Posts Tagged ‘Pearl Harbor’

A Pearl Harbor Story.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged history education, Pearl Harbor, Randy Holmes, Teaching about Pearl Harbor, teaching history matters, USS Oklahoma, World War II on December 9, 2024| 2 Comments »

Talking about Randy on my Youtube channel. Maybe you’ve heard it before, but I’ll keep reminding people until the day I die.

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A Walk in the Snow.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Matthew Rozell, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor 75th anniversary, Power of Teaching, Randy Holmes, remember, Teaching about Pearl Harbor, teaching history matters, USS Oklahoma on December 7, 2016| 4 Comments »

Paige and flag. Credit: Dan Hogan

We walked in the snow, squinting against the early winter sun, moving past the headstones in one of the older cemeteries in our town. Small talk wound down as we approached our destination. We stopped, and greeted the reporter who met us there for the event. Austin opened the small bag of black river stones, and each student picked one to write a message onto.

We approached the grave. Well, it is not really a grave, you see—a nineteen year old kid’s body lies somewhere back in Hawaii, at a place called Pearl Harbor. His parents lay just to the south of this marker, passing on 14 and 18 years later. The kid’s body was never properly identified. He lies in a mass grave somewhere else, far, far away.

And here in his hometown, there is not even a flag on his marker. Why should there be? As far as I know, there is no immediate close family left here to tend to his stone, and he is not even here.

But we buy a flag, and Paige affixes it to the holder.

Teacher and student. Credit: Dan Hogan

Paige holds the 1942 yearbook senior class dedication, and I pull out a copy of his photograph, and say a few words.

Seventy-five years after his death, after his parents’ pain and anguish at the telegram announcing he was ‘missing in action’, after his classmates’ angst that following June at graduating without him into the new world of 1942, where so many of them would go on to fight and die along with him, a bunch of kids from his high school return. The 17 and 18 year olds are on the cusp of entering a new world themselves, along with them the 55 year old man who was once also a young graduate-to-be of Hudson Falls High School.

We come to remember, and to set down our memorial stones.

The kids speak to the reporter, and we pose for one last picture.

We are here for all of 15 minutes before the bus has to return to the school to make another run, due to parent-teacher conferences at the elementary level. It is quick, a surgical tactical strike in an overly crowded and rushed school day; some might say, hardly worth the effort.

You wonder if the lesson will stay with them.

They leave this cemetery, some certainly forever, to go out into the world, having paid their respects to the boy from Hudson Falls whose future ended on December 7th, 1941.

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‘One of Their Own’

Local sailor who died at Pearl Harbor remembered by teacher, students

From the Remembering Pearl Harbor, 75 years later series

by BILL TOSCANO btoscano@poststar.com

HUDSON FALLS — On a windy Tuesday morning, in a snow-covered cemetery, Matt Rozell’s history class took a somber turn.

Rozell and about 25 Hudson Falls High School seniors stood in the fresh snow at a memorial stone that read, “H. Randolph Holmes,” followed by the words, “Died in action at Pearl Harbor,” “Age 19 yrs” and “U.S. Navy.”

Holmes had been a student in Hudson Falls’ Class of 1942 but left school early, joined the Navy and was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

“We wanted to make sure we didn’t forget Randy,” Rozell told the group, which had taken a quick bus ride on Route 4 to the Moss Street Cemetery. “Especially you in the Class of 2017 because it’s the 75th anniversary of the year he should have graduated.”

Holmes was aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma during the attack and was one of 429 men killed when the ship was struck and capsized. Like many of the sailors on the Oklahoma, his body was not recovered for 18 months and has never been identified. Holmes was buried, with the other “unknown” Oklahoma sailors, in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the “Punchbowl.”

Several years ago, one of Rozell’s students located Holmes’ name on the memorial to those who died on the Oklahoma.

Two of Rozell’s students said Tuesday they had no idea a former Hudson Falls student had died at Pearl Harbor.

“I had no clue,” said Alex Prouty, who went on to talk about what she and her classmates had

learned about the attack. “We learned that there was a loss of a lot of lives and that a lot of people went missing. No one was prepared for it, and our military did the best they could to protect us.”

Jacob Fabian said he learned about Holmes in class as well.

“Before class, no, I didn’t know anything, but now, yes, because of Mr. Rozell’s book,” Fabian said. “We learned a lot about Pearl Harbor, what its effects were, why and how it happened and how monumental it was.”

During the brief ceremony Tuesday morning, one of the students held up a picture of Holmes from the Class of 1942 yearbook and another held the yearbook itself as they stood by the memorial stone. Rozell had a student hand out black stones, and the students wrote on them and left them on the stone.

“This year’s yearbook is also going to have a page for Randy,” said Rozell, who has written two books on World War II and is working on several more. “It’s important for us to remember him.”

