Chapter One

The Musician

New Jersey, 1936–1941

John Francis Koplitz was born October 13, 1917, in Morristown, New Jersey, and raised Roman Catholic. Music, not the military, was his first calling. He trained at the Moseflle School of Music in Roselle, New Jersey, and became a versatile working musician, capable on piano, trumpet, violin, French horn, and bass.

From 1936 to 1941, he worked as a self-employed organist-leader, and led his own professional dance orchestra — steady work for a young musician in the years before the United States entered the war. His mother, Mrs. Edward Koplitz, lived at 118 Riverside Drive, Malvern, New Jersey, while her son built a career leading bands through New Jersey's dance halls.

Johnny Koplitz and His Orchestra performing as a small combo — trumpet, accordion, bass, and piano — beneath the band's own banner — Johnny Koplitz and His Orchestra, playing a nightclub engagement as a stripped-down combo of trumpet, accordion, bass, and piano. The trumpet player, front and center beneath the band's own banner, is almost certainly Koplitz himself — the customary spotlight position for a bandleader in publicity photographs of the era.

The band toured dance halls well beyond New Jersey. A snapshot from the road, dated by hand to the summer of 1936, places the orchestra in Harrison, Maine.

Koplitz's orchestra posed with automobiles in Harrison, Maine, summer 1936 — Koplitz's orchestra, summer 1936, on the road in Harrison, Maine. A handwritten note on the back reads: "Orchestra, Summer 1936, played for 2 months at [Fralow's?] Dance Hall." (The dance hall's name is hard to make out in the original handwriting and may be corrected if identified.)

The group also performed as a fuller, eleven-piece stage band — the same triangular podium stands seen in the combo photograph above appear here too, suggesting this was the same orchestra expanded for a larger engagement.

An eleven-piece lineup of Koplitz's orchestra on a theater stage, with saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano, and bass sections — A later, expanded lineup of Koplitz's orchestra — eleven musicians on stage, with saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano, and bass sections.

Koplitz leaning against the orchestra's own delivery truck, lettered 'Johnny Koplitz Orchestra' on the door — The orchestra's own truck, lettered "Johnny Koplitz Orchestra" on the door — likely used to haul instruments and equipment between engagements. Koplitz poses beside it.

That musical training would follow him overseas. Years later, in the Western Desert, Johnnie would find a piano in a bombed Italian church, have it hauled back to the airfield, and play for pilots who climbed onto the wings of their Spitfires to listen — the same range of talent that once filled New Jersey dance floors, now filling a desert airstrip between missions.

Chapter Two: The Volunteer →