Uncle Rush
This week, the theme of genealogist Amy Johnson Crow's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" project challenges participants to write on the theme of Witness to History. I had a lot of trouble deciding which ancestor to choose this week. As far as I can remember, I have already written about everyone I could think of in my family who has been on the front lines of important historic events. So I decided to write again about someone I've mentioned before, my great-uncle Romeo ("Uncle Rush"), who was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941.
When I was a child, Uncle Rush was a frequent fixture at the home of his sister, my maternal grandmother. They went through a lot together as kids. Their father was killed in a coal mine collapse when he was only three. My grandmother, the eldest child, was six at the time. The two remained close as they grew up. I remember him as a fun and playful man who loved children and always had a kind word, a joke, or a game for us.
He never spoke about the war with us kids. But I know he signed up with the army early in 1941, when he was 22 years old, and was stationed at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu. When asked had been like to be there on the day of the attack, he always said he didn't witness anything, because he hid under the bed. Of course, that was not true. He was very much involved that day and over the next week. When he found time during those harrowing hours of responding, watching, and waiting, he kept a diary. I don't have the entire diary; my mother's cousin, his daughter, does. But she sent me scans of some of the pages.
He describes the attack on Oahu that morning, and talks about seeing a Japanese plane shot down. "What an awful sight," he wrote. "It will live in my memory forever."
He spent the rest of that day moving artillery to a different position, and described manning a machine gun nest and scanning the ocean for signs of another attack. He wrote about being exhausted and dirty, since it was several days before anyone in his unit could shower or get more than brief intervals of uneasy rest. Two Japanese soldiers came to shore. He saw one shot. The other got away but was later captured.
Uncle Rush was not prone to flowery descriptions or flights of imagination, mostly recounting what he saw and did in a simple, factual, tension-filled tone. But sometimes he described what he was feeling. And an eerie sense of unreality pervades his narrative. He waited for several days for something to happen, as he sat overlooking the shore. "All you could hear," he wrote, "was the roar of the ocean's waves."
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