Thread by @MollyMcKew

It’s the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and just wanted to remember my grandfather, who wrote the initial damages report on the attack and spent the rest of WWII in the Pacific.

He almost never talked about the war at all, except with my father.

https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/828218880887758851

His stories were so good, but really my dad is the one who keeps them now.

I have all of my grandmother’s letters to him — which he kept all his life, hidden in his navy trunk so she wouldn’t throw them away. I wish she had kept his — but she was not sentimental about the past.

One of the stories I remember was about why he knew how to play chess.

For part of the war, he & like 5 other guys were dumped on some rock in the Pacific so the Japanese wouldn’t take it. One of the guys was a chess savant, could play with no pieces on the board. He taught them

He and my grandmother just looked like movie stars.

https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/1114686532433137664

Never missed a chance for a tux

https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/1060697080040222721

You can see his handwriting on the bottom of my grandmother’s letters — he annotated when and where he was when he got them, so he would have it all straight in his memory.

https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/978380768060805121

Sometimes I really wonder what he would make of all that is happening now....

Everything that he did after was shaped by his service in the war — just as everything he had done before Dec 7 1941 somehow made it his destiny to end up in Pearl Harbor.

So my dad just reminded me of a part of this story that my grandpa never told himself.

He arrived at Pearl Harbor the day after the attack — as mentioned in the previous thread, because he was the only guy who knew shorthand notetaking in San Diego Harbor.

So he flew in on a plane full of senior brass as the note taker for the damage assessment.

When they arrived, everything was still smoldering ruins. He was with a naval salvage unit that was climbing around on the capsized USS Oklahoma.

They could hear banging from inside the shop, and were sure it was trapped sailors signaling they were still alive.

Don’t know the exact details, but my grandfather — a dirt poor kid who never went to college but had always had a brilliant mind for engineering —

— somehow helped figure out the engineering problem relating to rescuing the 32 men who made it out of the Oklahoma alive.

I know I’ve read about 6 different accounts of the Oklahoma rescue, all of which name different key actors.

But this was a piece of why my grandfather believed so deeply in fate, destiny. He was guided by a series of serendipitous events to be there, where his tinkering mind was of service at a vital moment.

He believed we could all be called on in critical moments, and must be ready

He was so young during the war. But so was everybody else. He used to say: “those ships, those men, on those bloody seas, against the odds, they were the finest people I ever knew.”