In my youth, the Second World War was almost as real to me as it was to those who fought it. My father served. He was a hospital corpsman. His time in the Pacific was spent on the island of Espiritu Santo. I have a vial of Japanese mercurochrome he brought home from the war. His brother, Uncle JC, was a waist gunner on a B-17. He was stationed at Polebrook in the UK. Flew 40 missions over Europe. Their youngest brother, Uncle George, served on the USS Alaska in the battle of Okinawa. Lots of Kamikaze’s.

But as an old man looking back, I can see it was unlikely I really knew anything of the war or their service during my youth. Most of their service information came to me in my 30s and 40s as I started working on the family genealogy. So, it’s most likely the war knowledge of my youth came to me from school, episodes of Victory at Sea, issues of the Navy Times with pictures of ships and stories of war, and the “I Like Ike” buttons because he was the general who triumphed in Europe. I knew the broad strokes. Lots of little fragments of information from books, school, and television flowed into the malleable brain of a child and stuck to form a picture.

And this was the picture, my starting point. We won the war. We were good. Nazi’s were bad. Really, really bad. The Holocaust was an unimaginable evil. The Japanese were bad. So, bad that in 1973, when I drove to San Antonio to visit my grandmother with my wife and young child in my new Datsun B-210, my uncle JC couldn’t believe I was driving a Japanese car, because it was made by an enemy to remember. That’s some baggage to carry around. But, in sense I carried it around as well. Germany. Japan. The Axis. That war was part of me, and even to this day, I hold its lessons dear.

Part 2: Living in America, an old man’s journey into his past