Day of Destiny

Photo By Joseph Eddins | Portrait of Reba Sue Hudnall made in Austin, Texas in April of 1945 just before she married Joseph Moye Eddins, of Troy, Alabama two weeks before he deployed with the 317th Troop Carrier Squadron of the Second Air Commandos to China, Burma and India. (photo courtesy of Eddins Family)  

UNITED STATES

12.07.2016

Story by Joseph Eddins    

Airman Magazine   

Each of my Decembers has begun with the national remembrance of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

The surprise aerial strike on Oahu, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, killed 2,403 military personnel and civilians and wounded another 1,143. It also torpedoed the U.S. government’s policy of non-intervention in foreign conflicts. The United States was plunged into the greatest conflagration the planet has ever known, changing thereafter the nation’s place in and influence on world history.

World War II would also influence the destinies of millions of Americans and their families, including mine.

By war’s end, hundreds of thousands of America’s sons and daughters would be gone. Their family histories indelibly rewritten: spouses never met, children never born.

For those who survived, their lives too, and those of their descendants, would be forever altered.

This year is my 54th Pearl Harbor Day. It would have been my father’s 75th.

Joseph Moye Eddins was a high school sophomore in Troy, Alabama on that December day. He learned of the attack, as many did, after Sunday dinner gathered around the family radio.

Like many young men, the attack on Pearl Harbor drove him to enlist. When he came of age in 1943, he tested for and was accepted into pilot training with the U.S. Army Air Forces. He did not know it at the time, but he was leaving Alabama, never to return.

His final flight training took him to Bergstrom Field in Austin, Texas. While on a weekend pass, he met 19-year-old Reba Sue Hudnall, of Johnson City, at a roller rink. They were married in April 1945, just before he deployed with the 317th Troop Carrier Squadron of the Second Air Commandos to China, Burma and India.

After a mission in August, he received news of another event that changed the course of his life and all human history. The U.S. had used a new weapon on Japan that destroyed an entire city in a single strike: the atomic bomb.




With Japanese forces having withdrawn from Burma, my father and the Second Air Commandos were scheduled to redeploy to Okinawa and begin training for Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu, scheduled for November 1.

Given the unprecedented American losses on Okinawa -- one third of the invasion force was killed, wounded or missing – prospects for surviving an invasion of the Japanese home islands were bleak.

Government casualty estimates were 1 million American dead and wounded.

So many Purple Heart medals were manufactured in preparation for the invasions of 1945-46, that, even now, military personnel are receiving them.

However the invasion became unnecessary after two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led the Japanese to surrender on August 14.

Instead of braving anti-aircraft fire while dropping paratroops and supplies over Japan, my father came home to his wife, went to night school on the GI Bill, became an actuary and raised two children; one of whom is contemplating how those events led to him typing these very words.

This December, Airman Magazine tells the story of that fateful day in 1941 from the perspective of those who were there during the attacks on U.S. Army Air Force installations on Oahu.

That element of the overall attack gave the Japanese air superiority and allowed for the prosecution of their main mission objective, destroying the U.S. Navy fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor.

Some of the military decisions made that day, by both sides, set in motion an unpredictable chain of events that determined the course of the war in the Pacific.

The heart of the Japanese fleet that devastated Pearl Harbor would be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in just six months. The U.S. Navy would rebuild a massive fleet and prosecute a joint assault with Marines, Soldiers and Coast Guardsmen across the islands of the South Pacific held by Imperial Japanese forces.

Airfields, quickly constructed on those captured islands, allowed U.S. pilots to exact revenge on the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, and then push the fight deeper and deeper into enemy territory.

An airfield on one of those islands, Tinian, launched the USAAF B-29s that dropped the first atomic bombs in August of 1945, sending my father home to his wife instead of the flak-filled skies over Japan.

Airman Magazine relives those historic missions through the recollections and photographs of a USAAF navigator who flew them.

Finally, we tell the story of the 169th Air Defense Squadron of the Hawaii Air National Guard, whose mission today was born from the hard lessons learned on December 7, 1941.

That mission, to monitor and protect the airspace around the Hawaiian Islands is performed from Wheeler Army Airfield.

The same hallowed ground where, to this day, you can see the scars of the first bombs that fell on Hawaii and changed the course of history, 75 Pearl Harbor Days ago.

• Date Taken: 12.07.2016
• Date Posted: 12.12.2016 12:06
• Story ID: 217319
• Location: US
• Hometown: AUSTIN, TX, US
• Hometown: TROY, AL, US