Charles van Order was a student surgeon at 31 when, in 1941, he joined the US Army as a physician. He was a descendant of Gijs van Garderen who came to America from Heerde, Gelderland.
Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation, discussed him in a 1999 C-SPAN interview.
by Tom Brokaw
I feel very close to Dr. Charles Van Gorder because of my own father-in-law, who had similar experiences, and never ever talked about them. Dr. Van Gorder — I mean, this is an extraordinary story — he jumped on D-Day and they did something unusual. They decided not to set up well behind the front lines, instead they were gonna jump into the middle of the action and set up a MASH unit so that he could operate on young men, and he was operating on them.
By 9:00 in the morning, they had 300 or 400 casualties. He was captured later, a prisoner of war, almost died a couple of times during that experience. His closest friend, John Rodda, they kind of kept each other alive.
They made their way back through Poland, came back. They were gonna go to fellowships here in New York, have big distinguished practices. And he went to visit his family down in Andrews, North Carolina, and saw that they needed a physician. Got his friend, they went down there, set up this very small clinic and they were the doctors there forevermore, delivered all the babies, set all the bones, built a hospital.
I mean, that’s really what has made this country what it is today, what these people did when they came back.
Copyright: National Cable Satellite Corporation
Thomas John Brokaw’s surname descends from Broucard, the name of French Huguenots from Burgundy who fled to Holland. They married Dutch girls, such as Marietje van Cleef, daughter of a family from Rhenen and Zutphen. Marietje married Jan Brokaw. Tom’s middle name is John, for Marietje’s husband Jan.
