Name Three World War II Events in the Pacific

I was advised to have an audience in mind while writing this book. I thought mostly about my family, few of whom were likely to read Ty’s diary – 353 pages, typed, double spaced – or the more than 400 letters he, his parents, and others wrote in the war years. Most were handwritten when penmanship was a subject in school, so they were fairly easy to read for those of us who learned cursive in the fourth grade.

Iwo Jima Flag Raising
A Marine photographer captured the image of the American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945. Photographer Joe Rosenthal, of the Associated Press, arrived at the Iwo Jima mountaintop a short while later as an officer ordered that a larger flag be substituted. Rosenthal’s photo won a Pulitzer Prize and served as the basis for the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
Photo credit: Staff Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, USMC, staff photographer for “Leatherneck” magazine

I have two brothers (one of whom died in 2021) and two sisters, all younger than me. We are all Boomers. The next generation are my nine wonderful Millennial nieces and nephews and the first baby of the next generation born in early 2022. She joins Generation Alpha.

Mostly, I thought of my nieces and nephews. I did not survey them or any of their friends systematically. But I did occasionally ask people if they could name three things that happened during World War II in the Pacific.

Usually, whoever I had put on the spot just stared at me. After a suitable pause, I said, “Pearl Harbor?” Sometimes that unlocked other answers, and sometimes it didn’t. They could seem a little crestfallen that they hadn’t thought of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the battles of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, where Marines were captured in photographs raising the stars and stripes.

A few had heard about Americans fighting in the Philippines and the Bataan Death March. Some had studied it in detail, either in high school or college. But most had never heard of the cruel event when Filipino and American soldiers were marched 60 miles in high heat with little food or water. Thousands of them died. I hope my millennial relatives and their friends, and perhaps others, will become my audience, the readers of one soldier’s story of hope and horror in World War II.

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