Remembering the Impact of Pearl Harbor, 70 Years Later

Today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Below you will find Buddy's account of how he remembers that infamous day's impact on his life and the lives of those around him.

~Claire


I was getting grown during the time of World War II. That started in 1941, so I was only a teenager. But it impacted my life for a long time, and everyone else’s too. It changed everything.

Adolf Hitler was making speeches in Germany when he was trying to start the war in 1939. Then they started invading France and took France over overnight. It didn't take them long to capture France and Belgium and Czechoslovakia, and just on and on and on. It affected everybody. So they started to ration everything: sugar, shoes, gasoline, tires; unless you were a preacher or a farmer you couldn't buy tires.

When the Japanese got into it and bombed Pearl Harbor, we declared war immediately almost. We heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio and Dixie [my sister]and one of her girlfriends took me, I don't know why, to Temple. I was three years younger than them, so I don't know that it affected me at that moment the way that it did them. They were right at the age where all of their boy friends were drafted immediately.

There were some who were trying to find a job and joined the National Guard just to eat, or the CCC (the Civilian Conservation Corps). They sent one of my friends to Oregon, to cut trees down in the forest. It was hard to find a job then because there was a deep depression from 1937-1939. Those were bad times. So if men didn't have jobs, they joined the National Guard, or the CCC, or they were drafted into the Army right quick. And the women at that age either went to work at all these Army camps they were building or they went to the shipyards and worked building ships, tanks, and all that. That raised us out of the depression because it gave everybody a job of one kind or another, all for the war effort.

-an excerpt from Buddy B's Interview