General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do you remember what you were doing when you heard the news about Pearl Harbor? [View all]csziggy
(34,141 posts)At Michigan Tech. He and some of his classmates immediately went to enlist. The recruiters turned them away and told them the country would need engineers if the war lasted so they should finish college. Dad dropped out the next year, enlisted in the Navy and spent a year in Washington DC drawing torpedoes until they sent him to Officer's Training School at Columbia University, then on to Submarine School in Key West. He did three war time tours on a sub in the Pacific, going back to Pearl for refits and leaves.
Mom had finished at Montgomery School of Nursing and had signed up as a Navy Nurse but had not been called to go through her physical at the time of Pearl Harbor so she was working as a nurse (I think in New Orleans or maybe for a railroad) on Dec. 7, 1942. January 1942 she was called up, trained at Virginia Beach, was in the first group of nurses sent to open the Naval Hospital when Camp Pendleton was being built. From there, she was sent to Hawaii and served there until the end of the war.
They met in Hawaii after the end of the war and married in San Francisco in 1946.