Ray Griffin of Glover holds a photo of his brother, Everett Griffin, who died a hero’s death in World War II. Ray works to keep the memory of his brother and all veterans who died at war alive

The devil himself most likely couldn’t perpetrate the horrors the men sitting facing justice at the Nuremberg Trials in Nuremberg, Germany, were accused of committing on the world during World War II. They were accused of being some of the master minds behind the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of people of Jewish descent, and others they viewed as undesirables. The horrors became known as the holocaust.
Sitting in seat 187 of the observers’ section during one day of the several-months-long trial was a young soldier from Barton, Vermont. He wasn’t there to testify, and he wasn’t there seeking revenge for the brother he’d lost to German artillery fire. Instead, he was there partly on duty, but mostly to watch history unfold.
“I knew this was history taking place,” Griffin said as he went through his memorabilia from his war years, including his one-day journey to the Nuremberg Trials. “I never wanted to forget any of my memories.”
The Nuremberg Trials began on November 20, 1945 with the verdict handed down on October 1, 1946.
Although Griffin’s early years were filled with hardships—much brought on by the Great Depression, followed by the loss of his father to illness, then his brother to war—he is far from a bitter man. Instead of letting sorrow consume him he went onto become a husband, parent, and a prominent dentist in Bellows Falls, Vermont.
“It wouldn’t have helped to be bitter,” he said. “I just made the best of life.”
Now 87 years old, and long retired as a dentist, Griffin lives in Glover with his high school sweetheart and wife of several decades, Olive (Urie) Griffin. They are the parents of five grown children.
Born in Newport Center on January 1, 1922, to Ray and Grace (Rogers) Griffin—one of six children, four boys and two girls—Ray Griffin has good memories of the community of his birth although he moved from there when he was only four years old. His mother was a schoolteacher at the Newport Graded School, and his father was a mechanic. Reflecting back, he said the family was quite well off considering the times. Then in 1925 the family packed up and moved to Albany for life on the farm.
They settled on what to this day is known as the Hayden Farm. The farmhouse is part of the folklore of the county because for many decades some people have insisted it is haunted.
“I don’t know if it is haunted or not,” Griffin chuckled. Although he was about four when he moved there and he was only eight when the family moved out of the house in 1928, he does remember one incident that scared the daylights out of him, his brothers, and some friends.
He explained that on the third level of the house there was a dance hall. Under the floor was a space where he and his brothers could climb down into and crawl around. Some people have told him the space was used to hide slaves escaping from the south on the way to Canada during the days of slavery. Others said that it was used as a stopover point for people smuggling Chinese people through the area (which was common at the turn of the twentieth century).
One time we went in there and we touched something furry,” Griffin said. “Of course it scared the hell out of us and we went down and got my uncle Lesley, and he was quite a character anyways. He reached in there and got his hand on that furry thing and yanked it out of there and threw it into the bunch of us kids standing there. We all made a dash toward that stairway all at once. We all tumbled down the stairs.  He said he’d never seen so many kids go down those stairs so fast in his life.”
“It was just an old fox skin,” Griffin laughed, thinking back all of those years.
Not only did he not find any ghosts in the house he didn’t find any other of the mysteries some people insisted lurked there. “People claimed there was a tunnel from the basement of that house to the barn but we could never find it.”
By the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash that sent the United States into what became known as the Great Depression, the Griffin family was well into a depression of their own.
The family’s herd of cattle contracted TB and their horses were diagnosed with colic.
“We lost our herd of cows and we lost our horses,” Griffin said. With their money supply gone his parents fell behind on their bills. Then one day, while on an outing to the Albany Village Fair, most likely trying to escape some of their worries for a time, they returned home to a horrible surprise that Griffin remembers to this day. The bank had seized the homestead.
“When we came home the house was all sealed up, and the sheriff was inside the front door and he wouldn’t let us in the house so my dad piled us into what looked like an old pickup truck. What it was was an old sedan with the back part cut off.”
The family drove a few miles to Barton where Griffin said his father haggled with the banker to at least have the bank give them a place so his children could have a roof over their heads. Finally the banker capitulated and allowed the family to move into a farmhouse on Elm Street.
“At least we had a roof over our heads,” Griffin said. “Times were rough.” This was the beginning of life in Barton for the Griffin family. 
