My mother’s brother turned 18 just as WWII was ending. He served a hitch aboard the USS Chicago (CA-136) as a cook, shipping out in January of 1946. In 1964, our extended family took a vacation trip to Hawaii. We boarded a tour boat and sailed up the coast and then into Pearl Harbor. I still remember standing on the deck of the USS Arizona Memorial, watching the oil slowly come to the surface. I was eleven years old.
Almost everyone who remembers the war, who lived through it is gone. And since we are a clever but not intelligent species incapable of learning from history we will have another enormous war. We are a warlike species with a preference for conflict over cooperation. And since few now remember what total war is like and can’t learn without experience we will have another total war.
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
–Albert Einstein, in 1949.
US Army, Germany 1960’s. We had monthly alerts, all hours of the day or night, day of the month, and two hours to be in our assembly areas ready to go to war. The only predicable alert was December 7.
The Army commanders remembered.
All- ‘We’ have memories from our parents…what will the next generation remember?
I think the next generation will live the next war.
There will be wars, there will be lessons from them, and different people will have their own conclusions.
I’ve told this one elsewhere. I may even have told it here before, and I don’t remember it. But, it bears retelling.
My grandfather was TAD to Adak when they hit us. The only thing he would tell us grandkids about Pearl was that he lost shipmates. In the aftermath, the Navy sent him east, and he was a plankowner aboard USS Bunker Hill (CV-17), and he sailed to Okinawa and back aboard her.
To the end of his life, he quietly hated everything Japanese. He refused to let it interfere with the life he built after the war. I suspect that, if nothing else, it was out of sheer spite at the goddam Japs, so to speak.
In his den was a shadowboard with the photo of Bunker Hill’s commissioning crew, his ribbon rack, a chip of wood, and his bosun’s call. That shadowboard held pride of place in his house.
He never stopped busting my chops when I joined the Corps instead of the Navy. I think that “seagoing bellhop” was the nicest thing he said about it (strange thing – he didn’t appreciate it when I sassed him back and called him a cabbie…). When he passed, the local chapter of the Fleet Reserve Association semi-drafted me to show up in Service Alphas (the green USMC Service Dress uniform, for the uninitiated), and I was one of his pallbearers. I always thought he looked down from behind the pearly gates and laughed at that – “Seagoing bellhop carrying my luggage one last time, ain’t you, boy?”
What am I going to say to his memory except, “Aye-aye, Bos’n – Semper Fi. We have the watch.”?
My mother’s brother turned 18 just as WWII was ending. He served a hitch aboard the USS Chicago (CA-136) as a cook, shipping out in January of 1946. In 1964, our extended family took a vacation trip to Hawaii. We boarded a tour boat and sailed up the coast and then into Pearl Harbor. I still remember standing on the deck of the USS Arizona Memorial, watching the oil slowly come to the surface. I was eleven years old.
Almost everyone who remembers the war, who lived through it is gone. And since we are a clever but not intelligent species incapable of learning from history we will have another enormous war. We are a warlike species with a preference for conflict over cooperation. And since few now remember what total war is like and can’t learn without experience we will have another total war.
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
–Albert Einstein, in 1949.
US Army, Germany 1960’s. We had monthly alerts, all hours of the day or night, day of the month, and two hours to be in our assembly areas ready to go to war. The only predicable alert was December 7.
The Army commanders remembered.
All- ‘We’ have memories from our parents…what will the next generation remember?
I think the next generation will live the next war.
There will be wars, there will be lessons from them, and different people will have their own conclusions.
I’ve told this one elsewhere. I may even have told it here before, and I don’t remember it. But, it bears retelling.
My grandfather was TAD to Adak when they hit us. The only thing he would tell us grandkids about Pearl was that he lost shipmates. In the aftermath, the Navy sent him east, and he was a plankowner aboard USS Bunker Hill (CV-17), and he sailed to Okinawa and back aboard her.
To the end of his life, he quietly hated everything Japanese. He refused to let it interfere with the life he built after the war. I suspect that, if nothing else, it was out of sheer spite at the goddam Japs, so to speak.
In his den was a shadowboard with the photo of Bunker Hill’s commissioning crew, his ribbon rack, a chip of wood, and his bosun’s call. That shadowboard held pride of place in his house.
He never stopped busting my chops when I joined the Corps instead of the Navy. I think that “seagoing bellhop” was the nicest thing he said about it (strange thing – he didn’t appreciate it when I sassed him back and called him a cabbie…). When he passed, the local chapter of the Fleet Reserve Association semi-drafted me to show up in Service Alphas (the green USMC Service Dress uniform, for the uninitiated), and I was one of his pallbearers. I always thought he looked down from behind the pearly gates and laughed at that – “Seagoing bellhop carrying my luggage one last time, ain’t you, boy?”
What am I going to say to his memory except, “Aye-aye, Bos’n – Semper Fi. We have the watch.”?
Godspeed, Grandfather.