My Mother's Memories of December 8, 1941, the Day AFTER...

...the Day that will live in Infamy.

As many of you know, my mother passed on last summer (and thank you again for all of your kind words at the time). I am reconstructing the story of average Americans as told to me for years by she and my uncles. As with most Americans, my mom's family spent the evening of December 7, 1941 in shock, sadness, fury and prayer. As most Americans, they listened to President Roosevelt the next day.

My mom had 3 brothers. Their names were Jack, Jim and Joe. On December 9, 1941 (my Mom's 20th birthday, BTW), my Uncles Jack & Jim got up early to enlist, thinking that they were going to beat any rush. When they got there they saw a scene reminiscent of the scene in "A Christmas Story" when the boys think that there is a short line for Santa and then see the line that runs around the corner. Part way down the line, they ran into my Grandfather who had just gotten off of his over night job and went down before coming home. Now please understand, my grand father was in his 40s at the time. 65 years ago, your mid-40s were a lot different than they are now.

The men behind my grandfather, for the most part, had a good chuckle saying "take your boys in line with you, pop".

When they got to the head of the line, the sergeant just looked at my grandfather and said "Go home, Pop!" My uncle Jack wasn't taken because he was married and had a daughter. My uncle Jim was 4-F because when he was 12 or 13, he was hit by a car and almost lost his leg.

My uncle Joe didn't go. He had said that he wasn't going to go. He'd said that if they wanted HIM, they'd have to come and drag him from under his bed.

Just a few weeks later, he enlisted. He became the top sergeant in his outfit. He was at Normandy and he was in charge of one of the first (if not THE first) units to light the Eiffel Tower with Air Raid lights from the backs of Jeeps. He was decorated by the French for this. He was jolted when the French officer kissed his cheeks.

When my Uncle Joe, the top sergeant, and my Father, a bombardier and a captain, came home, it was one of the proudest moments of my grandfather's life when he was able to take the 2 of them to the "tap room" for a drink and to show them off.

Even 30+ years later, I would see men in the area who had served with my uncle Joe greet him with "Hi'ya, TOP!"

I share this for a few reasons. History isn't just what happens to the famous people. Many of you certainly have stories about your dads and uncles, brothers and husbands, sons and daughters. Maybe some of you are World War II vets. History is kept ALIVE by people like us and word of mouth.

I also am constantly aware of the difference between a president in office on the strength of 3 landslides who speaks of "a day that will live in infamy" and one who says "I was just trying to say out of harm's way" after sneaking into office on the strength of a stolen election.

I'd love to hear some of your family's (or your own) post Pearl Harbor stories. Thanks in advance, and as always...

PEACE!

Great stuff.

Odd, but good, thingis that not 1 man in my parents' immediate families lost a drop of blood. /they saw some MAJOR combat, too!

My folks KNEW the crowd would be insane on Monday. So my uncle waited till Tuesday. I've posted this before, how my mom remembers the lines snaking out of the subways of the young men waiting to buy their tokens so they could go down and enlist.

My uncle joined the Air Force, was terribly disappointed that, at 23, he was too damn old to be a pilot. He was a bombardier. His outfit did daylight skipbombing. The unit was famous because nobody died. Which meant nobody got promoted. Second looies with a ton of fruit salad, that's how you knew who they were.

When my uncle came back, he was rail thin and attached to a scotch bottle. He sat down in a restaurant with my mom and talked for hours. Hours. Then didn't talk about it again. It was only a few years ago that we found out his unit was at Anzio. They had finished. Their replacements had arrived. They were packed for home. And brass arrived saying they didn't want the green pilots for this mission. They wanted the experienced ones to fly escort at Anzio. They asked for volunteers. They got the entire unit. Afterwards, my uncle got a great reward: a hot shower on a navy ship.

And that's all I know because he hasn't written it down.

Not in the ways that really matter.

Unlike a certain president and vice=president who had "other priorities".

My parents were married ON Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1941. Since my father couldn't enlist (bad arm), he and my mother trained in the CAA. I think those initials are correct. Something like Civil Aeronautics Admin. Anyway, it has to do with sending messages to airplanes with the Morse Code. They went to school for that and were sent to Alaska (from Louisiana!) where they dot-dashed to the Allied aiplanes flying from US/Canada/USSR. They loved Alaska so much they continued to live there even after the war was over, but eventually moved back to LA.

..."the war is fought at home, too!"

Thanks.

After Pearl Harbor, he begged his father to let him enlist. Finally, he got his way.

My father, a farm boy, joined the cavalry. Yes, they really had horses. However, they left their horses behind when they became the replacement troops for Merrill's Marauders in Burma. My dad, who is eighty-one, is only beginning to speak of his experiences and his combat over there. He promised to send me a book that contains narratives of his unit's experiences over there. I think that is easier for him than talking about it. Anyway, they were the first Army Rangers.

After the war, my father's unit became MPs in China. He came home when he was 21.

The odd thing about all this is that my father grew up in a German-speaking household. He was fluent. He probably could have been much more useful in the European war theater. In fact, his family in Minnesota was near a POW camp. Two of the German POWs there were signed out to his family during the day. They lived with the family and worked as farm hands.

My father-in-law was a farmer with three children. He was much more useful to the war effort by staying at home and growing his crops.

But my father's uncle was a different story. He was a veterinarian, and a bit older. He came from a pacifist family, and most likely would have been excused from the draft. But he enlisted. He became a "mule skinner," or the man in charge of keeping the military animals healthy. He was sent to the Philippines, where he was captured and survived the Bataan Death March. After being a POW for three years, he was rescued from the Cabanatuan concentration camp in the famous raid.

Uncle Herb made sure that none of us in the family forgot what he and his comrades endured. He sent us every reputable book about Bataan and the raid. I have read all of them faithfully.

Herbert Ott, Wheaton, Illinois, D.V.M, Capt. Med. Dept. Veterinary Corps., 0-369-401, Army of the U.S. Inactive Reserve, went home to California, where he was a practicing veterinarian for the next fifty years. He died at the age of 91, in December of 2004.

I would never in a million years have guessed that a member of the Veterinary Corps could have been on the Bataan Death March and been a POW.

It really makes you think (well, it really makes me think, anyway) about the incredible stories of ordinary people's lives.

It's maybe a good thing your dad's experiences will be written down instead of just told to you, so everything can be passed on to your kids and grandkids too. I remember talking to a WWII veteran on Veteran's Day a couple of years ago. We were just chatting about his service, and he was telling me about a particular incident completely calmly, and then all of a sudden his face just crumpled. I'd read that description in books but I'd never seen it before. He just couldn't stop crying, about something that happened more than 60 years ago. I'll never ever forget that. What those men and women sacrificed--well, there's no way to honor them sufficiently.

...that any man or woman who puts on a uniform & serves their country honorably is a hero, even if they're not a fighter.

Your dad's uncle ia proof positive!

Thanks for sharing.

most of those guys were. My husband's uncle (sorry, not my dad's uncle -- I goofed) was in his early thirties. But my father was just a boy. He enlisted at 17. He saw combat at 18 and 19. He was no exception.

We try so hard to keep our children safe and out of harm's way. But so many boys defended us during World War II.

Kurt Vonnegut's wife called the war the children's crusade. She was not wrong.

...and one of the old men on his crew!

Marked contrast to a 60 year old president who has to have daddy's friends save his ass!

AGAIN!

I remember that I did not understand what was going on. My Mother and Father sent me to the store for newspapers.Back then we could trust the newspaper. I remember that since it was a Sunday the bar connected to the general store was full and no one was usually there on Sundays. Odd how you can remember trivial things like that.

My Uncle was the only close family member that went to service. My father was deaf in one ear and was 4F. He also had six children. I did not have any other male relatives, except several cousins and two of them went. All three came back safe. I remember my Uncle telling the family about the Battle of the Bulge. He said he was scared to death. It was so foggy you could not see your gun. And the guys were shooting at shadows. They started to asking the men who approached them about things in the US, ball teams, locations etc to make sure they were American. But the germans could have easily had faked the answers.