His father worked at a number of jobs—as a mechanic, a laborer for the town of Barton, and as a plumber. When one of young Ray Griffin’s sisters married during the depth of the Depression, she and her new husband moved in with the family. With his father and his new brother-in-law combining their incomes Griffin said they were able to survive some horribly challenging times. He said his father and brother-in-law also hunted a lot to put food on the table.
“They hunted a lot of rabbits so we ate a lot of rabbits during the Depression.”
Death came to the Griffin household in 1939 when Ray Griffin’s father died in 1939 at 57 years old of lead poisoning. Three of the family’s six children were still in school, with Griffin a junior at Barton Academy.
After graduating from Barton Academy in 1940, Griffin enrolled at Lyndon Normal School (now Lyndon State College) to become a teacher. It wasn’t his first choice of colleges or professions, but it was all the family could afford. Then on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “I was torn up about whether I should join the military. I guess most of us thought we’d eventually end up there.”
He quit college to train as a mechanist, a profession that was in high demand during the war. He trained at the Merkland factory that was located about where Orleans County’s weekly newspaper, the Chronicle, is located today on Water Street in Barton. In time he ended up working as a machinist at Jones and Lamson in Springfield, Vermont. Being a machinist he could avoid military service, but he’d hear nothing of it.
“I said, ‘No, that isn’t right,’”
The Glover man ended up joining the Army Air Force in 1943. While in radio school training in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in March 1945, he received news that rocks him to this day. One of his younger brothers, Everett, a member of the 10th Mountain Division, had been killed in action on March 3.  He had been killed in the Italian Alps.
Griffin said his brother joined the military in 1943 when he was still in high school. Later, when he learned that the military was looking for men who were comfortable on skis to become members of the mountain division, he said his brother threw in his name. As a member of the Barton Academy Ski Team, Everett knew his way around on skis. His brother trained at Camp Hale in Colorado and Camp Swift in Texas.
Speaking with deep admiration, Griffin said his brother was already a seasoned combat veteran by that day in March when he lost his life. He told what he understands happened the day his brother was killed.
“They secured their positions somewhere in the Alps when they started taking some German artillery,” Griffin said. “He [Everett Griffin] volunteered to go out when something went wrong with the communications. He was a field radio operator. He volunteered to get the location of the German artillery back to the officers so U.S. artillery could take out the German artillery. But he was right out there in the mist of it, right out in the open. Pretty soon the artillery was falling around him. He was starting to dig a fox hole when he got hit.”
Although the U.S. military insisted his brother was killed by enemy fire, Griffin said that soldiers with his brother that day said he may have actually been killed by “friendly fire”—artillery fired by American troops. If that is the case, the Glover man doesn’t seem bitter.
“There was so much confusion,” he said. The pain of losing his brother was made a bit easier by the fact that his brother was awarded the Silver Star for heroism posthumously. It is Griffin’s understanding that if his brother hadn’t volunteered for that last mission, the casualties in his unit would have been far greater. “Of course, though, I was devastated. He was probably the closest to me of any of my brothers.”
Everett Griffin is buried in Newport Center.
“The day of his interment in Newport Center Cemetery was probably the worst day of my life,” Ray Griffin said. “After leaving the cemetery I just broke down the worst I ever did in my life. I don’t think I ever got over it.” To this day he is awed about how his mother handled every parent’s nightmare of losing a child.
“She was a good solid Baptist from Newport Center,” Griffin said proudly. “I don’t think the word ‘bitter’ was in her vocabulary.” Her husband had died young, leaving her with school-age children, now she’d lost one of her sons in war. To make matters worse, shortly after her son was killed the bank evicted her from her home. But, he said, nothing made her bitter. She just found a new place to live and moved on with her life, cherishing her surviving children.
With America now at war, Griffin said every military death reported in the news reminds him of his brother, and the roller coaster ride of emotions he has experienced since his brother’s death decades ago.
“I just shudder when I hear the news that more Americans have been killed,” he said. “I know what their families are going through.”
As sad as he is to this day about the tragic loss of his little brother, Griffin said his brother died for the greater good of the country and the world. And, although his brother was killed he continued to have a positive effect on his older brother’s life. “It probably made me a better person. It made me challenge myself and I always thought about what he would want me to do with my life.”
The death of his brother didn’t end the war for Ray Griffin. He was preparing to serve as a radioman aboard a B29 bomber. Its mission was to take part in an all-out invasion of the Japanese homeland. But before the invasion could take place the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, bringing a sudden end to the war. He was instead deployed to Europe, assigned to the Air Transport Command based out of Frankfurt, Germany, transporting servicemen, including officers around Europe.
