[UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers! I published this post yesterday (Wednesday) evening. However, as noted below, the referenced episode of The War can be seen this Sunday, when the first five episodes will be aired back-to-back starting at 11:00 AM.]
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Tonight at 8:00 PM, the fourth episode of Ken Burns’s documentary on World War II, The War, will air on PBS. (It’ll be rerun at 10:30 PM and 2:30 AM, and on Sunday at 5:30 PM. The first five episodes will be aired consecutively on Sunday from 11:00 AM to 10:30 PM.) The episode, titled
"Pride of Our Nation," details the events that occurred from June through August of 1944, including D-Day and the battles of Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian.
As I’ve mentioned before, my Grandpa Loomer was a Marine, and he fought in all three of those battles. Here’s a photo of him — wearing the fatigue jacket that he would later give to me — sitting on a wrecked Japanese airplane along a captured airstrip in Tinian:
My mom, who has been watching The War with considerable interest these last two nights, e-mailed me yesterday to share some more details about our family history vis a vis World War II. (My paternal grandfather was in his 30s by the time the war broke out, so he didn’t fight. As a result, it was on my mother’s side that the war’s impact was most acutely felt.) Ken Burns’s focus on the impact that the war had on ordinary people has gotten my mom thinking about how it affected her own family. She wrote, in part:
We are from a
family wrapped around World War II. Grandpa started going out with Grandma in the summer of ‘42, while planning to enlist in the service as
a carpenter 4th class. When he found out how much more officers
earned, he decided to do that [instead], [so] that he could support a wife, and
proposed to Grandma. They were married in Fredericksburg VA, right
near Quantico VA [home of the Marine Officer Candidate School. He was 26 years old, and she was 25.] They
had to wait to have a wedding reception when he got 30 day’s leave, a
month later (and they had gotten married on a 3-day pass at Christmas).When he shipped out it was with the 2nd Marine Division, seeing combat
on Tarawa, then Saipan [and] Tinian … He and Grandma didn’t
know when they would be able to start a family, with all the danger Grandpa was in, so they were married from Dec. 1942 through 1944
putting it off. It finally reached the point where they thought if
they waited any longer, they might have to wait ten years (which before
the bomb seemed likely). So when he was sent back in California (as it
turned out for his last leave), in late 1944, he and Grandma stayed
together there for three months, and it was then that they decided they
shouldn’t wait any longer. When Grandma saw him off and took the train
back home to Wisconsin, she was 1 month pregnant with Patty. As a
result, Patty was born before the end of the war (4 days before Roosevelt died). Grandpa got posted to Japan for the occupation and
didn’t get home until early 1946, when Patty was 8 months old. (That
was the first time he saw her.) But not knowing what lay ahead, their
going ahead as they did was pretty brave. Patty’s best friend
in high school was raised by just her mother. Her dad had died in the
war. We knew of other families like that, young widows raising small
children alone. …When we were
little kids, there were assorted things around the house that we never
thought were unusual — a (real) Japanese kimono for a small child (for Patty), a stuffy named Zealy that Grandpa had bought in New Zealand (also for Patty - it’s a rabbit). We also had a ceremonial Japanese sword in the attic, Grandpa’s full-dress uniform, his rifle
and bayonet, the fatigue jacket he gave you, some really cool toy
military vehicles — scale models, very accurate and well-made. He
also had a book of photographs that had been made and published for the
veterans of one of the above battles. Lots of images like on the Ken Burns special, flame-throwers shooting into caves, burnt corpses of
Japanese soldiers, battle landscape, etc. Grandpa had a rising sun
flag (red circle on white) with a lot of Japanese characters on it. Much, much later, he decided to try to find the family of the soldier
it had belonged to. He actually did locate them (with the help of
someone who could read Japanese, and a few other contacts) and sent
them the flag. They were grateful — they had lost their son in the
war and it was something of him being returned.As I know I’ve told you, Grandpa never talked much about the war to
us. I remember (idiot that I was) asking him how many Japs he had
killed, but I don’t remember whether he gave me an answer to that. Once, when a relative of one of our Macomb neighbors visited who
happened to have been a soldier under Grandpa’s command, the two of
them sat out in the backyard for quite awhile one evening reminiscing. That’s the only time I remember him talking about it. Even the
fact that he got flashbacks when he was too close under fireworks, I
didn’t learn until you were a little kiddo and we were spending the 4th
of July in Arkansas with him and Grandma.
