This is Pearl Harbor Day 2020. I was seven years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I didn’t understand much about war, but I did understand how it impacted our family. My grandmother was so upset when my Uncle Jack was drafted. At first he was stationed at Ft. Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. My grandmother walked the three blocks from her house to ours to beg my dad to take her to see him. Something my dad could not do. My dad along with three others did go to visit him when he was stationed in Arkansas.
My cousin Sarah was equally upset when her husband Clarence volunteered as were cousins Mildred and Margaret when their husbands were drafted, I did not know that Dwight Knight, Margaret’s husband, had been part of the D Day invasion until I read his obituary years later. Carl Hanna, my Aunt Sally Lou’s son, was the clerk for Admiral William Halsey Jr. The story was that he got the assignment because he was the fastest typist in the Navy.
We had air raid drills at school. When the alarm sounded, we got under our desks. We had drills at home. We turned out all the lights and closed the curtains or shades. My dad was an air raid warden and wore a fancy armband. At church we prayed that the war would be over soon. Of course, God was on our side against our godless enemies. At the movie theatre there were news reels about the war usually featuring General Douglas McArthur. Sugar and gasoline were rationed. My parents bought War Savings Bonds at work and my sister and I bought War Saving Stamps at school. Stars were placed in the windows of the homes when a loved one had been killed in battle.
There was great anguish when we learned that my friend’s father was a prisoner of war. He was one of those captured at Bataan. There was great rejoicing when he came home after the war, a skin and bones edition of his former self.
President Roosevelt made his famous fireside chats and everyone was glued to the radio to hear them. There was great mourning when he died at Warm Springs, Georgia a few months before the war ended. When I was older Uncle Jack would not tell me about the war. He did tell me about the places he had seen. He brought my dad a new German Walther P-38 pistol from Germany. He said that his unit had captured a factory where these were manufactured. The Walther P-38 was the weapon of the German Army.
In the summer of 1956 I met Elizabeth Frei, Liz, who would become my wife. Her parents were Presbyterian missionaries to the Philippines before and during the war. Liz and her sister, Joan, were born there. The war then took on a new meaning for me. During one of the 50th. Commemorations of the war, Joan delivered a paper on, “A Child’s View of the War,” in which she quoted then four year old Liz. On our way to Australia in 1991 John Wallace, my brother-in-law, and I stopped in Hawaii. We visited the Battleship Missouri Memorial and the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. These are awe inspiring sights.
