DECEMBER 7, 1941
By Louise Heiselman
May 7, 2004
December 7, 1941 was a date in history that I will never forget and one that had a lasting affect on our family. As you know that was the date that the Japanese bombed our Navy fleet while they were in Pearl Harbor, destroying most of our Navy and then four days later Germany and Italy declared war against the United States.
The Japanese surprised our navy on a Sunday morning, Hawaiian time. We had been to Sunday School and Church that morning and were home that afternoon listing to the radio and getting the children ready to take to a Christmas practice at Church. Charles was 5, Peggy 3 and Charlotte was 2 years old. My husband,Therold’s folks were there with us and when the news came over the radio about the bombing none of us could believe that this could have happened to us. Everyone was glued to the radio the rest of the day. It was the same feeling that we all had when the three airplanes crashed into the twin towers and the Pentagon.
The next day the young men started lining up to sign up to go to war and then the draft was also initiated. Several years before, along with Therold’s parents, we had bought a home together and each of us had our own apartment. Therold was a city bus driver and had an early bus run and then the late bus run out to the airbase. Then gasoline was rationed and we needed to live down close to the bus barn as he wasn’t able to catch a bus to work. We were lucky enough to find a older home that had been turned into small apartments and they needed someone to live in one of the apartments and oversee the place; so we moved down to 1024 J. St, as he would be closer to his work.
Therold was not drafted right away because he had three children. He wasn’t drafted into active service until November 29, 1943. He was sent to Fargate, Idaho for his boot camp, so the children and I moved back to our apartment next to his parents.
Therold got to come home a few days after boot camp and then he was shipped out to San Francisco where he was assigned to subchase #1055. This subchase had just been built in the last 90 days and was commissioned when the crew was ready to go to sea. Many of the sailors’ wives moved to the coast where they could see their husbands when their husbands’ ships would come into port but Therold’s subchaser’s home base was Pearl Harbor and he never got back until the war was over. We tried to keep things going at home the best we could and wrote letters nearly every day and took pictures to send him. I would put the children on the bus, transferring downtown to another bus that would take us to the Sunken Garden because I wanted a beautiful background for the photos. Then we would get on the bus and go home the same way.
When the war was over the government made a Land Lease Deal (or something like that) and the crew took their subchase up through the Aleutian Islands and turned it over to the Russians. The crew was flown back to the US and he was discharged November 10, 1945.