What did you do at the end of the war?
You never think much about what happens to servicemen who are deployed at the end of a war, especially not as large of a war as WWII was... Dad was in or near Manilla when WWII ended and the task of bringing everyone home started. He was told that he might be there for months before there was room on a transport to get him home. He ended up spending a few days before he was able to secure a spot on a very very crowded ship on its way back to California.
I don't know if Dad had much to come home to; I know he married Marilyn shortly after the war, and was with her for close to 10 years, but I don't know if he knew her before he left. His father, Edwin Earl Hampton Sr (Slim), had died of a heart attack in 1940. Slim and Ange (nee Ange Atkinson Isham) had separated a couple years before his death. Ange ran their house in Wasco as a boarding house, and had the two boys with her, while Slim had moved to Coalinga or near there, and had taken up with another woman, who I know nothing about. I think Slim was working for WM Keck, who founded Superior Oil, and whose fortune founded the Keck Foundation. Ange, his mother had died of cancer while Dad was at sea, and his brother perished shortly after that when the destroyer he was on was rolled during a typhoon in the Tasman Sea. Some of his grandparents were still alive, and he had aunts and uncles and cousins, but his nuclear family was gone.
On the 60th anniversary of VE day, I asked Mom what she remembered of it. She told me that it was a wonderful spring; such a beautiful spring that it could have defined the season. She described the beautiful blue skies with pretty puffy white clouds, the flowers blooming, the trees with fresh new green leaves, that green color that promises summer to come. She was poetic about the spring, the flowers, the clouds, the dead Russians on the side of the road... Wha? Mom? the dead Russians?
Apparently they hadn't gotten around to picking up the bodies. I can't imagine what it would be like to witness that as a 13 year old. She said the shopkeepers opened all of their shops and told the people of Vienna to take what they wanted so that the goods would go to the Viennese and not to looting armies. Then city services (electrical, water, etc) started to fail as the people running it fled, not knowing how they would fit with the new regimes. Vienna, I think, wasn't sure if the Americans or the Russians would be there first, and of how they would be treated. Food supply lines were cut and there was a scramble in the weeks and months following to get everything back to normal.
Mom said that food was in short supply but they weren't starving during the war; after the war, there was hunger and malnutrition. Mom's mom died of liver disease that Mom said was a complication of that malnutrition.
I don't know if Dad had much to come home to; I know he married Marilyn shortly after the war, and was with her for close to 10 years, but I don't know if he knew her before he left. His father, Edwin Earl Hampton Sr (Slim), had died of a heart attack in 1940. Slim and Ange (nee Ange Atkinson Isham) had separated a couple years before his death. Ange ran their house in Wasco as a boarding house, and had the two boys with her, while Slim had moved to Coalinga or near there, and had taken up with another woman, who I know nothing about. I think Slim was working for WM Keck, who founded Superior Oil, and whose fortune founded the Keck Foundation. Ange, his mother had died of cancer while Dad was at sea, and his brother perished shortly after that when the destroyer he was on was rolled during a typhoon in the Tasman Sea. Some of his grandparents were still alive, and he had aunts and uncles and cousins, but his nuclear family was gone.
On the 60th anniversary of VE day, I asked Mom what she remembered of it. She told me that it was a wonderful spring; such a beautiful spring that it could have defined the season. She described the beautiful blue skies with pretty puffy white clouds, the flowers blooming, the trees with fresh new green leaves, that green color that promises summer to come. She was poetic about the spring, the flowers, the clouds, the dead Russians on the side of the road... Wha? Mom? the dead Russians?
Apparently they hadn't gotten around to picking up the bodies. I can't imagine what it would be like to witness that as a 13 year old. She said the shopkeepers opened all of their shops and told the people of Vienna to take what they wanted so that the goods would go to the Viennese and not to looting armies. Then city services (electrical, water, etc) started to fail as the people running it fled, not knowing how they would fit with the new regimes. Vienna, I think, wasn't sure if the Americans or the Russians would be there first, and of how they would be treated. Food supply lines were cut and there was a scramble in the weeks and months following to get everything back to normal.
Mom said that food was in short supply but they weren't starving during the war; after the war, there was hunger and malnutrition. Mom's mom died of liver disease that Mom said was a complication of that malnutrition.
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