Photo by Steve Jacobs, Post Star, Moss St Cemetery, Hudson Falls, NY, 12-6-2017.

Identification ongoing

Holmes may yet come home.

Five formerly “unknown” sailors from the USS Oklahoma were identified in January, using medical records. The identifications are the first to come from a project that began in April 2015 when the Defense Department announced plans to exhume an estimated 388 of the Oklahoma’s unknowns.

The first exhumations took place June 8, 2015, and the last four caskets were dug up Nov. 9, 2015.

Sixty-one caskets were retrieved from 45 graves. The caskets were heavily corroded and had to be forced open.

The remains were removed and cleaned and photographed. The skeletons were flown to the lab in Nebraska for further analysis, but skulls were retained in Hawaii, where the Defense Department’s forensic dentists are based.

http://poststar.com/news/local/local-sailor-who-died-at-pearl-harbor-remembered-by-teacher/article_8b7006ad-ba5f-5544-85a4-131a5a0b9430.html

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.

UPDATE:

As of Nov. 30, the Pentagon says it has ID’d 21 of the 388 unknowns.

You can see the news releases here. Hopefully someday they’ll ID Randy Holmes …

http://www.dpaa.mil/News-Stories/Releases/

A highly recommended PBS video is below.

http://www.pbs.org/program/pearl-harbor-uss-oklahoma-final-story/

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Vet tells his story: from Pearl Harbor to the classroom

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alvin Peachman, Hudson Falls High School, Liza Frenette, Matthew Rozell, New York State United Teachers, NYSUT, Pearl Harbor, teaching history matters, The Things Our Fathers Saw, U.S.S. Witter on December 8, 2015|

Vet tells his story: from Pearl Harbor to the classroom

by Liza Frenette

Nineteen-year-old Alvin Peachman was playing pingpong when he heard about the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His heart might have skipped a few beats, like a ping-pong ball skittering across the table. But it didn’t take too many heartbeats after that for him to enlist in the Navy.

“We heard the news on the radio. There was no TV then,” he told students at Hudson Falls High School recently. The idea of the U.S. Navy being so outrageously attacked seemed unthinkable.

“We thought it was a joke. Then, we heard President Roosevelt ask Congress for a Declaration of War. And I knew that I’d be in it,” Peachman said. “There was war fever. There were posters to inflame your patriotism.”

Always interested in history and geography, he said he knew right where Pearl Harbor was. Information about Pearl Harbor Day can be accessed in a free lesson plan at the American Federation of Teachers’ “Share My Lesson” site.

“I volunteered for the Navy. You had to be in perfect physical condition,” Peachman said.

At the time, he was working on the docks in New York City, where he’d come to find work away from the coal mines of Appalachia, where he grew up. He unloaded coffee on the piers. “I could rip the pier up!” he boasted.

It’s been a long time since Peachman was in front of a classroom, teaching students about history. But, at 93, he still lives just down the street from the small and rural Hudson Falls High School where he taught from 1951 to 1983. So he came on over recently to spend several hours with two classes of students, talking about his experiences during WWII. He fought in the Pacific Theater, which spilled out on a map behind him for students to see. A white-haired man with sparkling blue eyes, he sat comfortably in front of the students, wearing a brown cardigan, telling them how he slept in a hammock on his ship with 50 men in a room the size of their classroom.

He showed them a metal chunk from a kamikaze plane that attacked the U.S.S. Witter, a destroyer escort ship off Okinawa. Peachman worked as a radio operator and barely escaped death. Students marveled at the piece of history.

Peachman earned $21 a month for his service in the military, but he had to pay $6.50 of that for insurance because, he recalled, “If you got killed and didn’t have insurance, your mother got nothing.”

His service included fighting in the Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and New Zealand. When fighting on land, he said his helmet served as a wash basin to shave and wash. Many comrades got malaria or other tropical diseases. “You’d get dysentery and be so sick, you wish you were dead,” he said.

Sometimes he was “10,000 to 12,000 miles away from anywhere on the ship,” he said. He crossed the equator a half dozen times and lived through a typhoon, where waves slammed the ships sideways. People had to be tied down so they didn’t get washed away. More than a thousand lives were lost during the two-week storm, Peachman said.

Those weren’t the only challenges.

“I saw no girls for two years and that bothered me,” he said, as students laughed with him. “You go nuts!”

He got out of the service on a Friday and enrolled in college in New York City the following Monday. “I studied like a bulldog,” he said. He worked on Wall Street and then for Western Electric, but his commute was long and he found the city crowded. He went to New York University to get his history degree, and then found a listing for a teaching job in Hudson Falls.

“When they told me the train fare was $15, I almost collapsed,” he said, breaking out into a huge smile.

