One Day in August
By
Gerry Niskern
“Do you remember what you were doing the day the war in the Pacific started?” I was surprised by that question from my new doctor, but I answered quickly. “ Sure, it was a Sunday morning in December and I was trying to practice a song for a Christmas program with a neighbor on the piano. Her husband kept turning the news on the radio up louder and louder and when she asked him to turn it down, he turned it louder still.” Of course he did. Pearl Harbor had just been attacked. We were at war!
I was nine years old. I remember going to school the next day and learning that a friend’s brother was stationed aboard the USS Arizona that sank at Pearl Harbor. I remember my cousin Billy, 18, immediately joining the Marines and going to fight in the Pacific. We soon learned that Uncle Joe who was a gunner on a destroyer was ordered from the Atlantic campaign to the Pacific battle, without a leave in between. His younger brother, Uncle Harry, was serving on a tanker in the navy too.
This past week marked the 80th year since the United States dropped the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much was written and televised about those momentous days this week. The devastation to the Japanese in those cities was unbelievable and staggering. Thankfully, no country has suffered the fate of the bomb since that infamous day in August, l945. Right now, nine countries around the world possess nuclear weapons. Many world wide organizations actively oppose nuclear weapons and Japan is a leader among them.
The Japanese started their war of aggression against neighboring countries in the Asia Pacific area in l93l. It culminated in their attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, l941. 111,606 U.S. servicemen were killed in the war that lasted almost four years. Without the bomb our country was facing many more months of death and destruction.
Then, when I was thirteen, I have vivid memories of people out in the streets, laughing and crying. The Japanese had surrendered. The war was over. On that day in August a Jeep load of young guys, from Luke Field, training to be fighter pilots, pulled up in front of our house, laughing and yelling to my older sister and a group of girls they had been dating, “The war over. We’re going home!”