"This is no joke: This is War" 7 December 1941

[doctom54]

My first assignment after finishing residency in 1988, was as the only physician on Wheeler AFB (this was when the USAF still owned it, now it is part of Schofield Barracks).
Wheeler AFB was built in the 1930s and was a beautiful base. When the family and I arrived the buildings were all painted BUT none of the bullet holes in the HQ building, Clinic or any of the other building were patched. The tradition had been since 1941 to paint but not patch so no one would forget.
I was the Chief of Flight Medicine at Hickam AFB on December 7th 1991, the 50th anniversary. It was an amazing time and I was privileged to meet and talk with several who were there that day. Truly the Greatest Generation, they were all humble and essentially said they were just doing their job for the duration of WW2.

[sfshooter]

God bless those men! They were our Greatest Generation.

A rancher I became friends with died just recently. He was 91 years old. I had always heard that he was a WWII vet but no one knew what he had done.
He would come into the bar from time to time and still drink it up. He smoked and told me he had since he was 13 yrs old (he had cancer for almost a year before he died).
I finally got up the courage a couple of years ago to ask him about WWII. He was a belly gunner in a B-25 or B-24 (I can't recall which) in the Pacific. He was a small guy and that is why they made him a belly gunner.
He said the hardest thing for him was they would fly out and bomb an island and then fly back to where they were based. They would wait around for all the planes to come back in and a lot of times planes would never show up. They wouldn't know if those guys got shot down around the island they were bombing or if they had to ditch in the ocean on the way back. No one ever new what their demise was. He said that bothered him because he had friends who never showed back up.
The communications were way different then and they couldn't always relay back to their station island.

Absolutely humbling! We have no idea of the hardships these men went through!

I had some drinks with Leo just a few months before he passed. That man never quit!