My father had just turned 18 and was a senior in high school when the United States was drawn into World War II. The armed forces didn’t have the capacity to train all of those who lined up outside enlistment centers on December 8, 1941, and the law allowed only men who were at least 20 years old to be drafted. That changed soon after the war started.
Leo J. Beck Jr. finished his first semester at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he played junior varsity football. He was drafted in spring 1943. After two bouts of rheumatic fever, the Army discharged him for medical reasons in October 1944. He helped train new recruits before his discharge, but he never went overseas. Other friends’ fathers who fought in Europe or the Pacific, said little about their lives as soldiers and sailors. They focused on their careers and their families.
It was later in life before I learned that the father of one of my friends was the pilot of one of the planes in the famous Doolittle Raid. Sixteen Mitchell B-25s bombed Tokyo on April 18, 1942. While the raid did little physical damage, it startled the Japanese public and government. The United States, which Japan believed to be unprepared and unwilling to defend itself, had attacked the enemy’s capital. Americans, still reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, were buoyed by news of the raid.
It was more than three years before Americans returned to Tokyo in a fleet of 374 ships to accept Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. My mother started classes at the University of Nebraska that fall. She and dad met in 1946 or 1947 and were married a week after he graduated, June 12, 1948.