{"id":401,"date":"2013-12-08T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2013-12-08T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/?p=401"},"modified":"2013-12-05T21:41:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T05:41:07","slug":"december-7-1941","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/war\/december-7-1941\/","title":{"rendered":"December 7, 1941"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"photo<\/a>

photo courtesy of lefatima<\/p><\/div>\n

Pearl Harbor Wasn\u2019t the Only Target<\/b><\/h4>\n

If you\u2019re a history buff, you probably know how expansive the Imperial Japanese Navy war plans were for December 7, 1941. Besides attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, they planned and carried out simultaneous strikes and movements against several other targets, attacking the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Midway, Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, Java, Sumatra and Shanghai.<\/p>\n

There was at least one other place they invaded on that day. But let me keep you guessing for a while.<\/p>\n

Two Families Half a World Apart\"Mom&Dad<\/a><\/b><\/h4>\n

Less than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, my parents were married in Mount Vernon, WA. In keeping with wartime frugality, it was a simple civil ceremony. Soon thereafter my dad, who was actually a Canadian citizen at the time, joined the United States Army and was sent to Fort McClellan in Alabama for basic training. When he completed training, he was shipped out to fight in North Africa and then in Italy and France.<\/p>\n

They made him an engineer, which meant he was sent out beyond the front lines to build bridges and such.<\/p>\n

\"Andy<\/a>

Andy Cromarty and his best friend before the siege of Monte Cassino<\/p><\/div>\n

Another job: looking for mines by stabbing the ground with a knife. One day his best friend made contact with a mine and was blown to bits. My dad ended up in the hospital.\u00a0Losing his friend was so painful that he avoided having a best friend again as long as the war continued.<\/p>\n

My mom was pregnant with me when my dad went to war. She sent him pictures of me surrounded by hearts and doilies. My dad, who was generally quiet and low-key, wrote mushy letters back to her. (She saved them all.) My favorite quote from him: \u201cI love my wife, baby, rifle & foxhole.\u201d When he returned from the war, I was already three years old.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the world my future husband\u2019s family was affected more directly by the attack on Pearl Harbor. They lived on the small Chinese island of Kulangsu <\/a>(now known as Gulangyu). The area surrounding them had been occupied by the Japanese since 1938. But Kulangsu, which was an International Settlement or Treaty Port, had been spared. Then at 4 a.m. on December 8th<\/sup> 1941 (December 7 on the other side of the International Date Line), the Japanese Marines crossed over from Amoy, and for the next three and a half years, the 70 American, British and Dutch citizens and the nearly 80,000 Chinese on the island lived under Japanese occupation.<\/p>\n

While my mother-in-law and her children struggled to survive the occupation, my father-in-law fought the Japanese. He was an engineer too, but unlike my dad who was self-taught, my father-in-law had a degree in engineering. He was an officer who fought the Japanese for seven long years. In 1949 he helped arrange for some of the last boats to ferry Nationalists and their families to Taiwan. By the end of the evacuation, they were lashing small boats together like rafts to cross the Taiwan Strait.<\/p>\n

A Few Statistics<\/b><\/h4>\n

After Pearl Harbor the United States declared war on two fronts. By 1945, 418,500 Americans were dead. More than three hundred thousand of them died in Europe; 106,000 in the Pacific Theater.<\/a><\/p>\n

China, which had been fighting on its own soil since 1937, lost three to four million soldiers and around sixteen million civilians.<\/a><\/p>\n

Thankfully, my future father-in-law and my own dad were among those soldiers who survived. But as the numbers above show, it was particularly dangerous to be a Chinese civilian during the war. Without adequate food, fuel, clean water and medicine, many people starved or fell ill, my husband\u2019s baby brother among them.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re like most people in the world, you have some connection to Pearl Harbor. Do you have a story to share?<\/p>\n

\"my<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’d like to keep up with my weekly posts, you can receive an email reminder by clicking on the subscribe button at the top of the page.<\/p>\n

Next week’s post: Skirts and Pants<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pearl Harbor Wasn\u2019t the Only Target If you\u2019re a history buff, you probably know how expansive the Imperial Japanese Navy war plans were for December 7, 1941. Besides attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, they planned and carried out simultaneous strikes and movements against several other targets, attacking the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Midway, Malaya, Thailand, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[94,93,90,8,88,14,27,95,89,97,96,92],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war","tag-94","tag-december-8","tag-fort-mcclellan","tag-gulangyu","tag-imperial-japanese-navy","tag-japanese-occupation","tag-kulangsu","tag-officer-in-the-kuomintang","tag-pearl-harbor-attacked","tag-second-world-war-deaths","tag-taiwan","tag-wartime-letters"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Kn1e-6t","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5669,"url":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/china\/5669\/","url_meta":{"origin":401,"position":0},"title":"December 7, 1941: “A Date Which Will Live in Infamy.”","author":"Nicki Chen","date":"December 7, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Seventy-five years ago today, The Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 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