Price for Peace Page #3

We felt like we was building ships

to bring our husbands home in.

We wanted to go to work.

We wanted to help win the war.

One of the most important things

was the building of the landing craft.

You could run it right onto the beach,

drop that ramp,

a platoon of men come out

and they're right there on the beach,

firing immediately when they get off

that Higgins boat, as it was called.

They made nothing except war stuff.

Whatever you had,

that's it until the war was over.

You can't get butter.

You can't get sugar.

It was very difficult getting new shoes.

Tyres were rationed, gas was rationed

to only so much a month,

and we all worked with it.

Everybody was sacrificing,

to make this a military that could

fight in both theatres, and we did.

The Philippines

was a complete loss to us

because this was one of the chain of

islands that was key to us in the Pacific.

We lost the Philippines,

they overran Bataan,

then they took Corregidor,

then the Bataan death march.

We lost Guam. Everything was loss.

Then came the Doolittle raid

that bombed Tokyo.

Jimmy Doolittle was appointed to head

the raid, and he was the man for it.

We took off about 8.

We were over the target about 12.30.

We hedge-hopped in

right on top of the water

and pulled up to our bombing altitude

of 1800 feet.

If you're dropping bombs at 1800 feet,

you just can't miss, period.

It was the first raid on Japan

and gave the US a shot in the arm.

It didn't do much damage,

it wasn't a big operation,

but it lifted spirits across America.

Perhaps the biggest decision

in the Pacific war was island-hopping.

We weren't strong enough yet

to go directly to Japan and leave

all these islands out in the Pacific.

So the islands in the Pacific,

we island-hopped.

Just as you would cross a stream,

and you jump from rock to rock to rock

to get to the other side.

And eventually get close enough to

launch our aircraft to bomb Japan.

It was the strategic decision that

guided the whole war in the Pacific.

It was one of the best decisions

ever made.

Aboard ship there was a lot of hours

where there was not much to do.

It was a long time on ship.

You'd lay on the deck in daytime.

We had some fun and games.

It mostly was boredom. You got up,

ate, worked and went to bed.

There are problems keeping troops

aboard ship who don't have room to run.

So you run in place.

Then you give 'em physical exercises.

We didn't know where we were going

until maybe two weeks at sea.

After we got out at sea,

they start to brief us as to what our

mission was and where we were going.

People had all kinds of thoughts

about what might happen.

There was a great deal of praying,

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