Grandpa was away at war when his mother died. Of course a person can’t
come home for something like that in the middle of the war, but I think
he never got over that. I told Grandma once [years later, after Grandpa died] that it seemed so unfair that she and Grandpa had had to sacrifice
so much as a couple — the first four years of their marriage, delay in
starting their family, getting married alone far from home, having the
fear of death always hanging over them for 4 years because of Grandpa’s
combat — and she just smiled and said that everybody was doing it. I
found a letter she wrote to her mother when she and Grandpa were
traveling west as newlyweds to get him to San Diego, and she was
telling her how exciting it was to be starting off into the big world
with their whole lives before them.
Very interesting stuff, to me at least. When I asked if it would be OK for me to blog what she had written, my mom replied, "Sure. I think Grandma would be proud." As well she should be, and Grandpa too.
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Categories: Friends & Family
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September 26th, 2007 at 10:30:18 pm
Awesome.
I daresay I see some of the resemblance between your grandpa and you.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:58:39 pm
Yeah, I do too. Cool stuff.
September 27th, 2007 at 12:11:26 am
“I can never again see a UNITED STATES MARINE without experiencing a feeling of reverence.” GEN. JOHNSON, U.S. ARMY
“There are only two kinds of people that understand Marines: Marines and those who have met them in battle. Everyone else has a second-hand opinion.”
The US Air Force Chief-of-Staff would never be called — Airman
The Chief-of-Naval Operations would never be called — Sailor
The Commanding General of The US Army would never be called — Soldier
BUT the Commandant of the Marine Corps is proud to be called a –
United States Marine
September 27th, 2007 at 1:05:00 am
Reading the above comments, I thought of one remembrance in the Ken Burns documentary by a veteran who as a young recruit had gone with his brother to enlist together, and were trying to decide between the Marine Corps and the Navy. The Navy recruiter told them they didn’t qualify to be Marines because, among other things, their parents were married. Think about that for a minute. Grandpa would have smiled.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:41:42 am
Thank you Brendan and Leanna for sharing this. As an ex-marine I have a personal reason to give thanks for true heroes like your grandfather. The courage and tenacity he displayed on his watch gave our enemies pause when it was my watch.
September 27th, 2007 at 10:42:50 am
Brendan,
Thanks for sharing this heartwarming story. Quite a difference between their times and ours.
Dave
September 27th, 2007 at 12:24:14 pm
That pic of your grandparents . . . Lord, people used to look so good, didnt they?
September 27th, 2007 at 12:32:14 pm
My Dad was in the Army and at the Battle of the Bulge. He never talked about the war. He’s been gone almost 20 years now, and I so wish I had gotten him to talk about what he experienced, but I was too young and stupid to appreciate the reluctance to talk, which I think was partly the nature of war, and partly the concept of not being a braggart, we did what everyone else was doing. So, if you have WWII vets in your families, do everything you can to preserve their stories (actually all vets, but the WWII ones are most in jeopardy now).
Thanks for posting about your grandpa.
September 27th, 2007 at 12:46:02 pm
Your mother’s comment about odd things around the house that didn’t seem odd at the time made me remember shells. Relatives used to take me to the cemetery now and then to leave flowers on the graves of great-grandparents, uncles and aunts. They always brought a bucket to fetch water from a spigot nearby to spruce up the stones a bit and pour in the WWII shell casing buried in the ground to hold the flowers. Didn’t seem a bit odd to a kid that grew up going to Sunny’s Surplus, a local place that sold actual army and navy surplus items.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:01:45 pm
PS to my ealier comment:
In the wedding photo I notice he’s wearing his marksmanship qualifying medal. That’s just like a Marine - first a rifleman - proud of how well(to me)he can shoot.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:19:35 pm
Very touched by this, in light of the epidose last night. Thanks for sharing.
Michael Buckley
Kansas City
September 27th, 2007 at 1:23:20 pm
hey, it’s true, you really do look like your Granpa. I wish I looked like mine, no, I had to look like my Granma (only good thing she was a Ziegfeld girl but still, I am a guy).
All my relatives missed WWII but my Dad hit the jackpot and went to Viet Nam. He never talks about it either. While I (hopefully) have quite a few years left with him I am certainly going to do my best to get him to open up about his experiences. And tape his thoughts while I am at it.
