Discovering Dad: An Unsung War Correspondent
and My World War II Hero
Why does an architect write a book that’s not about architecture?
It all started with our Yale Class of ’60 Fortieth Reunion, where the bravest of
our classmates posed the provocative question: What are you going to do
with the last third of your life? The prospect of all that time of relative ease
stretching ahead of us beckoned like an unexplored continent. Fortuitously,
after the Yale festivities my wife Connie and I also visited one of her college
classmates, Mary Oates Johnson, a writer and editor herself, in Andover,
Mass. I happened to mention that I spent the summer of 1945, when I turned
six, just up the coast with my mother, sister, aunt and her family in a rented
seaside house at Annisquam, while Dad was off to war.
Two days later she insisted on guiding us toward that tiny fishing hamlet.
With an explorer’s sense of serendipity, she drove us directly to the shore
and a beach turnoff I recognized. Hardly believing my eyes, I studied the
house on the right side of the road: The same flagpole, the kitchen steps,
the neat white clapboard siding, the wraparound screened porch and
windows like eyes patrolling the sea. Here it stood, worn, but unchanged
after 55 years, timeless. Later that evening, over much great seafood and
wine, we were reminiscing about blackout curtains during the war, to fool
enemy submarines off the coast.
“Peter, you’ve got to do it,” Mary said.
“Do what?” I muttered, through the comfortable, dreamy fog.
“Write the story of that summer, of your father’s war experience, and how
your family coped during the war.” She knew a good story when she saw one.
I sat up, sobered and alert. Remembering an old cardboard box sitting on
our basement shelf with 400 of Dad’s letters Mom had saved from the war, I
said. “My God, I can. I have the documents. I was there. I lived it!”
The rest is history—including some new history that had never before been
written about World War II. The letters revealed that, from his post as de
facto manager of Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI on Guam on August 14,
1945, Dad had scooped the stateside networks on news of the Japanese
surrender.
Dad’s War with the United States Marines, by Peter H. Green, Seaboard
Press (Florence, SC), 2005, an imprint of James A. Rock & Co., Inc.,
Publisher, in the American Voices Series, 302 pages, (Illustrated), Trade
Paperback ISBN 1-59663-501-0, Online, Click at link on left, go to
www.RockPublishing.com or www.Amazon.com
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Next stop
Peter at Annisquam, June, 2000
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