However, before he even went overseas there was one thing he wanted to do first—marry his high school sweetheart, Olive Urie. They married on September 22, 1945.
Eventually Griffin was assigned to serve aboard a plane that ferried Navy Rear Admiral William Glasford around Europe.
“We flew all over Europe, wherever he wanted to go.”
Many of the cities were all bombed out, he said. He had high praise for the German people. “The Germans were great. They were just people who were misled…. Hitler was a complete dictator. He just took over. People didn’t dare question him. Hitler created a big war machine.”
Then one day he said the admiral decided he needed, or at least wanted, to go to Nuremberg, Germany. This was at the same time as what became known as the Nuremberg Trials, the prosecution of accused Nazi war criminals, was taking place. The admiral managed to get passes for himself and his men to listen in on the trial for a while one day.
“I thought that was great he was able to get us passes,” Griffin said. “I’m glad I was able to go.”
There were 22 people on trial. Griffin said the defendant sitting closest to him was Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).
“Well I think he was a little bit like Saddam Hussein, a little arrogant, but he didn’t mouth off like Saddam did.” And, considering the number of armed guards stationed in back of the defendants, Griffin said he doubts the judge would have put up with Goering or any of the others becoming unruly.
During much of the day at the trial, Griffin said witnesses testified against at least one of the defendants.
Of the 22 men on trial 11 of them were sentenced to hang, including Goering. However Goering committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill that somebody spirited into his cell. The others sentenced to death were hung on October 16, 1946.
If he had to guess, Griffin said he thinks the men, especially those sentenced to death, were probably surprised by their sentences. “I think they thought they were going to get off, at least with lighter sentences. Although he said he wasn’t surprised by most of the sentences, he was surprised by the harshness of the sentence handed down to Rudolf Hess, a deputy to Adolph Hitler. Receiving a life sentence, he died in prison in 1987 at 93 years old when he committed suicide. Hess’s story was bizarre to say the least.  Seemingly mentally unbalanced, in 1941 he flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 to Scotland. Once over that country he bailed out and parachuted to the ground. He was quickly captured. Hess insisted that he was there to help stop the war between England and Germany.
Following his military career Griffin returned to Vermont. He tried getting a job at his former employer, but there were no jobs. At the time he remembers being upset by the fact that here he had served his country only to return home and not have the job he left behind. After doing a bit of farm work he was accepted to the University of Vermont. Following graduation from the Burlington-based college, he went on to graduate as a dentist from Baltimore Dental School at the University of Maryland. He and his wife settled in Saxtons River, Vermont. Mr. Griffin set up his dental practice in Bellows Falls and his wife worked as a nurse. Their five children also kept them busy.
Busy or not, Griffin has never forgotten his little brother who gave his life for his country and has found ways to honor him. On the 50th anniversary of his brother’s death he and his wife donated money to the Lake Region Union High School Ski Team in Barton in Everett’s memory. The team also held a ski race at Lake Region in memory of Everett Griffin.
One of Ray Griffin’s proudest moments in remembering his brother was when he personally helped unveil the original plaque at the Killington Ski Area to the Vermonters of the 10th Mountain Division who died in World War II, including his brother. “I appreciated it very much. It was a very nice affair.” He was also in Stowe when a similar plaque was unveiled. In addition he has made many visits to the monument to the 10th Mountain Division that stands in Stowe.  “I have been to the monument many times,” he said. “It’s just a beautiful monument.”
Griffin said he feels, and he thinks all Americans should feel, an obligation to the servicemen and women who died for their country.
“They are soon forgotten,” Griffin said. “We have to keep their memories alive. They gave up their lives for us. 

Everett Griffin wrote the following poem while he was in the military. His brother Ray keeps a copy of it in his family archives.

A December Sight

It is a moonlight night. Every star in the heavens is bright.
And high on a mountain top,
Could be seen the sparkling snow,
And giant pines row on row,
With their giant branches raised,
They look like God sending His praises.

The stillness of the night,
And the stillness of the trees
Is broken by a soft,
But gentle breeze.

But such this picture faded away,
And God brought the new,
And welcomed day.
There are no stars in the sky,
but not for long will it stay,
For it is a winter day.

The sun is sinking in the west,
And people now go to rest.
Soon the moon will sail across the sky,
and in the cold but gentle breeze,
Will stand the tall bleak trees.
Then children kneel to pray, At the end of this day.