I also remember a song called "We're gonna have to slap the dirty little jap". And Uncle's sister used to come to the house and she would drag out the old record player and play it over and over and they would all clap their hands when the slap came up. Like I said I was by that time only eight years old but I knew something was terrible and I did not like the Japanese or Germans. I didn't know why but the grown ups were constantly panning them so I did also.

I also remember we used to have to walk everywhere. My father had to save his tickets as he called them for gas to get to work. We had to pull coupons out of our ration books to buy meat and a lot of other stuff. The women all wore ankle socks, they didn't have many stockings. But one thing I do remember, everyone..every single person my parents would meet on the street or any where were friendly. No yelling at each other because they were different political parties. We had old line republicans and democrats pulling together America was what America should be back then. It is a damn shame that a lot of the younger people around today could not have felt real "patriotism". Sorry to run on so long but old memories kept flooding back.

...PLEASE feel free to go on as long as you'ld like!

...was also a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines, and lost his leg in a cave in Corregidor. He was an army captain who, when the island was being bombarded, went out under fire repeatedly to drag his wounded men to safety. His leg became gangrenous and was removed above the knee by an army surgeon who was operating under the difficult conditions of battle. Uncle Bob was a prisoner of the Japanese for years. When he finally came home, he brought with him diaries that he had surreptitiously kept on labels from tin cans. My family sat together and read the diaries, and then they went to Washington to be archived. Uncle Bob never spoke of his experiences, but he never, ever bought anything made in Japan until the day he died. He received quite a few medals. I have the diaries that he wrote prior to his capture, and also the postcards that he was allowed to send to his family while a prisoner of the Japanese, censored of course. He always signed them with a special mark on the capital letter A, and that gratified his family because they knew it was really him. I always sign my notes to family with the same mark, in his memory. I'll try to scan one of those postcards and put it in this thread so the "kids" among us at DU can see how they looked.

A couple of years ago an Army rail depot was named after him, down in Texas. I did not go to the dedication as I knew that some of my other family members would be gung ho supporting the military expansion.

An article about his service and the rail facility is available here:

http://www.aiipowmia.com/inter24/in040423rrpw.html

...I'm surprised he didn't also get the Congressional Medal Of Honor.

He certainly merited it!

My father was 9yo and was living in Honolulu with my grandmother and two brothers. Apparently, Grandma had been pestering Grandad to come out to Honolulu, and he finally relented. They arrived in Honolulu about 2 weeks before the bombing. Here is from my dad's recollection: (I've removed names.)

...that the war happened to kids and families, too!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2873970&mesg_id=2873970

Dad's father and six of his seven uncles were all in the war (one was ill with really bad asthma and couldn't serve). His dad was the chief on the USS Minneapolis and stationed at Pearl Harbor before the attack. Dad remembers that all anyone could talk about on the ship over from California was when the Japanese would attack. He has never thought of Pearl Harbor as a suprise attack so much as something everyone knew would happen just not when.

Two of his uncles were in the European theatre, and the rest were in the Pacific. Uncle Ernie was a gunner stationed on the USS Enterprise who saved his pilot on the first day of the battle of Midway only to be killed the second day of the battle. Grandpa was the one who found out when his ship met up with the Enterprise after the battle and had to tell everyone else. Ernie had lived in their house on the base for awhile, so my dad really misses him.

The family was honored for all their service and Grandma being a Gold Star Mom with having a destroyer named after them, the USS Hilbert. We went to a ship reunion when I was in middle school. It was good to hear how they survived being in an escort group and went through two typhoons, only losing one sailor, may he rest in peace.

Grandpa was career Navy and retired after a long career. He died of a stroke (smoked a lot) after many smaller strokes before I was born. I wish I'd gotten to know him.

...4 men saw HEAVY combat. Not a one of them received a scratch.

Highly unusual!

