If My Heart Had Wings: A World War II Love Story(8)
Naturally, Mom didn’t tell it to me like that, but I figured it was pretty close to the truth. Whatever! At least it got me to focus long enough to get an A on my silly paper.
What she did tell me about that time was she hadn’t really paid much attention to what was going on in Europe. The news was bad, but like most people in the U.S., she thought it was Europe’s problem, and we shouldn’t get involved. Nobody really wanted to go to war. But by the time the summer of 1941 rolled around, the ominous news arriving daily from Europe was making the situation harder and harder to ignore.
Things got even more intense in the fall. At the beginning of November, Roosevelt put the Coast Guard under the control of the navy, which was a clear preparation for war. By Thanksgiving, Mom told me, the mood throughout the country had become unbearably tense.
And yet, it wasn’t the craziness in Europe that finally got us into the war—it was Japan. In 1941, after trying to conquer China for four years, the Japanese were about to invade Thailand, Burma, and certain other Southeast Asian countries and wanted the U.S. to stay out of the way. So they decided to do something huge—something so destructive that our navy would be completely crippled and we’d be scared off for good.
That “something huge” occurred on December 7 when the Japanese bombed our naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing thousands of our sailors, soldiers, airmen, and Marines, and severely damaging the U.S. Pacific fleet. Mom told me the Japanese thought we were weak and so resistant to war that we’d just give up and go away. Instead, we came after them with a vengeance.
––––––––
“S URE, I REMEMBER THE day Pearl Harbor was bombed! Who wouldn’t?” Mom exclaimed when I asked her about it.
She was simultaneously folding laundry and standing over me while I ironed Dad’s shirts, a tedious chore that I hated, although it brought me 25 cents a pop. She knew I was inclined to slop through it, though, and was making sure I didn’t.
“Now, don’t put a crease in the outside of those sleeves. You need to refold,” she reminded me.
“I know, I know,” I said impatiently, refolding the sleeve and clamping the iron onto it. “So, what do you remember?”
“I remember that my mother and I had gone to church that morning,” she said matter-of-factly, “so we didn’t hear anything about it until we got home. But once we walked into the house, I got a load of my father’s face and knew something was really wrong. He looked like somebody had just punched him.”
Sitting close to his old Kellogg radio, head cocked toward the speaker, Grandpa had turned to them in alarm and shouted, “They’ve bombed our Navy in Hawaii!”
“The first thing I thought,” Mom said in a bewildered tone, “was ‘Hawaii’? What’s our Navy doing in Hawaii?’ I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.”
Drawing closer to the radio, they learned that the Japanese Navy had pulled off a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, home to almost the entire U.S. fleet in the Pacific. It was so unexpected and so horribly destructive that everybody was outraged, Mom told me.
“And it wasn’t just Americans,” she added, “but people all over the world.”
Not only had the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but they had also assaulted Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway Island. Some 2,400 sailors, soldiers, and civilians had been killed, and the U.S. Pacific fleet dealt a crippling blow.
“What did you do next?” I asked, horrified.
She put a folded towel into the laundry basket and sighed.
“I remember that when Lyndon came to my house that afternoon, we just looked at each other in disbelief.” She shook her head sadly. “It was like the world had turned upside down. We didn’t know what to think.”
She picked up another dish towel, folded her arms across it, and held it against her torso as she remembered.
“He said, ‘Let’s just walk,’ and tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. We ended up at Hamline Sweet Shop, where we huddled in a booth with friends and listened to those horrible radio announcements about the death toll and the devastation. The bad news just droned on and on, and finally, Lyndon just couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up, grabbed me by the hand, and said, ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. I don’t like the music they’re playing.’ And then we walked home without saying a word.”
––––––––
T HE FOLLOWING MORNING , Monday, December 8, the Hamline University administration called the students together for a special assembly.
“There were several hundred students there,” Mom remembered, “all of us sitting quietly in the auditorium and listening to a radio broadcast of President Roosevelt’s speech to Congress. You’ve heard it—it was the one when he called December 7 ‘a date which will live in infamy.’ And then he said something like, ‘As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I’ve ordered that all measures be taken for our defense.’”
In other words, we were at war with Japan.
“I remember having a sinking, numbing feeling,” she said, shuddering as she recalled that terrible day. “There we were, a whole assembly of people, and not a sound. Just a sickening, depressing silence.”