On December 7, 1941, my dad was assigned to the Arizona. A few days before he had come down with the flu really bad and was in the Pearl Harbor hospital. He tried to get back to the Arizona that morning but was so sick could not stand up. After Pearl Harbor he served on several ships as a gunner and later drove LSTs on several of the invasions. In 1944, his ship was hit by a Kamikaze plane and he was wounded by shrapnel. Lost hearing in one ear. They evacuated him to New Caledonia in a PBY and then on a hospital ship to Pearl and then to Seattle where he was in the hospital for a year. Received a medical retirement in 1945.

One of my managers in the Air Force was a civilian photographer named Charlie Fetterman. Charlie was one of the first graduates of the new Army Air Force photo school in Denver in 1938. In 1941 he was a photographer at Clark Field. He survived Bataan and was a POW in Japan till the end of the war. My wife was Japanese and when I first reported for duty with Charlie and learned his history, I was afraid he would be prejudiced against me. We talked about it, he met my wife (and came to really like her). Charlie said some of the Japanese treated them really bad, but a lot of Japanese farmers risked punishment and gave the POWs fruit and vegetables when the guards were not looking. Charlie always felt that there were good and bad people in every race.