After Pearl Harbor, he figured he probably wouldn't be much use owing to the heart problems that were just then becoming evident. He was eventually drafted in 1944, though, when recruiters were scraping the bottom of the barrel. ("I heard we were supposed to get an eye exam." "Nope. At this point we just count 'em.") These draftees and later enlistees were either notably older (28+) or notably younger (17, plus more than a few younger kids who lied about their ages) than the ones who signed up immediately after Pearl Harbor. So dad, with a receding hairline and a touch of premature grey, instantly became "Pops." They knew perfectly well that he could't do combat, so they put him in the Signal Corps, the group responsible for changing the code books on a daily basis. (I once asked if he had ever known any of the Navajo code talkers, but that was a different group.)

When I was a kid, dad had lots of funny war stories--things like one of the guys in his unit applying for and getting a Purple Heart for tripping and scraping his knee running for an air raid shelter. The laughing stock of the unit--until they totalled up the points that determined who got to go home first and the Purple Heart put him over the top. How you scored beer when the officers are looking the other way, and got it nice and cold by dripping aviation fuel on top of it and letting it evaporate. He made his contribution and was never in any serious danger. My mom's youngest sister married a man who had been in the island fighting in the Pacific, and he never said anything at all about his experiences. My cousins heard not one single word from their father on the subject, ever. Having read some of the accounts of those battles, I understand why. I suspect he stayed sane by putting all of it in a separate mental compartment and shutting the door permanently.

Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers is an excellent novel about the Greatest Generation, capturing the war on the home front as well as on the battlefield. http://www.margepiercy.com/books/gone-to-soldiers.htm

...but he was there when it was his turn and did his duty.

Remind you of any president & vice-president who failed to do the same?

and the whole school was herded into the auditorium where a radio had been set up so the staff and students could hear FDR ask Congress for a Declaration of War (how quaint, a president who followed the Constitution). She said it was surreal, especially looking at her male classmates and knowing that most of them would soon be leaving and wondering what would happen to them. As it turned out, the first person from my mom's home town who was killed in the war was a nurse.

Like your uncle, my dad (he was 21) headed off to enlist that morning. His mother drove him and some of his friend into Minneapolis to a recruiting station. I can only imagine what went through my grandmother's mind as she turned her youngest child over to the Army Air Corp. He reported for duty on December 30. Because of the training he got, he didn't get sent overseas for about over a year. My grandmother made the trip out to San Francisco to see him before he shipped out - another thing I wish I'd talked to her about. Several years ago I took a tour of Alcatraz and, as we were being ferried back to the city, I stood looking at the Golden Gate and wondered how pop felt when he came home and saw that bridge come into view.

...it was one of the most beautiful sights he ever saw!

stationed in Hawaii preparing for the invasion of Japan. They were expecting a D-Day type assault and were training heavily for it. As an M.D., he was practicing battlefield care and mobile medical unit practices. After the bombs and the surrender he was sent to Japan and served with the Occupation Forces for more than a year.

He never bought anything from Japan, either.

He died in September and I'm going through all the items in the estate, cataloguing furniture, china, etc. so that my siblings and I can decide what to do with all of it. I've saved everything I could the last few years as he began to lose his cognitive facilities. In an old cigar box I found his childhood marbles and the bag for them his mother made along with his WWII dogtags and Catholic medal that he wore with them. It said "I'm Catholic - Call a Priest". For some reason that really hit me.

Sorry, I'm too emotional to continue with this right now.

His Medical School class picture shows nearly all the class in military uniforms.

...from Germany, Either.

The docs, nurses, corpsmen, etc. were in grave danger, but couldn't focus on defending themselves, only helping the wounded and sick.

One of my favorite books is of the nurses and docs who were stranded on the Bataan Peninsula at the beginning of the war when the Japanese first invaded. They had to move all the sick and wounded from the hospitals out into the jungle - doing surgery, etc. out in the open. It went on for a very long time before they all were eventually taken prisoner.

Great book.


http://www.amazon.com/We-Band-Angels-American-Japanese/dp/0375502459

--even when it still hurts.:grouphug:

You are so right, MarianJack!

