Pearl Harbor

[DarylC]

84 years ago today we were dragged into World War 2. To say the world is a different place today would be an understatement. I never actually took the time to ask my parents and grandparents where they were and how did they take the news. I regret that. I grew up with WW2 vets all around me and none of them offered their perspectives on their service during the war. Now I have to watch Youtube to hear actual veterans talk about their experience.

[Researcher]

My youngest uncle joined the U.S. Army in 1940 and finally went to Europe just in time for the Battle of the Bulge and on to VE day. Finally got him to talk about it in his early 80s, beyond his usual comment "they had good brandy in France!" He was at "Fort Lost in the Woods" training to go to the Pacific when Japan surrendered. Of my grandfather's six sons his two oldest could have been in WW-I but the oldest had lost an eye and the other was just barely old enough. All but the youngest were a bit old for WW-II.

My mother's foster brother was in the Navy during WW-I and in that he lived with us and then next door to us I got lots of his tales. He was on the U.S.S. Blackhawk the mother ship for the North Sea mine fleet. He was the Yeoman to a CPO Photographer. Once the mine situation was in hand, they were sent to France to document. I have his ditty box packed with the most gruesome pictures of trench warfare. Don't want to look at the rats eating on the fallen in the mud if you have a queasy stomach!

My father, born in 1907, was a Teamster from shortly after he finished the eighth grade and went to work. During 1941 he took night courses to become a shipfitter and right after Pearl Harbor left the Teamsters for the International Brotherhood of Boiler Makers, Iron Ship Builders and Helpers of America, and went to work at the shipyard at Winslow, Washington. Despite the union name, he spent most of the war building wooden minesweepers which put him in a good position to join the Carpenters Union right after I was born and get in on the post-war housing boom. Got his Fifty-Year Pin in the Carpenters Union a couple of years before he past.

My mother was a power machine operator at a factory sewing curtains and drapes when the war started and spent it making tarps and camouflage netting. My father's baby sister worked at Boeing through the war.

[DarylC]

Thanks Dave. Those pictures of the trenches must have been gruesome. The only story that my father told me about his tme in the Pacific was of him taking OO buck shotshells, removing the buckshot then using these perfectly round pebbles he would find on the beach to replace the shot with and then shoot parrots for some fresh meat. He said the meat they had was mutton and it was terrible. My mom was a medical secretary at Fort Holabird and that's where they met before he was shipped off to the Pacific.

A fellow I used to bird hunt with and actually was the one who got me interested in pointing dogs served on a minesweeper, one of those wooden boats probably built by your father. He told me stories of sweeping the beaches the night of the D-day invasion and the equipment they used to locate those mines. He lost his best friend, who he had just had beers with the night before, when something went wrong and destoyed his ship with one of those mines.