WWII Reflections Part 2

Dear Louie,

Another letter to the grandson... enjoy this look back.

Jim

Letters to Paul - Chapter 2

The days before Pearl Harbor were for my friends and me typical high school days. Football season was over, I was too short to play basketball, but not too short to work after school and at night.

I had a job cleaning the Hartford Theatre and being the usher from 6 to 11 p.m. five nights a week. On further thought, that job was during my junior and senior years. In the immediate year of 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor, I had a paper route, followed by a job at the meat market. That was a memorable job, cleaning 300 chickens a night just before Thanksgiving, selling brats and sausage, steaks, and chops after school, and cleaning, cleaning the chicken preparation area. What a smell, hot scalded chickens, and wet feathers. But I made some money; about 20 cents an hour.

The Sunday, Pearl Harbor Day, was spent initially going to church. Attending Mass was a Sunday must, since about the age of six. We always attended mass, Sunday was never Sunday without attending mass. I have never intentionally missed Sunday Mass. It seems that attending Sunday Mass is the least we can do to be thankful for life and health, intelligence, and happiness. Be that as it may, I did go to church that Sunday. The people were concerned. In Washington D.C., the Japanese ambassador was meeting with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. We were all concerned regarding the oil embargo and control of the East. Even we as high school students were worried.

However, that Sunday was a gray day, the clouds were low, the day was cool and there was little to do. Not many families had two cars, we had none. We walked or rode our bikes. Sunday two friends and I took a walk around town. We walked to the north side, visited and played in the woods adjoining the city, walked to the south side, two miles away, and then to Main Street. We arrived at Central Drug Store at about three o’clock, entered the store, sat in a booth, and ordered a Coke. Cokes were, either plain or cherry and both cost a nickel, five cents, with or without a straw. As we waited for the Coke, Casey Chaplin the druggist, came to the booth and told us of the radio announcement of War. He told of the attack on Pearl Harbor, of the radio accounts, scanty as it was. He was concerned, we were quiet, with no flag-raising bravado.

We immediately realized that we at the age of 15 or 16 would be involved in the war in a few years, that many of our friends would be called to fight in places we knew little about - and where was Pearl Harbor, anyhow. That day we changed.

We were never the same.

The following Monday, a school day, at about 11:30 President Roosevelt, came over the radio. There was nothing like TV. He announced, “a state of war existed between the United States and the Empire of Japan.” The study hall was so quiet, the halls were so quiet. No one had any bravado, only worry. Our supper that night was somber. My Father spoke and was disdainful of the politicians who were predicting a short war, annihilation of the Japs, and other empty words.

He said, “Talk is cheap, many lives will be lost.” And, “It will take years.”

The coach at high school lined the physical gym class boys along the bleachers, and looked each in the eye, and stated, ”Your lives are forever changed, each of you will be drafted during the next two to three years.”

And we were.

The following years, until August of 1945 were hard years, years devoted to fighting the war and winning the war. The War was fought each and every day; we talked war, read of war, listened to the radio about war, saw war on the news releases in the theaters, and prepared for war. Depending on one’s age, the war was personal and immediate, or remote and worrisome. My class graduated in 1944, and within twenty days I was at Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

I spent six weeks in Basic Training, took placement tests, and was assigned to the electrician’s school at Great Lakes. There for three months, I went to night school and learned how to be a naval electrician. I learned about generators, capacitors, a.c./d.c. current, circuits, pumps, firefighting on board ships, and other skills necessary on a ship. Night school was taught on the base, by guys a little older than I. We marched in the raw, cold nights, of November and December. We lived in barracks, stored our clothes in seabags, tied to our bunk, spent weekends in Milwaukee, or hitchhiked to Hartford for a few hours. Time passed and in December I was assigned to the Army camp at Camp Crowder, MO. There I met another group of inductees and spent five months learning about teletypes, a machine that was electro-mechanical in nature and most trying in keeping functional. Camp Crowder was near Joplin, Mo. and Joplin was the city in which we took weekend liberty.

