Fresh water had to be rationed on Ascension Island, until the engineers got their sea water distillation plant up and running. There was virtually no fresh water on the island. US Air Force photo.
Researching the letters my father wrote home during World War II, I've stumbled across a report in the Air Force files about living conditions on Ascension Island, where he was stationed for the first two years of the war. It begins in an ordinary military-like way:
My grandmother Chapman's scrapbook covering my father's service in World War II.
I've been working on a book proposal about the end of World War II, and I owe a debt to the work my grandmother did--keeping a scrapbook of my father's photos, newspaper articles from his hometown paper, as well as telegrams and letters. All this has been an enormous help in my work.
One thing my grandmother did not do, much to my dismay--when she cut out newspaper articles about my father--she did not include the name of the paper or the date of the article. For the family, at that time, it didn't seem important. For a researcher--it is essential.
Thank goodness for libraries. I learned that the downtown library in Birmingham, Alabama (my father lived in Homewood, a Birmingham suburb) has microfilm from the 1940s of both the Birmingham News and the Shades Valley Sun. I suspected the articles about my father appeared in one or the other of these papers. The Sun was a weekly published for Homewood and surrounding neighborhoods, where my grandfather was President of the City Council.
An online request could not be fulfilled, because one has to give a librarian a date range of just a few days if one wants a librarian to pour through the microfilm.
So, I took a recent research trip to Birmingham and went through the microfilm myself. I rolled the dice and started with The Sun and began my search in August of 1945 when the war was coming to an end. I based that on the content of the articles and their placement in the scrapbook. One was about Nagasaki, so I knew it had to have appeared after August 1945.
Within less than an hour I had found both articles--with name of the papers, page numbers, and dates
"Capt. Chapman Served on World's Remotest Islands" appeared on page 10 of The Shades Valley Sun on Friday, September 28, 1945. My grandfather was in advertising and he had a flair for promoting the service of his self-effacing son.
The more important article, "Homewood Boy Visits Scene of Atomic Bomb Destruction," appeared on page 11 of The Shades Valley Sun on October 26, 1945. Based on a letter my father wrote home after touring the destruction at Nagasaki, it quotes his observations including: 'The stench of the dead is still present in some places."
I knew my father had seen Nagasaki--though he never spoke about it to me. I learned it from this article, which I had seen in my maternal grandmother's scrapbook decades ago. More recently, I found it in my grandmother Chapman's scrapbook. But without a date, or the name of the paper, I was stymied. Now, with the rest of the blanks filled in, at least of this mystery--I can move forward with my research.
History is like a large puzzle and my father's war history is like a puzzle within that puzzle--with a few pieces filled in here and there by my father in random conversations throughout his life. Now, as I am gradually finding the other pieces with research, the true story of his experiences in the last and largest battle of the Pacific Theatre--Okinawa--is beginning to come into focus.
I wish he would have talked to me about it in his lifetime. But he didn't seem to want to.
But there are still ways to learn:
My grandmother helped by saving the articles. My mother helped by saving my father's letters. And the Birmingham Library helped by aiding me in my microfilm search through their archives. I hope one day to find a gracious way to thank them.
My grandparents might have had an inkling--but it has taken us all many years to realize how much we all owe to the contributions of all these men whom Tom Brokaw thoughtfully dubbed "The Greatest Generation."
My father, standing third from left, with his men on Ie Shima, during the Battle of Okinawa.
If you are interested in reading more about the Battle of Okinawa, I recommend Typhoon of Steel: The Battle for Okinawa by James H. and William M. Belote. It was published in 1970 and can be found at Abe books On Line or at your local library.
The stories coming out of Japan are stunning. That the one nation to have suffered the effects of the only two nuclear weapons fired in anger--in the history of the world--should now have to face this latest tragedy--also involving radiation--almost defies the laws of probability.
I think we should be cautious before everybody runs under his desk in the duck-and-cover position: in spite of the blabbing on cable news. As serious as the concerns are about the radiation--and they are legitimate--the economic and human impacts of this disaster are very likely much more serious.
I've recently uncovered a cache of my father's letters to my mother, written near the end of World War II. They were in a dusty footlocker in a crawl space over our garage.
Dad's letter's home from the end of World War II.
They are an amazing historical and personal treasure and I will write more about them in the future. But I want to make several points with regard to them and to what I have learned from them about my father's radiation exposure sixty six years ago in Japan.
Captain Ashley Chapman was on Ie Shima, about 700 miles away from Ground Zero, when the atomic bomb exploded on Nagasaki. The pilots who flew from his airfield that day could see the mushroom cloud. Within a month he was in the occupying force at Sasebo, just 40 miles across the harbor from Nagasaki.
He and his battalion rode out a typhoon that September which--one can only presume--blew the fallout around to a considerable degree.
He also toured the city of Nagasaki with his friend Capt. Herb Schiff.
My father lived to be 90 years old. Herb Schiff is still with us, living in Sarasota, where he recently celebrated his 91st birthday.
The two of them also took a train to their embarkation port when they were going home, and that train took them through Hiroshima. My father wrote my mother that he slept through that part of the trip, though others stayed awake that night and reported that the city--seen at night, through the train's dark windows--seemed to have vanished.
Dad came home. Had kids. Both of us went to college and I have a graduate degree. So Dad's DNA seems to have survived his ordeal.
None of this is meant in any way to dismiss the concerns over the radiation from the nuclear power plants in Japan. They are obviously in serious difficulty. But, with the knowledge learned through many years of research, the U.S. is taking the proper precautions for our troops over there, and the international community will make all the same preventative measures available to Japanese citizens.
Thus, we need to temper our concerns about this with a dose of common sense.
However: the economic and humanitarian concerns are very serious--for Japan and the world. The earthquake--now calculated to have been a 9 on the Richter scale--has created the biggest devastation in Japan since World War II.
Nothing can mitigate the loss for the victims of this tragedy. But the destruction can be repaired. And though both the Japanese stock market and the American stock market have taken a hit over this, they will come back. Rebuilding will mean a huge investment in Japan and some of that money will be invested in and by American companies with the expertise to help. Think about investing in one or two of them while the market is down. It will help the companies, the economy, and it might bring you dividends, as well.
Finally, on a personal note, the Japanese earthquake has made me think seriously about my own very casual preparations for an earthquake disaster in California. I have not taken this seriously enough--as I did not in Florida, before Hurricane Charlie slammed through in 2004.
Every citizen in a potential disaster area--and the San Francisco Bay Area qualifies big time in the earthquake department--needs to have a substantial earthquake kit on hand. Fresh water, canned goods, a land line telephone, a hand crank radio, candles, matches, paper products, soap, and a good first aid kit, all should all be stored in a safe, easily accessible place.
Disaster relief will come. But, as I learned in Florida, it won't come immediately.
So, I'm going to do a better job of getting my earthquake kit ready for the future, in the firm hope that I will never need to use it.
The radiation--if it does blow across the Pacific Ocean toward California--is of much less concern to me. Driving on the freeway is probably more hazardous to my health.
As is--potentially--an earthquake, for those of us who live on the San Andreas Fault. A 9.0 on the Richter Scale is a shaking of the earth of unimaginable magnitude. Except now it is imaginable. Because we've seen it in Japan.
