Memorial Day
Technically my father is a veteran of World War II. He joined the Navy after he graduated from high school, at Boston English. About three weeks after. They gave you a month to make up your own mind about things, then it was the draft boards choice. The Navy said thank you, they would certainly be in touch. They had a lot on their plate at that time. Later that summer the war ended. Abruptly I believe. Eventually the Navy remembered my father. They had ships by the tens of thousands jammed into every port in the world, which were suddenly empty of sailors who had all demobbed. "Hey thats right," they told my father, "you signed up and now we need you - could you report to bootcamp at Bainbridge Maryland in December". Sometime in 1946 in either San Diego or San Francisco my father joined the crew of the USS Piedmont (AD17) and sailed away for the far east.  The USS Piedmont was a Destroyer tender, a supply and repair ship for a destroyer squadron. For the Navy; he repaired radars for two years. The most I've ever been able to get out of him about that is that it involved color coded wires and having to climb masts. All the time I've known him he was an accountant, with an associates degree from Bentley College.
Things I recall him saying about his years in the Navy. The Piedmont towed a Kaiser liberty ship back to port when its propeller fell off at sea. He saw the German Battlecruiser Prinz Eugen in Pearl Harbor. Mostly he recalls spending the winter of 46-47 in Tsing'tao harbor (Qingdao in current spelling) on the Piedmont. The Maoists had already taken over the city, at least sufficiently to make it too dangerous for sailors to go into town. The Navy was too stubborn to leave. They eventually sailed away in the spring. Nearly sixty years passed and my father is still bitter about that. It was a cold winter in Tsing'tao, the Piedmont wasn't that big a ship. My father is not the sort of person to let a good grievance go before its time. I saw the Piedmont in Subic bay when I was in the Navy. I asked people about her, no one could remember her ever putting to sea.
About ten years ago the Smithsonian toyed with the idea of putting the cockpit of the B29 superfortress Enola Gay on display in the Air and Space Museum downtown (the whole thing is on display at their new facility over by Dulles International). The curators wanted to put a exhibit up around it, to give it a little context. As it turned out no one wanted the Enola Gay to have any context, that show was canceled. In the summer of 1945 the army had a plan, that plan called for an amphibious landing on Kyushu in or around November followed up by one into central Honshu in the spring of 1946. My father spent the last few weeks of high school following the accounts of fighting for Okinowa, and Iwo Jima and Saipan before that. All that summer the War department transfered men ships and planes to the Pacific. My father is among those who has no problems with the dropping of the atomic bomb. He had already been taken up by the machine which sent the previous four classes into fires across the world. He was glad when that escalator stopped. General Marshall believed that the goal of unconditional surrender could not be achieved without invasion of the Japanese home islands. Unconditional surrender was our unconditional goal in that the last good war. The more I think about it, the more I listen to the actual voices of that generation. The more I have the feeling that by the summer of 1945 with Hitler dead and the Japanese fleet gone; the mood of the country for another effort equal to, or greater than Normandy and the Rhine breakthrough may have been passing. General Marshall may have realized that. President Truman as well.
I have absorbed World War two through pop culture all my life. The movies, the books, speeches, campaigns and memorial days. There have been many waves of remembrances not all if any alike. And there have been times slipped between remembrances. I recall third grade in my towns VFW hall, a period of satellite classrooms while my town built a new middle school and high school, (This is a story I mention also somewhere on my old site) . The bar in the basement was exempt from the counties liquor laws-VFW's were private clubs. By noon and not that occasionally. the troubled would come up the back steps and deliver small curse laden speeches to those close by until our teachers would chase them back down. Sometimes on a Saturday at the barber shop someone would remember Tunisia and it would be remembered differently depending on whether they noticed a small boy in the corner or not. The quality of the remembrances in my lifetime was mostly marked by a certain bravado, but now the past few years as the need for them passes, the masks of a lifetime fall away. The men and women speak less with the consensus voice more with individual voices. Their own questions and fears. Thoughts about what sort of world that grew out of the sacrifices of those years.
11:21:28 PM  ;;
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