Adapted by Todd DePastino from Scott Masters’ Crestwood history class’s April 2023 interview
Burton Lieberman was born in Pittsburgh on February 8, 1926, and grew up near Highland Park, where a kid could wander all day and feel like the world was wide. He had two sisters, a hardworking mother at home, and a father who’d arrived in the United States as a boy from Lithuania/Russia, not speaking English, with a note pinned to his lapel so someone in Baltimore would know who he was and where to send him.
Burton’s father made his way to relatives in Pennsylvania, learned the butchering trade, and eventually became a kosher butcher in Pittsburgh. Burton was raised in an observant Jewish household, in a neighborhood of immigrants—Italian, Polish, and others—where people often “got along because we had to get along.”
Like all Americans of his generation, Burton’s childhood was marked by the Great Depression. He remembered unemployment and “hobo jungles” near the park, men warming themselves at fires and cooking what they could. His own family stayed afloat—his father worked steadily and even managed to buy a two-door 1929 Pontiac.
Burton’s memories are full of city-kid details: streetcars, a day-long run of serials at the Enright Theater, the icebox years when the iceman delivered blocks of ice and a boy could chew on chips of it like candy. He also remembered the great public works of the New Deal era, especially the Civilian Conservation Corps, and watching young men at work building walls and structures in the parks.
World events didn’t stay far away. Burton remembered hearing about Nazi persecution, and the fear in his house as Germany swept into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. News came that relatives on his father’s side had been murdered, and Burton watched his father sit shiva, helpless with grief.
When war came home for Americans on December 7, 1941, Burton saw it first as a headline—“Pearl Harbor…”—on a neighborhood newsstand as he walked home from school. Like many teenagers, he assumed the war would surely be over by the time he was old enough to serve.
It wasn’t. Burton’s last year of high school was interrupted by the draft. When he turned 18, he was called up and made a choice that shaped the rest of his life. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy rather than go into the Army, persuaded by a friend who told him bluntly that Army life meant mud and misery. The Navy, he’d heard, meant a bunk, hot meals, and—maybe—“see the world.”
Training and the Atlantic War
Burton Lieberman went to boot camp at the Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland, a site the Navy had taken over as wartime manpower surged. He remembered it as a beautiful former academy setting, and he also recalled training time at Aberdeen, Maryland, near the proving grounds.
After training, he was sent to sea on a brand-new destroyer, the USS Borie (DD-704), for a shakedown cruise. Burton’s rating was Yeoman, the shipboard equivalent of clerical/administrative work, but he also found himself drawn into the newer electronic side of the Navy: radar. He described the radar shack high above the superstructure, like a modern crow’s nest, where blips on the screen could mean aircraft, ships or danger.
Burton later served aboard the USS Gandy, doing radar/electronics watch and helping with navigation and detection. His ship’s main mission during the European war was Atlantic convoy escort, protecting troop and supply ships crossing to England against German U-boats. Burton estimated he made six to eight crossings while the war in Europe was still raging. The work was tense and repetitive: scanning, plotting, watching for submarines “lurking off the Atlantic coast,” trying to cut the lifeline between the United States and Britain.
Burton said his ship detected U-boats and dropped depth charges, and he remembered debris coming to the surface as proof they had destroyed a submarine. He also remembered the Atlantic itself as an enemy: a brutal gale in the North Atlantic that rolled the ship hard enough to make the crew fear capsizing, swaying so far “almost flat on our side.”
When liberty finally came, he used it. He remembered shore leave in Cardiff, Wales, then traveling on to London, where the Blitz had left whole areas blasted and broken. Even so, young sailors found their way to Piccadilly Circus, the bright center of a dimmed city.
From Victory in Europe to Occupied Japan
On a return voyage after delivering a ship safely to England, Burton’s crew received word that Germany had surrendered—the war in Europe was over. With the U-boat threat gone, orders shifted: through the Panama Canal, into the Pacific, and onward.
Burton’s war ultimately carried him into the early months of the occupation of Japan, centered around the naval base at Yokosuka. He described arriving in a country saturated with wartime propaganda depicting Americans as monsters. At first, he said, civilians literally drew their shades when Americans walked the streets. Burton and other sailors were housed in former Japanese barracks facilities—intact buildings in a landscape that still held the scars of war and defeat.
Over time, Burton Lieberman did what he often did in life: he talked to people. He remembered exchanging dollars for Japanese currency, walking city streets that in some areas seemed surprisingly undamaged, and gradually seeing fear loosen into curiosity. Burton enjoyed meeting local residents. In one telling memory, he described Japanese children learning that Americans carried Hershey bars, and how gestures as small as candy could cut through suspicion.
He also volunteered for an Army Special Services trip to Tokyo, which put him in Army-issued clothing and carried him into a city that was, as he put it, “a different world.” He remembered the names of theaters and entertainment venues, the sense of hostilities ending, and the strange feeling of living in a place that had been a fierce enemy only months earlier.
Coming Home
When Burton Lieberman finally returned to Pittsburgh, home felt like reality after a long stretch in a fantasy world.
During the war, Burton sent much of his pay home rather than spending it in port. He hoped his parents would use it. Instead, his mother saved every penny. When he came home, she handed him the bankbook—money set aside for his future. Like a lot of young veterans in 1946–47, Burton did what he’d been unable to do during wartime rationing and production limits: he bought a car. With help from family connections in the auto business, he bought a Plymouth convertible, a happy symbol of release, youth, and the start of the next chapter.
Celebrating Burton at 100
Burton Lieberman will turn 100 years old on February 8, 2026. His story holds a century’s worth of history: immigration, Depression, war, and the emergence of a new world in the 1940s. We salute you, Burton!