We stayed at the Hotel in Joplin, danced on Saturday night at the YMCA, and had a good time. In the spring we spent time living in tents in the field. About all I remember are two events. The first was the continual attacks of chiggers, small, biting insects, which got into socks and shoes and bit and bit. No fun in the dusty fields of Missouri. The next event occurred in April of 1945 when while standing in the chow line, an announcement was made that President Roosevelt died. His death was as if a member of the family had died.

We were lost since he was the president for fourteen years, and being eighteen years of age, he was “the man.” Harry Truman, from Missouri, the Vice President, took over. He was unknown but proved to be more than an adequate replacement. I learned a valuable lesson. No one is irreplaceable. President Truman saved my life and the lives of millions by sending the B29 to bomb Hiroshima. I don’t know what the future of the world will be from here on out, but for the past 65 years that act has kept the use of atomic energy in check, and so far no one has had to challenge the use of the weapon.

I hope mankind can control its use.

In June or early July, I was sent to Mare Island, California where for about ten weeks we learned to repair and install machines that when added on to teletypes revolutionized coded messages. The basic radio transmission was linked to the radio transmission of coded messages generated by teletype and coding machines. The amazing speed of sixty-five characters a minute was scrambled on transmission and descrambled on reception. My, we thought we were sophisticated. Nothing like the web, computers, and TV was even dreamed of.

Radar was in its infancy, but the changes in communication were just beginning. The war came to the end with the atomic bomb, but the bases throughout the world were in need of closure; the soldiers, marines, and sailors who had spent three or more years were in need of replacement. We were shutting down remote bases, and many were returning home.

I was assigned to the Naval Station on Attu. I wondered where Attu was but recalled that it was in the Bering Sea and had been the site of a land battle in 1942. I soon learned of Attu firsthand and spent 10 months on the island, throughout the winter of 1945 and spring of 46. That was a winter - many days of constant snow, constant cold, constant darkness - from December to March, with only 4 to 6 hours of sunshine, the rest of the 24 hours in darkness. The nights were sometimes clear and the sky was filled with millions of stars, but more often than not the night was utterly black.

We lived in a radio shack, a building built of single sheeted walls, drafty windows, a large lab, a few smaller labs, a large stove, an outside oil tank, an inside plumbing room, which froze up very easily, and lights which sometimes dimmed and went out for hours at inopportune times. But we had no place to go, and no one was looking for Attu. The Japanese had surrendered in the summer of 1945, and our time was spent shutting down the island, waiting to go home, and surviving.

We survived snowstorms, deluge-like rains, blowing Willowas or blizzards, and we survived a tsunami. The tsunami originated in the chain of islands - the Aleutian Chain, near Dutch Harbor, and the tidal wave was generated by a landslide and earthquake which was under the islands. The tsunami, or tidal wave, washed-out Dutch Harbor Naval Station and drowned ten or more sailors whom I knew from the boat trip to the islands. They were young guys, who went to bed one night and were washed out to sea during the darkness of the night.

The tsunami then went down toward the islands of Hawaii, washed ashore, and killed many islanders. It is written up on the web, as the Tsunami of 1946 in the Aleutian Islands.

My days were spent keeping 20 teletypes functioning. Teletypes were electromechanical typewriters connected to radio signals in the radio shakes and offices on the island. These then were connected to coding machines. Sometimes everything worked well, but as the island buildings deteriorated the communications broke down; as everyone was thinking of going home, not much repair was done.

Finally one day we boarded a C-47, flew to Adak, thence to Kodiak, and there boarded a C54 Constellation and flew home to Seattle, Washington. That flight took ten or more hours, now with a jet, the flight takes four hours. It was an uncomfortable flight; we sat in bucket-like seats, in long rows along the sides of the plane. There was little or no heat in the plane, and we shivered for ten hours.

We ate a box lunch and looked out small windows as we flew south home. We flew over the Inner Passage of Alaska, over waters which we had sailed through the cold fall days of 1945. It seemed that most of my memories have always been of cold, damp, and snow; memories of my overseas service. No battles, thankfully, no battle-inflicted wounds, but memories of the ten from Dutch Harbor, who also fought no one, but died in the battle of, and against nature.

So, you can realize that all casualties of war are not caused by bullets and violence, but many are caused by nature.