I think Granma was very wise when she said no big deal, everyone was doing it. Shared sacrifice has a way of bonding people. Perhaps those latte drinkers that look down at the military need to sacrifice some too.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:48:19 pm
Your post made me remember things I hadn’t thought of in years.
My Uncle Gene was in demolitions in WWII. I was pretty young when he died, but his story was passed on to me later. He was the newbie on his team and getting a good ribbing one day when he was sent to fetch a tool the other guys needed. As he ran back to their jeep to get it, no doubt grumbling about the treatment, the device they were working on went off, killing everyone in his team except him.
Both of my grandfathers served during WWII as well, my mom’s dad was in the Army and my dad’s dad was in the Navy. One of my clearest memories of my mom’s dad is of him cleaning his service pistol, which he did religiously until the day he died. He had all manner of fascinating objects: his pistol, a Luger, bowie knives, a bayonet, spent cartridges of all sizes and a Nazi helmet with a hole in it. He even made an ashtray out of some of the spent cartridges. He died while I was in the service, at the end of a Med run on a fast attack sub. My dad’s dad didn’t really tell us much about his service, ironic since I ended up in the Navy and not the Army.
Anyway, thanks for bringing those memories back to visit for awhile.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:48:33 pm
I too remember war oddities from Grandpa. He was in the South Pacific (I don’t know exactly where) and I too remember the Japanese swards, miscellaneous Japanese stuff as well as his photo album of the places he went during the war (”crispy critters” is the name given to the “Japs” caught by the flame thrower and no name was given to the topless island gals that posed for pics!!!). My wife’s Grandpa didn’t make it through Normandy but a neighbor of ours did and he’ll chat your ear off about it (he got a chunk of a German grenade in the neck…he still doesn’t like Germans). What a generation.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:55:23 pm
My father was a bombardier with the 8th Air Force in England. He rarely talked about his war experiences, but once he showed me various medals he’d won (nothing too extraordinary). In with the medals was a little piece of German flak that had bounced off his flak jacket. I remember it had narrow black and yellow lines on one side, and ugly sharp points where it had fractured from the shell.
I didn’t begin to understand what he went through until I read “Masters of the Air”, a very personal account of the air war in England that was published last year. I wish my father had survived to see the publication of that book; he died in 1996. Among other things I learned was that the casualty rate for flight crews in bombers was around 35% — higher than for any service group except submariners.
The greatest generation indeed!
September 27th, 2007 at 1:58:50 pm
Great post–really great. Commentary too. Thanks.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:50:13 pm
I’ll show your story about your grandpa to my 20 y.o. son Matt who is about to join the Marines. They are really special people. I saw the Ken Burns episode that was mentioned. In the late 70’s I had cause to visit Saipan twice. It was a beautiful place with “flame” trees abloom (the leaves are red part of the year and amazing to see). I knew the history and visited bonzai cliff where the 2,000 citizens jumped. Japanese tourist light joss sticks and leave written prayers to the ancestors who died there. Seeing through Burns’ eyes what it was like for your grandpa gave me a new perspective. Thank God he survived. Thanks for his story.
September 27th, 2007 at 4:21:56 pm
You inspired me, I’ll start posting my great-uncle’s story on my blog. I have some 30 pages of double-spaced text, will take me a while. He was in China during the war as an airman.
September 27th, 2007 at 5:03:54 pm
Becky could take some fashion lessons from Grandma Loomer. What a looker!
Great story.
September 27th, 2007 at 5:37:40 pm
Thank You for a touching story.
Folks like your grandparents saved civilization. Thank Them, too.
September 27th, 2007 at 6:03:16 pm
My father was just young enough to miss being drafted in time for the Second World War. They got him for Korea, though, but by the time he finished radar school, the fighting was over. He had some fascinating Army stories, but that’s for another time.
My mother’s older brothers went different ways. The oldest worked in the West Coast shipyards and so was draft-deferred as essential skilled labor. The second oldest was badly nearsighted and ended up serving in a military band.
The third was one of the first infantrymen across the Remagen Bridge. He doesn’t talk about it much.
September 27th, 2007 at 7:31:58 pm
I was born in 1948. To me all those troops were larger than life. One of my uncles was killed when his plane went down in the South Pacific. His older brother was an Army Captain over an AA battery on Corregidor. I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through the Depression and WWII can really understand what sacrifice means.