Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [24]
Mom updated Dad on Joan and me. “[Don] is the type of person who needs to keep busy and he does keep busy,” she wrote in one letter. “Don said this evening at dinner that he has three ambitions. He would like to become a ‘band leader’ like Harry James [at the time I played the cornet in the junior high school band]—an ‘architect’ and a ‘flying Naval Officer.’”9 As it turned out, I would only fulfill one out of three.
In one of my letters to Dad, I updated him on what I was sure he needed to know. Softball was in season and I was going out for right or center field. Even though Dad was at sea in the Pacific Ocean, I did have my priorities. “Would you please try to get me a…fielder’s mitt if you can?” I asked. “I miss you a lot,” I added. “Take good care of yourself.”10 I couldn’t wait for him to come home.
A dramatic moment for me came quite unexpectedly when I was working on a school play in the courtyard of Coronado Junior High School. An urgent announcement came over the loudspeaker: President Franklin Roosevelt had died.
I had become accustomed to thinking of the President as indomitable. He was the person we listened to on the radio and saw on newsreels, the one who I believed would lead us to victory and keep my father safe. As shocked as I was by the news of his death, I was surprised by the reaction of a few of the kids in the school. When they heard about his death, some of them seemed cheered.
In my young mind, FDR was tied to my father, his ship, our country, and the war. Now that monumental figure was gone. I cried.
The conduct of the war now fell to someone the country knew almost nothing about, Vice President Harry S. Truman. Within a few months of taking office, Truman ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. None of us knew what an atomic bomb was other than that it was a powerful explosive, and there was something called fallout from the massive detonation. For many Americans, including our family, the bombings meant that the long bloody war, a war that had cost sixty million lives, might soon be near its end.
After the second bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, Dad wrote my mother a letter. “There is much conversation among the crew about the possibility of a Jap surrender, based on nothing concrete of course, as we have no information other than that from the radio,” Dad told her. “All of us think, however, that there is a good likelihood of it happening not far in the future. It is wonderful to contemplate.”11
His hope was fulfilled a few days later. On August 15, 1945, newspapers carried variations on the headline: “JAPAN SURRENDERS, END OF WAR!” I was selling the San Diego newspaper at the Coronado ferry dock with that message emblazoned on the front page. I sold out every copy of the paper that day, though in retrospect I wish I’d kept one. V-J Day meant my father would be coming home.
At first the USS Hollandia was scheduled to go to Japan as part of the occupation force. But the ship was assigned instead to bring back to the United States the survivors of the USS Indianapolis, which had been sunk in the Pacific by a Japanese submarine. It was a terrible disaster. Approximately three hundred U.S. naval personnel went down with the ship. Of the nine hundred or so men who had made it into the water, only about three hundred were rescued after nearly five days with no food or water, facing exposure and shark attacks. So the USS Hollandia returned to the United States on September 26, 1945—stopping first to drop off the wounded survivors of the Indianapolis, then coming into port the following day to disembark the Hollandia’s crew.
When we received word that the ship was coming in, my mother drove us up to meet Dad. Mom, Joan, and I watched the ship disembark the passengers and crew. Finally, my father came off the ship. For this thirteen-year-old boy, all was suddenly right with the world.
After my father died in 1974, I found a wrinkled letter