I was born long after WWII, but I'm old enough to remember a time when almost every family you talked to had someone still alive who had directly experienced the war in some way. ("The war." I'm almost scared to ask the students in my classes WHICH war they think of when I say those words ... some might think of Vietnam, or increasingly, Iraq and Afghanistan.)

I'm in Canada, and my oldest uncle (who died about a decade ago) was already in the Canadian Army when war broke out in the Far East. His unit was in the middle of training -- people did have an idea, by the late 1930s, that Japan was going to do something, but were unsure of what to expect. The drill sergeant used to tell them, "You'll be facing masses of nasty little guys who look just like Harry!", and hundreds of pairs of eyes would swivel to look at him on the parade ground. (My family is Japanese.) To give them credit, the guys would take Harry drinking with them, and they would refuse to hang out at any bar that wouldn't let him in, in his uniform.

Anyway, my uncle had downplayed a foot injury in order to enlist, but when it looked like they were going to receive orders, the unit physician pulled him out and said that they would probably be doing a lot of marching, and he would only slow them down. In a way he saved my uncle's life, because he got discharged before the unit was sent to Hong Kong. (About 8 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Army attacked Hong Kong too, and during the following days, the garrison was shredded. A lot of my uncle's fellow soldiers -- the ones who were kind to him, the ones who muttered racist remarks, the ones he knew from high school -- were killed, or taken captive and tortured.)

The world changed abruptly for both my mom and my dad's families, after Dec 7th -- they were relocated away from the coast, into internment camps or (in my mom's family's case) exiled to be farmhands on a mink ranch way up north. My folks never did return to the west coast. (After 9/11, my dad remarked that all the pronouncements of the news anchors that "now everything has changed" seemed overreactions, by comparison with before and after Pearl Harbor.)

On the other side of the world, my boyfriend's dad was a sergeant in the US Army during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he married a Jewish woman -- soon to become my boyfriend's mom -- who'd lost a lot of her family in the Holocaust.

Another guy I knew in my neighbourhood had a dad who'd been a navigator on a Lancaster bomber. He never talked about it. (After I read about what the average lifespan of air crews in Bomber Command was, I could see why.) My Grade 5 teacher had been a teenager in London during the 1940s, so she vividly described what it was like to be on the receiving end of a "stick" of bombs ... one warm June day, she just put down her colonial history book and started telling us about surviving the Blitz. I'm glad I listened ... she died back in 2000, and there aren't that many people around anymore (let alone still teaching) who have that kind of direct experience of MODERN history to pass along.

The lady who lives across from us had been a little girl in Austria during the war, and of course they'd made all the kids join the Hitler Youth in those days. (When her pre-teen daughters started pestering her to let them join the Brownies, she panicked and rushed over to talk to my mom, seeking reassurance that the uniforms and the camping activities weren't a sign that something sinister was afoot in Canada!)

All these people are dead now, or in their 80s or 90s. I'm still shocked by this, because in part of my mind it's still the 1970s, and there are not only lots of vigorous WWII vets around, in their 50s and 60s, but survivors of the Great War who are still able to march in the Nov 11th parades.

Almost all the WWI vets are gone, and soon the people who remember WWII will be gone too.

...that there are often not enough VFW, American Legion, etc., to give them the Honor Guard.

Unfortunately, Holocaust deniers, nazi apologists, and other rightist pond scum are taking advantage of this to deny History. Not while I draw breath, and I have a good 20-30 years left. Maybe more (I'm 51)!

He was a WW I draft dodger from Austria-Hungary, who periodically sent in more money than his tax form required, just because he believed that the American government would use it for the public good and not waste it on funding fancy uniforms with lots of brass buttons and fruit salad. (The Feds always sent it back and told him to buy bonds.) My dad wanted to join the Boy Scouts, and grandpa put his foot down--no son of his would ever wear a uniform of any kind if he could help it. He died believing that America would never get mixed up in any of that European nonsense again, well before my dad was drafted for WW II.

No PH stories here (Dad was 12 at the time, both my grandfathers served in France in the Great War) but thank you for this.

My Grandfather, who was on line when my uncles got there, had served in WWI, too!