Memorial Day

There’s a statistic that popped into my head when I woke up this Memorial Day morning. I stumbled across it in the book Unbroken, Laura Hildenbrand’s story of the life of Louis Zamperini. Louis was a hell-raising juvenile delinquent who grew up in an Italian-speaking family near Torrance in the 1930’s. A fleet-footed thief, he managed to dodge a jail sentence by returning to school and joining the cross-country team.  To make a long story short, Louis went on to participate in the 1936 Olympics and was closing in on the four-minute mile when World War II intervened.

Louis joined the Army Air Corps and, after the engines failed in a borrowed, beat-to-shit B-24, went down in the Pacific. He spent the next 47 days adrift in a sun-scorched, shark-infested hell. Rescued by Japanese fishermen, he then entered another kind of hell: the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp system.

While the book itself is spellbinding (author Hildenbrans also wrote the bestseller Seabiscuit) it mentions a statistic that permanently imprinted itself on me: During World War II our country lost 30,000 pilots, gunners, and bombardiers — just in training. That’s the equivalent of losing every man, women and child in a big league ballpark on any given game day. And this was just teaching our guys to fly.

But the military taught them other skills, too. Young gearheads from San Pedro to Bakersfield, San Diego to Portland, were trained in engineering, welding, sheet metal and millwork. They in turn came home from the war and gave us the modern day hot rod.

Bless ‘em. Bless ‘em all.

I posted this 8mm film on our website awhile back. It was shot by my uncle at Harper Dry Lake in 1940. You’ve probably already seen it, but I watched it again this morning in a different light. I realized that, within two years of the time it was made, virtually every young man pictured would be in a uniform, fighting a war.

Bless ‘em all.