When democracy was on the line 80 years ago, Americans put their lives on the line
A U.S. Navy ship sends rockets at shores of Pokishi Shima, near Okinawa, five days before the invasion. Photo by U.S. Navy, courtesy of Library of Congress.
When I retired in 2022, I followed the retired Baby Boomer handbook and started researching my father’s experience in World War II.
Understanding family history appeals to many of us as we get older, along with regret that we never really listened to those stories the older generation told us.
The appeal of this particular topic for my generation is heightened because our fathers didn’t talk about World War II. I have heard this from many contemporaries.
This was true of my father. We knew World War II was important to him; he loved to read histories of the war, and we would always accommodate with the latest books at Christmas.
But other than the legendary story of meeting his brother when both were in Okinawa — a story that involved a bottle of whiskey and the questionable commandeering of a jeep — we heard little about his own experience.
I am fortunate to have an historical source that few others can turn to: 148 letters that my father sent my grandmother from 1943 through 1945 while he served in the U.S. Army.
What I learned was remarkable. No, not in that way where someone discovers their father was actually a great war hero.
What’s remarkable is that for my dad’s generation, it was so normal: A kid from a small town becomes an ordinary soldier and is part of the most important event of his lifetime.
My dad was a senior in high school in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
In January of 1943, he and three other young men drove through a snowstorm to Fort Sheridan in northern Illinois to start their journey in the U.S. Army. My father was a few weeks short of his 19th birthday.
His experience was a true journey: He spent at least a month in eight different places over his three years in the Army, four in the U.S. and four overseas. Prior to this, we believe he had only left Wisconsin once or twice to visit cousins in Ohio.
The letters offer a peek into one person’s experience of a lifetime. He does at one point muse, in talking about his younger brother enlisting, “it will be something for him to look back on.” It is abundantly clear how very young he is and how new everything is. He sees several exotic parts of the world, and many parts of the U.S. He meets new people — young men from all over the U.S., as well as Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans.
The letters also tell of the home front. My dad frequently asks for the addresses of high school friends who are now scattered across all branches of the military and all parts of the world.
Sturgeon Bay is a shipbuilding town and thus part of the war effort. Young women move there to fill positions at the shipyards. For a while my grandmother serves as a “house mother” in a dormitory for women.
After a full year of various types of training, my dad spends much of 1944 waiting for an assignment, never even knowing if he is going to Europe or the Pacific.
Eventually he is shipped to the Philippines, arriving toward the end of the Battle of Leyte in November 1944.
While censorship prevents him from sharing a full account in his letters, he was part of the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. Okinawa was the Allies pre-test for the anticipated invasion of mainland Japan.
My father served as an MP — a job he hated — for the early part of the battle, guarding division command. But he finally got his wish, going to the front and serving as an artillery gunner for the last half of the battle.
Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war — 150,000 military casualties and a reported similar number of civilian casualties.
Letters from sons to mothers during war have one limitation: They tend to avoid descriptions of the actual battles. In fact, once he arrived in the Philippines my dad’s letters focus on assuring my grandmother he is safe.
But he does talk of “night fires” when they fire artillery at night to keep Japanese soldiers from leaving caves in the hillsides. He also writes about going to the beach to watch dog fights between American and Japanese airplanes. He sees what he believed to be a kamikaze plane shot down before it can hit a U.S. battleship.
Okinawa was the last battle of World War II. In part because of the Japanese resistance on Okinawa, President Truman decided an invasion of mainland Japan would cost too many lives, and instead used the atomic bomb. On August 9th — three days after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the same day a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki — my dad writes to my grandmother that he hopes the bomb “will prevent future wars.”
He is on Okinawa for months after the battle, and then goes to help secure Korea. He arrives home early in 1946, almost three years to the day after he left for Fort Sheridan.
We tend to view historical events as inevitable. It was not inevitable that the Allies would win World War II. It required incredible resilience by the British, the death of over 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, some questionable strategy decisions by the Axis powers, and, yes, the heroic — if belated — U.S. contributions to defeat Japan and, 80 years ago this week, invade Europe on D-Day.
As we careen toward the November election, some folks have elevated a famous (perhaps apocryphal) quote from Benjamin Franklin as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787. When asked by a citizen what sort of government America would have, he said, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Today the focus is on the next election, urging people to get involved and protect our republic from those who wish to undermine or overturn elections, undermine the rule of law and more.
But 80 years ago, the action required to keep our republic wasn’t to get involved in a campaign or be an election judge or write a clever rejoinder on social media.
It required real sacrifice. People uprooted their lives, moving to new towns to help with the war effort and putting their lives on the line by heading off to places they never imagined visiting to engage in combat they never imagined being part of.
I’ve always been skeptical of the glorification of war that is woven so deeply into our national psyche. But without the sacrifices those people made 80 years ago, I may not have grown up in a democratic nation.
Thanks, Dad.
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