His host for the day at the school was Matt Rozell, who used to be Peachman’s student. Now, Rozell has written a book, The Things Our Fathers Saw (The Untold Stories of the WWII Generation from Hometown USA — which includes interviews with Peachman and many other veterans. Peachman also passed around a book with photos of his bombed out ship and pictures of his comrades.

“This book will help to remind those who are young and who are living in today’s confused world, that freedom is not free,” Peachman said.

http://blogs.nysut.org/blog/2015/12/07/pearl-harbor-attack-prompted-dockworker-to-enlist-retired-vet-and-teacher-tells-students/

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Pearl Harbor survivor was quick to share memories

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Barney Ross, Gerald Ross, Japan, narrative history, New York State Military Museum, Pacific War, Pearl Harbor, Seventy Years, teaching history matters, the Japanese, World War II on October 6, 2015|

Pearl Harbor survivor was quick to share memories

OCTOBER 04, 2015 2:00 PM • BILL TOSCANO

Editor’s note: Every life has a story. In this column, we pay tribute to people who have died recently.

I wrote about Mr. Ross and his passing a few weeks ago. This article appeared in the Post Star yesterday as he was being laid to rest. The reporter had contacted me for comment. And just so folks are aware, I asked him not to mention my recent book unless it was okay with Mr. Ross’ family. Rest easy, Barney. You made a lot of people happy in this life.

Barney Ross by Erin Coker, Courtesy Post-Star

There’s a footnote at the bottom of Page 21 of Matthew Rozell’s recently published “The Things Our Fathers Saw” that sums up the late Barney Ross perfectly.
“In his remembrances, Mr. Ross’ voice began to break up recalling his friends who had passed before him. Barney brought smiles through the tears as he reminded my students that, ‘I may get emotional, but I’m still a tough guy.’ “
Rozell and his students at Hudson Falls High School were among many who heard Ross’ first-hand story of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War and the signing of the surrender in Tokyo Bay.
Over the years, he had to think a little harder and sometimes needed prompting, but once the Whitehall native started telling his story, the memory and emotion took over.
Gerald A. “Barney” Ross, 94, died Thursday, Aug. 27, at Indian River Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Granville, and with him died another memory of the attack that brought the U.S. into World War II. Ross, a lifelong resident of Whitehall, was one of an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 survivors remaining out of 60,000 who were at Pearl Harbor on that day of infamy.
Ross was a 1940 graduate of Whitehall High School and played on the 1939 unbeaten, untied, unscored-upon team. He was a hunter, fisherman and lifelong communicant of Our Lady of Angels Roman Catholic Church.
Following graduation, Ross enlisted in the U.S. Navy in August 1940. He served on the USS Blue during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Ross met Alice Marie Doyle at a USO dance in Philadelphia, and they were married in 1946. He operated Ross’s Restaurant in Whitehall and was later employed as a machine operator at Decora Industries in Fort Edward, retiring after many years of service.
Indelible memories
An electrician’s mate aboard the USS Blue, Ross found himself in the destroyer’s magazine during the battle, feeding ammunition to an anti-aircraft gun on the top deck.
“I’d get a shell, put that in the hoist,” Ross said in one of his many interviews. “And I’d get a powder and put that in the hoist. That way, I was feeding the gun. … I feel that we did our job.”
He had been in the harbor on the USS Blue when the Japanese planes dove out of the sky and dropped their bombs, and when the enemy submarines simultaneously sent torpedoes into American ships, in the surprise attack on America’s Pacific fleet.
“When the Japanese attacked, I was on the deck waiting for a boat to take me to a church service,” Ross said. “We saw a plane dive toward the USS Utah, then within minutes, it was the worst devastation you could ever imagine — the USS Arizona was blown up and the USS Oklahoma was turned over on its belly.”
Over the past seven weeks, at least five other survivors of the attack have died, including Joe Langdell, who at 100 was the oldest survivor of the USS Arizona. Eight men who served on the Arizona during the attack remain alive.
Ray Chavez, who at 103 years old is believed to be the oldest living survivor of the attack, recently threw out the first pitch at a San Diego Padres game.
In all, 2,000 to 2,500 of the 60,000 survivors are thought to still be alive, according to USS Arizona Memorial officials. More than 2,400 Americans died during the attack, including 68 civilians. Most — 1,177 — were killed when the Arizona exploded and caught fire.
‘A real nice man’
Rozell said he had not been in touch with Ross recently, but the man left a deep impression on him.
“He came across as a real nice man — down to earth, with a great warmth for the students he met in my classroom. A man who loved his town, his family and the entire region. But having survived the shock of Pearl Harbor, he always left us with a warning: ‘Be vigilant.’ That was in 1988 [1998].”

