Pearl Harbor Attacked!

[Oldgringo]

"....a date which will live in infamy...."

[jmra]

One of the planes that survived is coming back to the states.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/07/ra ... latestnews

[MoJo]

I got on a "Freedom Flight" out of Cam Rhan Bay, Republic of Vietnam at 1100 on December 7, 1968 and arrived about 26 hours later at McCord AFB, Washington at 1000 December 7, 1968. That guy McFly doesn't have anything on me!

[Redneck_Buddha]

I'll still never forgive the Germans.

[howdy]

I'll still never forgive the Germans.

Neither will John Bulushi....(Animal House speech)

[texanjoker]

I worked with a Pearl Harbor survivor back in the 80's when I was a rookie. His story of the day was amazing. RIP Bob!

[ELB]

If it hadn't been for WWII, I probably would have been a farmer's son, raised on a farm in Illinois. My dad dropped out of high school when he was about 16, so around 1934, rented acreage with a friend and his friend's father, and started farming. Dad told a lot of stories about that, he farmed using both horses and tractors, and really enjoyed it. He never said, but I suspect that some of the fun went out of it when his friend was killed in a tractor accident crossing a creek on the farm(my middle name comes from that man).

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, my father immediately enlisted and was on his way to basic training by Christmas. Dad said he told the recruiters he wanted to be a paratrooper, but they told him he was too small (about 5' 6", 135 lbs - dad said later in the war he found out they were taking guys even smaller to be paratroopers).

When they found out he was a farmer, they asked him if he knew how to work on tractors. Yes, of course. So after basic training he found himself on the way to some place called "Kelly Field" to learn to become an aircraft mechanic. After that he shipped out to the Pacific, where he spent the whole war working on various Army Air Force planes and painting artwork on the planes and various signs. He came back in late 1945 and almost immediately got married.

He worked for his dad at an oil station for awhile, but one day he drove past the airport at Peoria IL and saw a whole bunch of P-51s (redesignated F-51). He stopped in to see what it was about, and ended up joining this brand new flying outfit called the "Air National Guard" as mechanic in the 169th Fighter Squadron. As an Air Reserve Technician he worked on F-51s wearing civilian clothes during the week and a uniform on weekends. He once told me that was the happiest time of his life. He was doing something he liked, just married with brand new son (my brother), and soon after a daughter as well. The official logo of the squadron was The Chief, a Disney character that they got permission to use, and I am pretty sure dad painted the original version of that for the squadron. He also painted designs on fighter pilot's helmets.

Over the next couple or three decades he was almost always involved with some component of the Air Force, becoming one of the first Chief Master Sergeants in the Air Force Reserve when that rank was created around 1960, and also working as a government civil service quality assurance inspector at various Allison engine plants in Indianapolis (Allison built lots of aircraft engines, as well as transmissions for every tracked vehicle the military used back then, as well as the fuel tanks for the Apollo command module and lunar module).

With all that background, the second son born in 1959 more or less always figured he'd join the Air Force, which he did via AFROTC at Indiana University. Commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, he received his first salute as an officer and paid a silver dollar for it to a certain Chief Master Sergeant (Retired), also of the Air Force Reserve, and spent the next 22 years as USAF property until he retired and settled down in south Texas.

So although I was not even a vague thought on 7 Dec 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor had a fairly direct and substantial affect on how my life turned out.

RIP to all the souls lost at Pearl Harbor.


"A veteran is someone who wrote a blank check payable to the United States of America for an amount up to and including his life."
-- Gene Castagnetti, Director, National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific