By Caitlynn Taylor
“It was the worst thing to happen,” Ricardo Garcia said of his time in the 5th Marine Division in Okinawa.
Garcia spent 10 days on the front lines, waiting in the daylight and fighting and surviving bombings at night. It was on his 10th night, May 16, 1945, when the Japanese bombs got too close–an attack that proved fatal for many men.
By Rachel Taliaferro
Berta Parra’s memory is slipping away from her.
People, places, names, dates – as she sat in an armchair at the Ambrosio Guillen Texas State Veterans Home, in her native city of El Paso, she worked through the gaps to tell her story. Despite the haze of a fading memory, a few images stood resilient in her mind – ironically, the images Parra had tried the hardest to forget.
By Samantha Salazar
One of nine siblings and the fourth of five brothers to fight in World War II, Angel Romero consistently returns to the subject of his family and friends, and the support he has always received from them.
Romero tears up when talking about his parents and siblings, saying, “My family would have to be defined as unique. I wish everybody had a family like mine.”
By Na Kyung Kim
General society’s prevailing atmosphere of racial discrimination couldn’t shake the strong comradeship present in the Army for Albert Caballero, who began his service in 1940 with the 36th Infantry Division. Though he initially enlisted to prepare himself for war, for him, the Army turned out to be primarily a place where he could interact and unite with others, rather than learn how to fight.
“When the combat started, we leaned how to respect each other,” Caballero said. “[It] was people from different parts of [the] country into one segment.”
By Jenn Zwillenberg
Estela Fernandez was a young woman in El Paso, Texas, when World War II began, so the battlegrounds seemed distant.
Wartime wasn’t about soldiers and combat. Instead, while her husband Johnny was away, she learned how to care for her family, hold a job and value education and family. She and Johnny had married on Nov. 26, 1944, at which point Johnny had already been drafted into the Army and stationed at Ft. Devins in Massachusetts as an amphibious engineer, Fernandez recalls.
By Spencer Hamilton
A simple announcement for aviation cadet training at a camp in Washburn Island, Mass., piqued John Fernandez’s interest, so he applied.
He just never expected to make it.
But to the El Paso, Texas, native’s surprise, he did, and was quickly assigned to Army Air Corps pre-flight training at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn. Fernandez successfully completed advanced aviation training and went on to fly dangerous daily missions with the 345th Bomb Group in the South Pacific during World War II.
By Eric Latcham
When her new husband shipped off for the Philippines, Olga Delgado Flores was pregnant back home in El Paso, Texas.
Only 15 years old when she married 18-year-old Ramón Flores, she had dreams of a better life for her family and had been encouraged by a local principal to go to college. Flores soon learned, however, that traditional-household caregivers had limitations placed upon them.
By Danielle Flahrity
As his B-24 bomber turned to begin its bombing run, radio operator Nemesio Mena would carefully stand on the catwalk over the bomb bay and take pictures of the damage below.
After the bomb run, he would have to make sure no bombs were hanging in the bomb bay. If one of the highly explosive bombs was still in the plane, he would have to “trick” it into dropping by kicking it, as a B-24 can’t land with a bomb hanging from its bomb bay.
By Rachel Vallejo
As the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian to drop the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Ernesto Hernando waited alongside his fellow servicemen to hear about the destruction.
According to the Navy’s online database of WWII casualties, the United States had been engaged in the two-front battle of World War II for more than four years, and had already lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the process. Hernando describes the mood of his unit, which was stationed on the island of Guam, about 100 miles north of Tinian.
By David Muto
Juana Flores holds up a photograph her husband sent her while at war more than 60 years ago.
“For my dear wife, Juana,” script on the back of the picture reads. “The love I have for you is unforgettable.”
Depicting the couple in their youth, the black-and-white photo, which Flores’ husband, Espiridion Contreras Flores, sent while fighting in Europe during World War II, is one of the memories Flores holds onto of her late husband, whom she describes as, above all, a “decent” man who was deeply proud of his national service.