Interveiwer - Matt Meehan
Interveiwee - Jean Morris (My grandma)
1. Q. How old were you and where were you when Pearl Harbor happened?
A. It was the day after my 13th birthday. I was home, it was a very dark, rainy Sunday. We had buried my grandmother the day before. She was from South Carolina. My uncle worked at the Charleston Navy Yards where he had planned to stay a few days. But, we were listening to the radio - I can still remember it (chuckle) - and we heard the news and he drove right back. Of course they were preparing things for war anyway. Of course there wasn't flying then, you went by train. So that's where I was and that's how it was as I remember it. And then the next morning in school we were all... I was in the library but, you know, the principal turned on the intercom and we all listened to it as President Roosevelt made his speech.
2. Q. What was your reaction?
A. Well, my uncle had to go back to South Carolina and even though I had to go to school the next day we all talked about the bombing and President Roosevelt's speech.
3. Q. How old were you and where were you when the A-Bomb was dropped? Reaction?
A. Well, I would have been 17. I don't remember exactly where I was. Well, I guess at the very first we weren't really as cognizant of how awfully destructive it was. We were just glad it was going to bring the war to an end. And I think it took a while for it to sink in - exactly what this bomb was.
4. Q. What did you think about Hitler before the war?
A. I can remember reading an article or two in "Reader's Digest" that this man was doing great things for Germany, because they had debts from the First World War and had to pay reparations, and their economy and all was in such sad shape and that this person was really turning things around for them... I would generally consider that he was an OK guy.
5. Q. What were the rations like?
A. I lived on a farm, so it didn't impact us the same way it would people in the city because we had our own meat and vegetables. We did our own canning and stuff like that. In terms of sugar - you know, for canning and making jams or jellies - we had stamps; and stamps for gas. Living on a farm we had lots of gas stamps. We had our own gas pump and you had to give a stamp for every so many gallons and I can still remember sticking on all those stamps to give when you got a tank of gas. And I remember because our parents put so much sugar in their coffee, the kids thought that wasn't fair, so we each had our own little jar of sugar. So they would use it all up in their coffee and we saved it, and my sister was caught with quite a lot because she wouldn't share at all. We used to make fudge or something like that when we had enough. In college everyone would save their sugar ration, we'd eat our cereal with no sugar in it. I can still smell that fudge baking.
6. Q. How did you feel on V-E Day, V-J Day, and D-Day?
A. Very relieved that the war was coming to an end each time. I remember on my parents' farm down in the valley we could sit out and hear all the church bells ringing for V-E Day. V-J Day they signed the treaty the day I was going to college and listened to all the way on the car radio because they were doing the signing on the U.S.S. Missouri that day. D-Day was another rainy day, a Tuesday, and I remember being on the bus at school - going to school - and my sister had a horse and we saw it on the backfields of our farm and the horse was there with a foal and she named the horse Invasion. D-Day was really, with the casualties and all, it was sad and happy. It was sad because of all that and it was kind of a releif because finally it would be the final push. That was all of my high school - all my high school was World War II.
7. Q. What did grandpa do in fighter training?
A. He was in the Air Cadets training to be a pilot, but see he graduated from high school when he was 16 and worked at a war plant for a couple of years till he was 18 and then he was accepted into the Air Cadets.
8. Q. Where did he train?
A. He trained in several places: Texas, Kentucky - those are the two I remember. But he had to report to Fort Dixon, too.
9. Q. How did his training affect you?
A. Well, not too much. I was going with him, but I was still in high school and he was mostly just friends with my brother, as well as mine. And at that time everyone was going, it wasn't like Vietnam or anything. People were not complaining, they felt it was duty and you were going to go and be there. Of course, he wanted to fly and he was excited - it was what he wanted to do.
10. Q. What did you do during the war? You just went to high school, right?
A. Yup. Pearl Harbor was December of my freshman year and the end the end of the war in the Far East was the day I went to college
11. Q. How did you feel about the Axis leaders back then? Were they dehumanized?
A. Yes they were - they were the enemies. But we didn't know all of the atrocities, we didn't know for sure until towards the end of the war. We didn't know that they weren't just leading an armed army, but that they were doing other things as well. There was a very, very uncomfortable feeling about what truly was going on, like instead of just a normal battle. And we knew the Germans were very clever with their bombs and their technology. They had a lot of advanced things, possibly more advanced than we were. Their aircraft was more manueverable at the beginning of the war, and they had the rockets they launched on London - things like that: propulsion kind of things - which evolved into jets.
12. Q. How do you feel about the Axis countries now?
A. We're all part of a different world now and we can't feel about them and you should never just lump everybody in the same boat anyway. If you're German you're not all the same as everybody else. If you're American you're not all the same. The Russians are not all the same. And I think we probably need to be more vigilant always because we were still pretty naive at the time of WWII. We just didn't think that people would do these things to other people and we found out it wasn't populated by what we would call a civilized world. And I think that's one reason we have Kosovo and things now that people are more willing, because America was still pretty isolationist at the beginning of WWII. You know, it's not our world, we don't have to worry about it, it's too far away. There was still a lot of that even at the beginning of the war, but now we feel much more closely bound as a world. (Me-"So that's why they formed the U.N. and N.A.T.O.). Mm-hmm. Of course the United Nations was put together in the spring of my senior year in high school because the United States did not enter The League of Nations after WWI which was hopefully going to serve as a unifying force in the world, but we were very isolationist and didn't join. After WWII we were being reminded that it's all about togetherness.
13. Q. What was your most vivid memory?
A. My most vivid memory of the war? Well, the big dates I talked about before I remember. The first person from our town listed as a casualty. The juniors and seniors who graduated early because they had to be drafted. Probably just those big, big days.
14. Q. Was the war beneficial or negative?
A. I think it was beneficial in the sense that again we do feel we are part of the world together, we're not separate countries so much. Plus those who remember and hear about the actual horror of the war, I think, are not as eager to go to war. There have been times in our history when it was a really exciting thing to do and some of our engagements have been just because someone got really excited about it - 'Hey I'd like to do that'. With the atomic bomb and the potentail destructive forces that were created by the war, I think that the world on the whole is more cautious about these things. But there's still a lot of people who aren't, obviously. And with the SMART bombs supposedly we won't have the wholesale destruction that we did in some the German cities we saturated - saturation bombing.
15. Q. How did the propaganda affect you?
A. We certainly were bombarded with it and I can remember we all kind of thought that the Japanese were all awful people without ever really knowing any on the East Coast. But we did have the feeling that we knew, just knew, that these people were not good, more so than the Germans. The Germans were closer to the people we knew. (Me-"What about the Italians, since your town is mostly Italian"). There were a lot of Italian-Americans in the area where I grew up. I think that we thought more or less that they were just kind of dupes of Hitler. He was kind of leading them around. They were a group that "we knew", let me put that in quotations, because they were more similar to us. I think we were really more willing to believe the most terrible things about the Japanese.
