The War

This week PBS is airing The War a documentary on World War II. I watched some of it with Walter in between my bike riding induced nap... There was a segment on Guadalcanal an island in the pacific...
August 7, 1942
"American land forces go on the offensive for the first time in the Pacific, landing on Guadalcanal. It would take six months to secure the island, but Japanese expansion is halted."

It was particularly gruesome and in the end 35,000 American soldiers died on Guadalcanal at the hands of Japanese bombers.

So I asked my Grampop tonight if he had been watching the show. I knew he had been stationed in the Pacific but I couldn't remember where. So I asked and you know where he said he was?

GUADALCANAL!

I have heard plenty of his stories but to see the pictures and video from the documentary that go along with his stories makes it a heck of a lot more relevant!

To think my grampop was there in the jungles with all the bugs, heat, death all around...
Granted he wasn't at Guadalcanal from the beginning, he was one of the reinforcements but he said "it was bad enough."

Interestingly, he said toward the end of his tour he was helping with a shipment of dynamite.
Looking on the box he read, "DuPont Gibbstown" and exclaimed to the men he was working with "My dad made this dynamite." To think Grampop wasn't the one shipped over from Gibbstown during the war... They were shipping dynamite made at DuPont plant in Gibbstown.