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A war story to end all others

By Scott Craven The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Nov 10, 2012 11:54 PM

The radio room was a tight 12 feet wide by 25 feet long, and inside were tucked three soldiers, working the third shift of that May 1945 night in Reims, France.

One might have called it the graveyard shift, but all of the shifts in the radio room looked the same, day or night. This was where trained Allied high-speed radio operators sent and received messages across the battlefield of World War II, and security was paramount. There were no windows, and the door was always locked.

For those eight hours, the soldiers’ only connection to the outside world — besides the familiar electronic beeps and tones of incoming communiques — was an eye-level slot in the door through which messages passed.

Gregory Melikian was 20, from New York, and the youngest soldier in the room. He remembers how they learned to tell who was outside by the sounds their vehicles made. And at about 1 a.m. on Monday, May 7, the soldiers listened — and they knew. Three cars, by the sound; the most distinctive being the low rumbling of the limousine favored by British leaders.

So they waited. The three men, one with a cigar clenched in his teeth, sat at their stations, wondering if they were right.

Finally, at about 3:30 a.m., there came a sharp rap on the door. One of the radio operators slid open the door covering the slot, and a sheet of paper was thrust through from outside, followed by a gruff, “Send this out.”

A glance at the paper revealed nothing, just letters grouped together in nonsensical strings. But the men were sure what it said, even if they couldn’t read it.

All eyes went to Melikian. As the youngest, he was tasked for what would be the shift’s only job. He took the sheet and sat in front of the teletype, fingers poised over the keys, ready to change the world.

* * *

The 88-year-old in a loose-fitting yellow shirt from the ’70s took another sip of the chicken soup, pausing in what was at least his umpteenth telling of the tale.

“You know that was, let’s see, 67 years ago,” Melikian said, the math still coming easily after all these years. “And you don’t have to put this, but it was also 40 pounds ago. Things change.”

Indeed they do. That 20-year-old sergeant — one of history’s extras on May 7, 1945 — has long been a successful lawyer and real-estate magnate who amassed a small fortune after moving his family to Phoenix in 1969.

He sat at a quiet table in the corner of an Irish pub on the first floor of the Hotel San Carlos, a historic hotel in downtown Phoenix. Spend some time with Mr. M, as everyone in the place calls him, and you’d never know he owned the joint, though he is proud that the second-floor meeting rooms were dedicated years ago as an official wing of Luke Air Force Base, and how honored he was five years ago when he was named an honorary commander, a salute to his more than 50 years in the Air Force Reserves.

Gregarious and lively, he also speaks with the same enthusiasm when explaining the role of the Melikian Center at Arizona State University, where 22 languages are taught to those who will travel to some of the most dangerous places on the planet, where they will train soldiers and, more importantly, foster understandings between disparate cultures.

Yet it is the details of those early-morning hours in the Little Red Schoolhouse 67 years ago that fascinate people when they discover Melikian’s role. Those same details — with yet another twist — recently led to Melikian receiving one of France’s highest honors.

* * *

In early 1944, Melikian was one of thousands of American soldiers aboard the battleship-gray Queen Mary bound for war overseas, his orders still secret. He’d spent the previous year in Missouri and Wisconsin training as a high-speed radio operator, using cutting-edge technology that employed a teletype capable of sending messages faster, and often more accurately, than normal conversation.

Melikian would ultimately be assigned to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, the headquarters of Allied forces from the United States, Britain, Canada and France. The command was in Versailles when Melikian was assigned later in 1944; in early 1945, it would move to Reims. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the supreme commander, and Melikian was among the radiomen working with him in both places.

“One of us had to be with him at all times,” Melikian said. “We were his contact to the outside world. He’d be in the back seat of this Cadillac when he was out visiting various Army groups, and one of us would be in the jump seat or in the front with the driver.

“It was either us or carrier pigeon to communicate, and we were a lot faster and more efficient.”

Most of Melikian’s time, however, was devoted to duties other than being the general’s personal Blackberry. He and the other high-speed radio operators would work four days on, three days off in the radio room, donning headphones, listening their way through beeps and code. The worst noise, however, was not something they wanted to hear: incessant radio jamming by the Germans, whose oscillating tone is forever buried in Melikian’s psyche.

Even the memory of it drives him crazy.

“Let me tell you what it sounded like,” he said, interrupting his story and about to disturb the handful of patrons in the pub. “It was this.”

He cleared his throat and proceeded to screech — “EEEE-ooo-EEEE-ooo-EEEE-ooo” — an ear-piercing, voice-straining tone Melikian mimicked for seconds, which was far too long.

“That was it, time after time after time,” he said.

By spring of 1945, the Germans were all but finished. But Allied soldiers knew that as long as Adolf Hitler was alive, surrender likely was not an option.

* * *

Melikian still had no idea if he would make it home alive. That was what it was like to be part of a group that was a high-priority target.

He and his colleagues, however, sensed that the war was coming to an end. Based on messages and what they were hearing from other soldiers, it seemed only a matter of time. They placed bets with each other on when it might happen. Better yet, that infernal German jamming tone had stopped.

The next thing Melikian remembers is the arrival of the German officers (specifically Colonel-General Alfred Jodl and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg), who had been sent to negotiate surrender terms.

“They walked around with their chests puffed up and their entourage shaking in their boots around them,” Melikian said. “But we saluted them when we saw them. You see a general, you salute. That’s that.”

