<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Well, now I want to kind of jump to December 7, 1941.

RM: Yeah.

TI: And with the, Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, what was then the reaction?

RM: I was in a, a drugstore, Joy Drugstore. I was having my breakfast, I had a milkshake with an egg in it, probably ten or eleven o'clock in the morning.

TI: That was your breakfast? A milkshake and an egg?

RM: That was breakfast, yeah, that was breakfast. And my mother was asleep, I didn't want to make noise, so I left the house and went to the drugstore, Ed Cabets, and he had the radio on like everybody else in America, and I heard the announcement. And I, this fellow next to me -- I can't remember what he was eating -- but he turned to me and he says, "Oh, God." He says, "We're gonna go back through it again." And I said, "Yeah," I said, "There's, I don't think there's any way out of this one." And by the time I went over to see my best friend, whose name was Stan Ogsbury, Stan's father was saying, "Well, the Japanese aircraft carriers are on the Pacific Coast." I said, "Where?" He said, "San Francisco, Portland, Seattle." I said, "They are?" Says, "Yeah." Said, "We're gonna have to get ready." I said, "Oh," I said, "Gee, I haven't read that yet or heard that on the..." "Well," he said, "it's happening." He said, "I've got friends in the military who told me this." So about this time I started to get a little scared and I went home and listened to the radio. Or did we... just a minute, I don't think we had a radio until oh, about 1942. So I heard it, must have been a neighbor. Anyway, they, they just kept giving the same announcement over and over. And my reaction to Pearl Harbor was that, "Uh-oh. We're going in whether we wanted to or not." And I heard the Roosevelt speech on December 8th in the classroom. I had a very enlightened principal who pumped it into the different classrooms so we could hear it.

TI: What were your, your classmates saying, and teachers saying about this?

RM: "Too, we're too young to go." The kids that I was going to school with said, "We're too young."

TI: 'Cause you were about fourteen?

RM: Yeah, I was fifteen, fourteen. And I do remember on December 8th, passing -- I can't remember whether it was Scottish Rite Temple or where, but there was a long people, line of people enlisting in the service. And they were all shouting and yelling that, "Let's go, let's go." Another person would come up and they'd greet him, that kind of thing.

TI: At that point, did people understand that the United States was going to war not only with Japan, but with Europe? That it was fully entering, or was it more focused on, on Asia?

RM: No, and, and it was interesting. I was selling, I was selling papers then, and it was interesting. Roosevelt turned the, the war from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and he was helped immeasurably -- and I remember shouting the headline -- by Hitler, who declared against the United States. Probably the capital mistake he ever made. And, and so forced our attention onto Europe. Otherwise, he might have had to fight the war in the Pacific first. So that... and I remember when we were selling papers, that -- and he wasn't called FDR, he was called FR in the papers. And I remember that that, that switch took place. And, and it took so, it was so subtle, you hardly noticed it in Idaho, but it was there.

TI: I'm sorry. The switch being from, from Japan to Europe?

RM: Yeah. Yeah, of taking on Europe first, and then Japan. Roosevelt's belief that didn't come through clear in Idaho, the Roosevelt idea that Germany was a greater enemy, to be feared more, than Japan.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.