Ross was one of the first of many veterans to visit Rozell’s classroom. He is the first veteran quoted in “The Things Our Fathers Saw.”
“As a nation, we were sleeping; it is a terrible thing to say, but we just …” Ross is quoted as saying.
“I was just standing there waiting for a motor launch to take me to a bigger ship to go to Mass, to go to church! We had no inkling, no inkling whatsoever,” he added.
“We were sitting there like sitting ducks! Here are men, if you can visualize, men struggling to get out of the ships. A lot of them were sleeping in because they had the day off. It was a horrible thing! This fleet was coming to blow us off the face of the earth.”
Paying respects
Ross is survived by his wife and his three sons, Gerald F. Ross and his wife, Patricia, of Hartford, Dennis A. Ross and his wife, Angella Gibbons, of Marshfield, Vermont, and Christopher D. Ross of Whitehall.
Ross lived at Indian River Nursing Home in Granville for the past six years, and his wife still lives there.
A Mass of Christian burial was celebrated Saturday at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Granville.
Rite of Committal will be celebrated at 1 p.m. Monday at Gerald B. H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery in Schuylerville with full military honors.

http://poststar.com/lifestyles/columns/local/epitaph/pearl-harbor-survivor-was-quick-to-share-memories/article_f37b8284-0a58-5d8f-b5c5-8576e20dd2bc.html

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Danny Boy.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Author Matthew Rozell, dan lawler, Daniel Lawler, Marines, narrative history, New York State Military Museum, Pacific War, Pearl Harbor, Seventy Years, teaching history matters, The Things Our Fathers Saw, the Japanese, Voices of the Pacific, World War II on September 17, 2015| 3 Comments »

Danny.

Dan Lawler in my classroom, 2011. Portrait by Robert H. Miller.

Daniel Lawler in my classroom, 2011. Portrait by Robert H. Miller.

I’m staring down a stack of papers I have to grade, and the pile keeps growing higher. I’m too busy teaching and planning lessons at school, so like most teachers I know, I bring them home. I’ve gone through a ‘first look’ once, and that’s a start. But I can’t get into the rhythm until I write about my friend Dan Lawler, who passed away almost a week ago at the age of 90.

I’m ashamed to say I missed his wake today, and tomorrow I will miss his funeral. But I think he knows that I will be doing my best in school and elsewhere to keep the memory alive.

Dan Lawler was a Marine’s Marine, World War II edition. He was wounded at Peleliu, and then miraculously made it all the way through the Battle for Okinawa. Later he served in China to protect against communist insurgents; he had many stories to tell and I detailed many of them in my book. But what struck me the most about Danny was his devotion to his friend, Jimmy Butterfield, and Jim’s wife Mary.

They would come to my classroom and entertain and enthrall the kids, but it was always tempered with the realities of what they truly experienced. You see, Jimmy was blinded for life at Okinawa. But Danny always got him to come in to school, and together they told the stories that only brothers can share. They would rib each other, fun stuff to reel the kids in. And then the stories would flow. It was never an act. It was brothers being brothers and letting us in on the most intimate stories that would bubble forth, sharing with the teenagers in my room, who fell in love with them, and for the moment, becoming the teenagers who they once were themselves.

People I don’t really even know, who have read my book where both are profiled, have reached out to me to express their condolences at my loss. Of course, that is one of the downsides of getting close to the folks who fought and sacrificed in World War II. Eventually their time is up, and they have to leave us.

And of course, my sorrow is nothing compared to that of his family, but remember this- Danny, and all the survivors of World War II who managed to make it back, had stories to share. I thank God that I knew Daniel Lawler, and Jim Butterfield, who passed 2 years before him. But it’s not just a loss for those who had the honor of getting to know him- it’s the loss for humanity. I just hope, Danny, I did my part in keeping your memory alive.

Rest easy, Marine.

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This fleet was coming to blow us off the face of the earth.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Author Matthew Rozell, Barney Ross, Gerald Ross, Japan, narrative history, New York State Military Museum, Pacific War, Pearl Harbor, Seventy Years, teaching history matters, The Things Our Fathers Saw, the Japanese, Voices of the Pacific, World War II on September 2, 2015| 2 Comments »

My friend Barney Ross passed away a few days ago.

I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I know he was not well these past few years, but he was one of the first vets to come to my class and spend some time with us. He is also the first veteran to speak in my new book. I remember one poignant moment when he briefly lost composure recounting his friends who had died and whom he missed. It’s always something to be prepared for when you interview any veteran, but Barney hardly missed a beat-he brought smiles through the tears as he reminded us that, “I may get emotional, but I’m still a tough guy.”

So today, on the anniversary of the signing of the surrender aboard the USS Missouri, where his boat was also anchored for the ceremony, I’ll let him recount for you what it was like at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. Yes, he was there, too.

Rest easy, Barney.

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