The German officers insisted they would surrender only to the British and Americans, as their forces to the east were still engaged with the Russians.

Eisenhower said, in no uncertain terms, that surrender would only be accepted to all Allied forces, the Russians included. Melikian was the radio operator who typed out Eisenhower’s message saying just that.

At 11 p.m. on May 6, 1945, Melikian reported for work. Another night. Another shift.

Until that sharp rap on the door at about 3:30 a.m. May 7.

“Send this out.”

Melikian studied the message as he took his seat in front of the teletype. Any doubts what the coded dispatch said were erased when he saw the list of addressees.

All military groups.

Every command center.

Washington. London. Moscow.

He began with a code that is as embedded in his mind as that German jamming tone. As he typed it in — “Priority,” meaning drop everything you are doing and read this — he knew what the radiomen heard on the other end.

“Da di da di di da ditty di di.”

He then tapped out the coded message, which consisted of roughly 75 five-letter groups. In five minutes he was done.

Knowing the historic value of the coded message he had just transmitted, Melikian asked officers for the direct translation. Within a few minutes he was handed the uncoded transcript, which Melikian then tapped out word for word on the same teletype machine.

It read:

“A representative of the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air force in Europe to the Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command at 0141 hours Central European Time May 7 1945.”

Melikian pulled the all-capital- letters message from the machine and tucked it away, knowing one day people would want to see one of the war’s most significant missives.

“I wanted a record of it,” Melikian said. “This was history happening right now.

“After my wedding and the birth of my four kids, that’s the greatest day in my life,” Melikian said. “That’s when I knew for sure I was going home. And in one piece. I made it.”

The rest of the morning appears in his mind as bits and pieces. Celebration. Cups filled with the champagne that made the region famous. Toasts in the War Room. The Germans noticeable in their absence.

The door to the radio room left wide open.

* * *

Once the war was over, Melikian settled nicely into life. After obtaining a law degree in 1949, he established a successful practice in New York City, specializing in real-estate law.

In the summer of 1953, Melikian, who had developed a passion for the classical arts, attended a ballet and was struck by a particular Russian dancer. They would marry in New York’s Russian Tea Room after an 11-month courtship that included many visits to the outskirts of LaGuardia Airport, watching planes soar overhead.

Melikian and his wife, Emma, would have three sons and a daughter (and today, he is a grandfather of three). The lawyer would eventually become a New York City civil judge, but his true joy became the purchase and restoration of historic buildings.

After buying his first in 1951, he would go on to amass 32 properties by the time he retired from real estate in 1979, handing the keys of his company — Great Western Realty — to his children, who run it today.

Many of those buildings were in Arizona, a market he thought had more potential and room for financial growth than New York.

Melikian still recalls his first purchase in 1958, a hotel in Holbrook. The private plane landed in a field that recently had been cleared for that flight; 45 minutes later, contract in hand, he was on his way back to New York.

Over the next few years, he and Emma visited the state often. Emma quickly fell in love with the landscape, and in 1969 the Melikian family moved to Phoenix, where four years later they would purchase the crown jewel of their holdings — the Hotel San Carlos, which had opened in downtown Phoenix in 1928.

Thanks to wise investments over the years, Melikian became a philanthropist and was an avid supporter of the arts, including Arizona Opera, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Arizona Theatre Company, among others. The family made their largest gift in 2007 when he and Emma donated $1 million to ASU to establish the Melikian Center, specializing in languages spoken in areas of military conflict.

When retirement afforded the Melikians plenty of free time, the two discovered the joys of travel. They preferred cruise ships, which allowed them to watch the world as it drifted slowly by, and over the decades they have taken roughly 40 cruises. There is no question, however, that the most notable was three years ago, when a bit of serendipity accompanied them on the way.

***

Officials from Princess Cruises had heard of the surrender message — Melikian is still unclear how that happened — and he was invited to share his story during an Atlantic crossing aboard the Norwegian Gem in 2009. Halfway through the oceanic journey, Melikian met with the cruise director to go over the specifics of his talk. And two 60-something women interrupted in what were clearly French accents.

They’d overheard his story. Was he really on duty that night? In Reims? And he was that soldier?

“I told them I was,” Melikian said. “And they said, ‘We’ve been looking for you for 50 years.’”

If only they’d been checking cruise ships, which tended to be the only time the former sergeant told the story outside of family and friends.

The women, who told Melikian they were associated with the French government, begged him to apply for the French Legion of Honor, an award given by the French president to citizens who have made contributions of exceptional merit. The honor, created by Napoleon in 1802, has gone to thousands of American World War II veterans to recognize their contributions and acts of bravery during the liberation of France.

Melikian looked into the issue upon returning home and noted the Legion of Honor was not bestowed posthumously.

“I got right on it,” he said.

It would take three years to cut through the red tape (due largely to a 1973 fire in the National Center of Personnel Records in St. Louis, which destroyed an untold number of military records, including those of Melikian).

But on May 7, 2012 (the significance of that date was not lost on Melikian), he received word he had been named a “Chevalier” (knight) of the Legion of Honor. On a Saturday morning in August, he boarded a jet to Burbank, Calif., drove to an American Legion hall in Hollywood and received the medal in front of his wife and three of his four children.

Son Robert Melikian said he was never more proud of his father.

“When we were growing up, he always told us he was the guy who ended World War II,” he said. “For the longest time, we just thought it was a story.”

Reach the reporter at scott.craven@arizonarepublic.com.