Grandfather in World War II: A History For Milo: Part I

Sergeant Russell J. Robinson, 1944

n December, 1941, Grandfather was nineteen years old. On December 7th of that year—now almost exactly 79 years ago—Japan attacked America’s main naval base in the Pacific ocean at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

At that time the war in Europe had been going on for over two years; Germany had attacked many countries and had even invaded and occupied some, like France. Germany had even attacked the biggest country in the world at the time, the Soviet Union (now Russia) in June of 1941, so the Germans were fighting a war on two fronts—in the East against the Soviet Union and then in the West, all the other countries in Europe, especially against England, who were holding out almost alone on their tiny island.

The main thing that had stopped the Germans from invading England (also known as Great Britain and nowadays mostly called the UK, or United Kingdom) was that small stretch of water that separated England from France—the English Channel, only 22 miles wide at its narrowest point.

The reason the Germans couldn’t cross the English Channel was mainly because the German Air Force, which they called the Luftwaffe, (meaning “Sky forces”) hadn’t defeated the English air forces. If they had tried to cross the English Channel, their boats would have been attacked by the English planes and sunk.

Invasion

At that time, invasions of countries by water—either the ocean, or a sea, or even just a river—was very difficult, because you had to have air superiority above all, but then you had to have huge numbers of ships and boats to carry all the soldiers, because the soldiers of the country being invaded would only have to put lots of guns all along their coast and shoot all sorts of bombs onto the invasion fleet’s boats to stop them from invading.

In military thinking they like to say that any invader’s armies have to outnumber the country being invaded’s army by three to one, meaning that the invaders had to have three times as many men, as well as all the weapons, and of course, all those men had to be fed, and they had to have tents and supplies and ammunition for their guns and all that stuff took a LOT of planning and organising. So behind the army that was invading a country there had to be another army which was carrying all the supplies for the invading army; plus, lots of men (there were no women soldiers in the American forces) whose job it was just to organise the whole thing, because if you didn’t have people who were doing all the planning then the soldiers would not have known what to do when they finished invading the target country.

So at the time that Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, the American forces—the Army, Navy, and the Air Force (which was at that time actually part of the Army—but more on that later) were a lot smaller than Germany’s and even Japan’s, because in the years before World War II there was a huge segment of American people who just didn’t want to get into any war. World War One had just finished less than 20 years before and of course lots of people could remember it very well, and lots of men had even fought in it. So they all didn’t want to get back into another war, especially in Europe, because they felt that the people in Europe were always starting wars and they just didn’t want to have to go and fight another war, because they figured that they had just finished one and were just tired of it.

But luckily, the president of America at that time, whose name was Franklin D. Roosevelt (pronounced “Rose-velt”) and whom everyone just called “FDR,” had begun to get worried that sooner or later, if the Germans somehow defeated England—which would have meant that the Germans would now be the rulers of all of Europe—then America would have to get involved.

FDR had many reasons why he didn’t like the Germans, but a lot of it was that the ruler of Germany, Adolf Hitler, was determined to kill anyone who he thought was not as smart or as strong as the Germans. This meant he wanted to kill all the Jewish people, all the Black people, and other people who weren’t White or did not have the same religion as the Germans. Back at that time, religion was much more important in the world and most Americans and Europeans would go to church once a week or so and would celebrate Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas and lots of smaller religious days each year.

So FDR realised that he didn’t want the Germans to control Europe, and now Hitler was even threatening the Soviet Union, and at that time, in December 1941, it looked a lot like the Germans might completely defeat the Soviets, which would have meant that only England, that tiny island on the Atlantic coast, would be the only country that would not be ruled by Adolf Hitler and his soldiers, who were called Nazis.

At the same time, from around 1935 or so, Japan, which had been becoming more and more militarised, meaning they had made their Army and Navy and Air Force much stronger than normal, and invaded China and were now threatening to invade lots of other countries in Asia, like Vietnam and Thailand and even India, so FDR had begun building up the strength of the American armed forces starting in about 1939.

One way of doing that was by having a "draft," which meant that when boys became 18 years old they were automatically put into the Armed Forces, where they were usually, but not always, allowed to choose what "branch" they wanted to join.

Grandfather wanted to be a pilot, but because he didn't pass a test called the "Color Blindness Test"—which mean that a person can't properly see certain colours, usually red or green. If you fail that test, it usually means that you can't be a pilot.

Can you see the numbers in this picture?

Russell The Radio Operator

When Pearl Harbour happened on December 7, 1941, Russell  was a 19-year-old student at Harvard University when " . . . a friend and I were waiting for two girls at an Emerson College rooming building and there was a radio in the hall, and it was about noon . . . and the radio announcer was saying 'And a Japanese fleet has bombed Pearl Harbour!' blah blah blah, and I remember saying to myself 'Where is that?'—I had no idea—'Is that Manila?'"

Russell remembers, in a 1999 interview: "Everything—everything—changed on December 7, 1941."

To be continued