After our June 7 broadcast of D-Day Reunion we received many stories from all over the nation. We will continue to add stories as they come in. (Email stories to now@thirteen.org)

Again, we encourage you to do an oral history for the Veterans History Project. We have easy-to-follow — instructions.

We have received stories from veterans and children of veterans, refugees and children of refugees and those affected on the homefront and abroad. They make for excellent reading.

D-Day Stories — Long Lost Friends — Brothers in Both Theaters — Refugees — Memories of the Philippines — Second Thoughts — Nagasaki — Homefront Heroes — Thanks Again — From the Blitz to 9/11

BROTHERS IN BOTH THEATERS

Bill Moyers:

Thank you for the opportunity to recall my experiences from 1943-46 in WW2. I was 18 when I joined the U.S. Navy in June 1943. I was a Hospital Corpsman attached to the 112th Naval Construction Battalion (Seabees). Our bootcamp training was at Camp Peary on the James River near Williamsburg, VA., clear across the country from where I lived in Los Angeles! I was homesick very quickly.

Among my first memories was marching on 90+ degree days in mid summer for over 8 hours a day or until you dropped from heat exhaustion. After boot camp, we went to Eastport, ME where we took over an old National Youth Administration (NYA) facility and converted it into a Naval Station. It was October and snow was already falling in the most easterly part of the U,S. We were the first sailors these Mainers had ever seen; they were still using crank telephones. I have many memories of north-eastern Maine; it was a very poor area, but exceedingly beautiful.

From Camp Lee Stephenson in Maine, we were shipped to Port Hueneme near Oxnard, CA. and I was much colder standing the midnight watch (2400 to 0600 military time) when the fog rolled in than I had been in Maine. After 3 more months of training, we were shipped to Island X which turned out to be Oahu, HI. I was detached from the Seabees and assigned to the Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the windward side of Oahu where for the first 5 months I was Assigned to the bakery and learned to make bread for 5,000 sailors and fry donuts. I was in the bakery on June 6th when our forces landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.

I suspected that my brother, Staff Sergeant Mort Gaines with the 30th Division would be part of the invasion force and, indeed he was, having gone ashore in the third wave at Omaha Beach. He was at the break through at St. Lo and fought in 5 major battles in France, Belgium and Germany. His Reconnaissance Troop was the first to enter Germany at Aachen. They fought their way across Germany to link up with the Russians at the Elbe River. He was my personal hero and this past May he celebrated his 89th birthday.

After a stint in the Naval Air Station Hospital where I trained to be a Corpsman. I rejoined the 112th Seabees and we shipped to Island X in February 1945 which turned out to beTinian in the Marianas Islands. While on the voyage there, we listened to Tokyo Rose play all the 1940's Big Band Music in the hope our nostalgia would convince us to return home. She wasn't successful. The first night on Tinian, we dug foxholes, but I volunteered to man the sick bay tent and got to sleep on a folding cot. I was really sorry, I had volunteered because I was never so scared in my 18+ years. Every time one of the tent flaps moved in the breeze, I was afraid that a Japanese soldier was getting into the tent with a knife to slash my throat. I kept my carbine loaded with the safety off and was relieved when the sun came up the next morning.

While stationed on Tinian, I watched the B-29's depart to bomb Japan and many returned with portions of their planes riddled from flack and some ran out of fuel as they touched down on the landing strips the 112th Seabees had constructed. While we didn't know it at the time, we were on Tinian when they delivered the first atomic bomb that ultimately was dropped on Hiroshima. We knew something big was in the wind because of the extra security around some of the ammunition locations.

My memories include being in the hospital during the battle for Iwo Jima and seeing the brutally torn up bodies of the marines who were brought to us for care. Many were given beds in the hospital as they came in only to be dead by morning. This scene is embedded in my mind, I remember my brother's first letter that arrived while I was still on Tinian; it took over a month to reach me half way around the world. I still have it.

From Tinian we were shipped to another island X which turned out to be Okinawa where the 112th Seabees built airstrips near Naha to bomb Japan which was 300 miles north from where we were. We experienced nightly Kamakazi air raids and watched as Japanese suicide pilots dive bombed ships in Yonabaru Bay (later named Buckner Bay) We were there until the war ended and we lived through one of the worst typhoons that ever hit Okinawa. On November 1st, we boarded a Victory ship, the USS St Mary for the trip back home. I'll never forget steaming under the Golden Gate Bridge and all of us throwing our white hats in the air. Taken to Treasure Island for processing for a 30-day Rehabilitation leave home, my first stop was the galley where I ordered 6 eggs, over easy and a quart of FRESH mill; it was my first taste of real eggs and milk in nearly a year! Oh was that good.

Weighing only 120 lbs soaking wet, I went home to Los Angeles where for the next month my mother fed me that good home cooking until I gained back some of the lost weight. After my leave I was reassigned to the USS Vicksburg, a light cruiser in Los Beach Harbor and stayed on board until my discharge at the end of February 1946. On March 1st, I re-enrolled at UCLA from where I eventually graduated and where I met my wife of 53 years, May Belle.
Sincerely,
Richard S. Gaines, California

REFUGEE STORIES

A Daughter Says Thank You

After the war many people found themselves scattered in foreign countries. These refugees had been running and hiding from bullets and fear. The Allied forces started providing a structure to feed and house everyone that was left standing. My mother was one of those people. She walked from Berlin to Munich.

Her one goal, find the Americans and get behind them. Because only there was peace and safety. Her parents and siblings lost to her, she believed if there was any hope, it lay with those gum chewing, loud talking brash Yankees. Their energy gave hope to all that saw them. Hope was being assigned to a displaced persons camp in Bavaria in the American sector. There she worked as a nurse and sewed and mended for the GI's. She always remarked how those hard American fighters were, to her so young and sweet. She says they are all heroes because they tried to do their best.

My thoughts

I was born in 1941 around the time that the Germans invaded Ukraine....my parents had immigrated just 20 years earlier....so I could have easily been born and killed that horrible year instead of having a wonderful life as a US citizen.....I have always been totally absorbed by WWII and have read and watched shows for a long time.......My soul tells me that I must have gotten the soul of a baby who was killed...it just feels so close to me...the war.....so I wanted to share this most intimate feeling with all the brave and courageous men and women who saved the world.....thank you.....
Marilyn