Meyer "Mike" Chessin

photo courtesy of Meyer Chessin	photo by Thais Boise
Meyer "Mike" Chessin, now 82, taught botany at the University of Montana for more than 40 years.	Chessin as a 23-year-old college student at the University of Ohio in Columbus in 1944.

Veteran finds value of peace in war

by Jared Ritz
Veterans History Project

When Meyer “Mike” Chessin first crossed into Germany just after the end of World War II, he was angry. Chessin was to serve as part of the American occupation in Berlin as a member of the Army’s Signal Corps, helping install radio stations to guide aircraft into a country whose leaders had just attempted to systematically destroy an entire group of people.

Chessin was Jewish — and he was mad.

photo by Thais Boise

Chessin fills out paperwork for the Veterans History Project. Chessin recalled his experiences as a Jewish American serving in Germany during World War II.

“I remember my first glimpse of a German,” he said, remembering his bus first passing into the ruined nation in October of 1945. “It was just a young boy, about 13 or 14 who was riding a bike along the way. I couldn’t believe I reacted the way I did. I literally wanted to get out of the bus and do something to that little boy. I had built up this feeling against the German people for what they had allowed.

“I stopped myself, of course. It was a terrible thing. It’s one of the things you get from war time situations.”

Chessin, now 82, had many European Jewish ancestors, many of whom he and his family had lost track of in the lead-up to the war and presumed had perished with the millions of others in concentration camps. He found himself becoming alienated from his German friends back home and furious with the German people.

One chance meeting, though, helped him put things in perspective. At the airport where Chessin was stationed outside of Berlin, he befriended a German carpenter working on the work site, who asked him home to dinner. The man wanted Chessin to come and “see what a typical German family is like.” Chessin agreed, and was surprised at the warm reaction he received, something he feels speaks to the will of the German people to keep the past in the past.

“They were all very welcoming,” he said. “Looking back at it now, it was a harbinger of what has happened in Germany since the war. The German people are a very anxious to wipe away the blot of what happened. They’re very open and progressive people, and feel that that was a blot on their history. [They’re] peaceniks, as far as I can tell. They don’t want to go through that sort of thing again.”

Raised in New York City until he was 16, Chessin was born in a mostly Jewish part of Brooklyn before moving to more secular part of the Bronx. He was raised mostly by his grandmother, who spoke strictly Yiddish. By the time he first walked to school, Chessin was fluently speaking both his grandmother’s native tongue and the language of the kids on the street.

After graduating from high school in southern California, he worked occasional jobs across the state before applying to the Marine Corps officer training program. Before his application received full review, though, the Army sent him a letter, saying he had received multiple draft notices and was now to be a part of their infantry replacement program.

Despite the seeming bad luck, Chessin actually looks at it as a blessing; most of the young officers in the Marines didn’t last too long.

His good fortune kept coming. After an intensive three-month basic training program, almost everyone in Chessin’s platoon was sent off to the fierce fighting in the Pacific. Pasadena Community College was his first destination as an Army man. Next was a three-semester stay at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he studied Communications Engineering, and, more importantly, met his wife Florence. After that, some radio work in Philadelphia and a stay at Camp Crowder, Missouri, for five months. Only then, in October of 1945, did he get sent abroad.

photo courtesy of Meyer Chessin

Chessin served in Europe and at the Kwajalein Islands in the South Pacific, missing combat in both places but still being awed by the destructive power of war. On his first trip through Berlin, finally coming two-and-a-half years after being drafted, the desperate situation the city was in showed him his “first taste of war.”

“I didn’t need much more to convince me about war when we arrived in Berlin,” Chessin said. “We couldn’t believe what we saw. It was almost all totally destroyed, bricks and rubble on the ground.

“If anything needed to convince me that war is not the way to solve problems between countries in this day in age, that certainly did. We’d seen plenty of films about the destruction, but when you see it, total destruction, and you’re actually in it, physically, it really hits you. From that point on I became very active in the peace movement.”

One film Chessin saw was the testing of hydrogen bomb, more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He remembers it vividly. The bomb explodes near a full-sized battleship; the battleship rises with the mushroom cloud, sailing thousands of feet in the air. He saw the film after the bombs in Japan had were dropped. At the time, he supported the use of the nuclear weapons, just like most people who were in the service. Now he believes it was a mistake.

"After I learned what atomic bombs were capable of doing and what they did, and the alternative approaches that could have been taken … it was not really essential,” he said.

Chessin has been an active member in the peace movement since leaving the army in May of 1946, and in September 1949 came to the University of Montana as a botany professor, where he taught until retirement in 1990.

He was an activist against war while getting his doctorate at University of California in Berkeley, mainly fighting for the disarmament of the rapidly growing nuclear stockpiles being built by the United States and the Soviet Union. He campaigned for Henry A. Wallace during his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1948 because he was on the Progressive ticket and one of his major issues was de-escalating the cold war.

“That’s when we got used to losing,” he said.

After coming to Missoula he became interested in the testing of the nuclear bombs and their effects on the earth. He helped start a group of Montana scientists whose national organization was partly responsible for getting the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty passed by Congress, which permanently banned the testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

More recently, he spoke in the fall of 2002 at an anti-nuclear bomb rally and concert at a University of Montana ballroom that was sponsored by campus activists.

"I’ve devoted myself to keeping the world a peaceful place," he said, "unfortunately not with the greatest success, but we keep at it.”

back to J-School main page

back to UM Veterans History Project page