Personal History Lessons (and the people behind the facts)
Posted on 19. Apr, 2010 by Deb in Observations
Yesterday was the 68th Anniversary of the Doolittle Raids. Mere months after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, 16 B25-Mitchells were FLOWN off of an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo. These were not planes built to be flown off of carriers…And the crews knew there was not enough fuel to get them back to the ship, but only enough to hopefully get them to China.
When I visited the USS Hornet this past week, I said a quiet prayer for these amazing men. I was standing on the dock where they stood. Wow. (The Hornet, by the way is the 2nd Hornet that was put into commission sometime in 1944, the 1st Hornet was sunk by the Navy after being severely damaged in a typhoon).
Two years ago, I was blessed to go to luncheon and symposium that the surviving Raiders and their families attend. In reading through the news of the most recent reunion held this past weekend in Dayton, OH, I was sad to read that three of the gentlemen in the raids have passed away since 2008, and of the eight surviving Raiders, only four were healthy enough to travel and attend. There are eight survivors now.
I’m sad when I think of the sheer volume of stories that will never be told, never be heard, as we lose this generation. Will future generations remember what these men and women did during WWII, or will it become simply a paragraph in a history book? I feel so blessed that I have been able to chat with veterans of this generation, hear their personal stories, be reminded that there is more to war than a series of events, but that there are real people behind it.
I’ve seen some of the criticism about the new HBO Series The Pacific. I remember talking to George Pelecanos as he was beginning to work on the project back in 2008. Some say it’s not about the war, it’s really about the men in that Marine Battalion. I understand that people want to know about the war, what happened in the Pacific Theater. And I want to know the facts of what happened in Guam, and the Guadal Canal, and Pearl Harbor and Normandy and Berlin and London. But I also want to know about the people, because we lose so much when we fail to look beyond the facts.