JIM DOWNIMG PEARL HARBOR SKIN

Stratton and five others on the Arizona got the attention of a sailor on board the Vestal, and the man - they later learned his name was Joe George - threw them a small heaving line and attached a larger line to it that they could use as a hand-over-hand route to the smaller ship.

JIM DOWNIMG PEARL HARBOR SKIN

We just pulled the skin off our arms and threw it down, because it was in the way. “It was self-preservation after the bomb hit,” he recalls. Stratton, standing on the USS Arizona when the exploding munitions and fuel burned him over nearly 75 percent of his body, desperately sought escape from the inferno. Seventy-five years later, it’s the personal stories that sprang from Pearl Harbor, sometimes from vastly different vantage points, that resonate with the intensity of the times, coalescing around a common theme: Never forget, never let it happen again. Thanks largely to the GI Bill that spurred rapid growth in higher education nationwide, CU saw its enrollment virtually double, launching it toward status as a research institution. The University of Colorado, seeking ways to bring training programs to the campus that was losing male students to the war effort, became home to a fast-track Japanese-language school. The facility eventually trained more than 100,000 soldiers for duty in World War II and also housed nearly 9,000 mostly Italian and German prisoners of war, whose labor helped make up for a shortage of Colorado domestic workers during the war. The Army’s 10th Mountain Division trained at Camp Hale near Leadville from 1942-45 to produce soldiers with mountaineering skills that paid dividends against German forces - and later, in launching the state’s ski and outdoor gear industries.Ĭamp Carson, the Army installation near Colorado Springs that eventually would become the sprawling military and economic force that is Fort Carson, sprang up in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.

With the war effort ramping up, Colorado played a key role on several other fronts. Public attitudes would play out in both policy and politics as Colorado hosted one of 10 internment camps that confined Japanese-Americans amid fears that spies, collaborators or a “fifth column” lurked among the West Coast population. “But it’s clear that they see the peril and are trying to get out in front of it.” “They were telling whoever would listen that they are Americans, that they fully intend to support America in this war effort,” Hanson says. VIDEO: Amache Internment Camp survivor Bob Fuchigamiĭonald Trump’s focus on Muslims is troubling for Colorado survivors of Japanese-American internment camps in WWIIĪnd Colorado’s Japanese-American community, he adds, hastened to add its voices to the rising tide of patriotism. Pearl Harbor hero’s remains rest with parents’ in Colorado Springs after 75 years One of the last survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack on the USS Arizona dies at 94

Letters and diaries chart the enduring grief of a Denver mother with two sons at Pearl Harbor “That instantly changes when Pearl Harbor is attacked,” says Jason Hanson, director of interpretation and research for History Colorado. The chain reaction reverberated in Colorado, where domestic concerns still dominated a populace inching toward economic recovery while keeping an eye on the war that raged across the Atlantic.

A nation just emerging from the Great Depression and hunkered in an isolationist cocoon suddenly was catapulted, within days, into both theaters of the Second World War.

He and others will gather in Hawaii for what they suspect will be a last major reunion and a time for widespread reflection on the event that triggered enormous political and cultural repercussions - globally and nationally. Stratton, for instance, is one of only five living survivors from the USS Arizona, which accounted for almost half the casualties after a Japanese bomb detonated a store of ammunition and fuel to cataclysmic effect. service members and civilians were killed in the strike which brought the United States into World War II.Īs the 75th anniversary approaches, the ranks of surviving witnesses have thinned. Navy, sailors stand among wrecked airplanes at Ford Island Naval Air Station as they watch the explosion of the USS Shaw, background, during the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu

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