Grandpa Libby

Over the weekend I was down in my hometown of McMinnville visiting my parents' house. While there my dad brought out a photo album he had borrowed from my grandpa. And these were no ordinary snapshots.

My grandpa served in the Navy during World War II on a number of different ships. I had already known that he participated in one very important and historic conflict: the Battle of the Coral Sea, which along with the better-known Battle of Midway helped turn the tide against the Japanese. During the battle, incidentally, my grandpa's ship, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, was sunk, and he escaped on the last lifeboat.

Anyway, the photos my dad brought out were of another historic event, this one even more sobering: the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. All these years my grandpa has had photos of Nagasaki from just a few days after the bomb was dropped, and he never told anyone. I'm enclosing a couple in this post, and in one you can clearly see that the city was pretty much completely destroyed. All you see is rubble.

As it happens, just in the course of conversation with my other set of grandparents that night, I learned from them that my grandpa Libby, the same one who was at Nagasaki, had also seen in person the one and only flight of Howard Hughes's HK1, better known as the Spruce Goose. Along with Nagasaki and Coral Sea, that makes three major historic events he's witnessed -- and we previously knew that while in the Navy before the war he had also been in the search party for Amelia Earhart.

Yet talking to grandpa, you'd think all he did in his life was drive a Shell Oil company truck and go to church. Boy, that World War II generation can be pretty tight-lipped. Thankfully they're starting to open up a bit, and this reminds me I've got to talk with grandpa about this stuff soon whether he likes it or not.

Comments

[Paul]

Wow, an amazing story. I hate to admit that I admire the humility of that generation. It can be problematic when they are living links to the past. Brian, I just read a Henning Mankell book. Very cool. Have you heard of Alan Furst? A cool WWII mystery genre writer. Maybe we could trade Mankell books.

[Rose]

I bet a lot of people would love to take a look at those pictures (including me). It'd be great if you could write an article that included them. And if you scan them and post them anywhere, you might consider adding a digital watermark to the photos for copyright protection. And I know just the company with that technology :)