had to grope in the darkness for an enemy he couldn't see.
The knowledge saved Hudson, when he had to defend himself against a German soldier in an Albanian cave.
Hudson still has the knife, along with many other pieces of the past.
Even though he has spent much of his later years writing about the war--five books so far, with more planned--"Captain Jim" hardly seems like a throwback to another era.
He is active and healthy, up-to-date on current events and savvy about computers.
He has no aches and pains and says he has never had a headache in his life.
"I used to walk like a soldier until last year," said Hudson, who's the same size (6 feet tall and 130 pounds) as when the war ended. "But now I walk like a lousy old man."
He's married to a woman 30 years younger. He became a father for the fifth time at 61.
He still works full time, gathering teams of engineers who recommend cost-saving measures on big public projects.
He and his wife, Pat, believe he's still going strong for two reasons. The prayers of his mother went a long way into the future, Pat said, and may have been as powerful as his positive thinking.
"I could always see something pleasurable in any situation," Hudson said, "and I think it really was a help. I really do."
Even when he was stuck in the Albanian mountains, with poor peasants who barely had enough to survive. Hudson wrote about how they shared their meager meals of cornbread and water in "Beyond OSS," published in 2004.
"In the field, the men accepted anything with a fatalistic attitude. Eat and enjoy was the theme of the day. The alternative was gripe and die."
Ancient history
Freelance writer Arch Di Peppe of Stafford County interviewed Hudson two years ago and was amazed by how engaging and intelligent he was--and that he was "a heck of a nice guy."
"He's done so much, and he's got that confidence and strength," Di Peppe said. "He's forgotten more than I'll ever know."
It doesn't seem that Hudson has forgotten anything.
As he talked recently, he joked that events he witnessed must seem like ancient history now.
He put every story into context, explaining what was happening in the rest of the world when he was sent to Egypt or Italy.
He laughed about the haphazard way he became an official photographer in the military, a man who stood in the same room as Allied leaders debated which countries would have the "sphere of influence" over other nations.
Because Hudson earned an ROTC commission, he was a second lieutenant when he joined in 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor.
He was 24, older than most soldiers. He had earned his degree as a chemical engineer at Gettysburg College, and Army officials figured he was suited for something besides the infantry.
He ended up with the title U.S. Army photo mail officer, which took him in two vastly different directions.
First, a "crazy adjutant general" decided he was qualified to be a postal officer, even though Hudson had never been behind the counter of a post office.
Hudson was put in charge of mail distribution to troops all over Africa, India and Pakistan. He was later replaced by a lieutenant colonel who brought 23 clerks with him, but Hudson says that's another story.
the inner circles
After Hudson worked in the mailroom, the same crazy general decreed he would become a photographer.
That led him into the inner circles of world leaders.
At a 1943 conference in Cairo, he photographed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who remains one of his heroes.
He escorted the wife of Chiang Kai-shek around the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx. Her dainty shoes weren't suited for the rough and rocky terrain, but the wife of the Chinese leader never complained.
Hudson saw the respect other military forces afforded American Gen. George C. Marshall, and the way they all stood--voluntarily--when Marshall entered a room.
And he was among those who never photographed FDR in his wheelchair.
As Hudson explained, the world took a different view of disabilities in those days. Those with handicaps were seen as flawed, and often kept at home, out of sight.
Roosevelt never used his wheelchair in public, and he convinced voters that he had recovered from the illness that actually left him paralyzed from the waist down.
When new photographers joined the military, the veterans--such as Capt. Jim Hudson--made sure they knew FDR's wheelchair wasn't fair game.
"That was a form of respect," Hudson said. "It was amazing. There was so much more courtesy in those days."
Cathy Dyson: 540/374-5425|
Jim Hudson has good genes. His mother lived to be 95, and his father 100. His older sister Grace died last year at 96.
Grace was fiercely protective of Jim after he almost died from spinal meningitis at 3. When Jim became a photographer during World War II, he regularly sent home film, pictures and detail-filled captions. Grace became his personal librarian, faithfully preserving the information. "Grace treated me like a hero," he said. |
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Jim Hudson believes he's healthy at 90 because of positive thinking and a diet that includes:
no white bread fresh fruits, vegetables a little meat lots of eggs chocolate daily During the war, he carried an Army-issued bar as hard as baking chocolate. He would scrape it against his tongue, instead of biting off pieces, so it would last. In the mountains of Albania, one bar got him through three months. |
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When the North African campaign ended in World War II, so did Jim Hudson's duties as a military photographer.
He was looking for a new assignment when he heard about a mission to rescue 13 American nurses whose plane crashed in Albania. Hudson volunteered and became a spy with the Office of Strategic Services. It took him eight months to make contact with the women, who had hidden among the mountain peasants. Ten of them already had been escorted to Italy, and Hudson helped the others get The Germans probably wouldn't have harmed the nurses, but they would have publicized the fact that the Americans couldn't keep their women safe, Hudson said. He became the senior intelligence officer in the country and performed 33 missions behind enemy lines. He ate wild goats in the mountains, frogs in the swamps and cornbread among the natives. The peasants shared their meager belongings with Hudson--and paid dearly for it. "They'd give us anything they had and they were all killed" after the war by Albanian communists. "I still dream about that sometimes," he said. |
