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Each year on November 11, leaders of the Veterans Memorial Building in Danville observe Veteran’s Day with various military exhibits and educational activities. The goal is to bridge the divide between past generations and future ones, passing along knowledge from lessons learned, sometimes at a bitter cost. Too often, our current educational system provides a brief review of a famous incident or two within a war era, and then moves on. There is little critical thinking developed from this; awareness that would help shape informed opinions for our future voting citizens and community leaders.

In addition to the great array of military equipment and informational displays, there will be two special topics of focus this year, with supporting exhibits and talks. Both will delve into the concept of citizens who take great risks and/or make extreme sacrifices to help gain freedom for their countries.

The first speaker, Cecilia Gaerlan, will discuss World War II events in the Philippines, with a special focus on the infamous Bataan Death March. Cecilia is the founder and Executive Director of the Bataan Legacy Historical Society. Its mission is to educate the public on the historical significance of Bataan and the impact of World War II in the Philippines. She was inspired by her father, Luis Gaerlan, Jr., a survivor of the Bataan Death March. The Society has developed addition high school course curriculum designed to improve student awareness of the war in the Philippines.

Many Americans are unaware that only hours after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, our military bases were struck in the Philippines. Within days, the Philippine Islands were invaded by a determined and vicious Imperial Japanese Army. Their goal was to capture and enslave the island quickly, paving the way for conquering all of southeast Asia to create a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (the Japanese version of Hitler’s Third Reich).The fundamental key to their success was a speedy conquest, keeping the US and other allied countries off-balance and unable to respond, until they achieved a position of unassailable dominance. Their plan allocated 50 days for the conquest of the main island of Luzon and capture of the capital city Manila.

But the brave U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, the majority of whom were FiIipinos, would have none of this. Out-numbered, out-gunned, deprived of food, fuel and ammunition, and with no air support, they slowed the Japanese advance to a crawl. A peace time army with antiquated weapons, they knew for a fact they could not beat the Japanese Army. But they fought to give the allies time to get more organized in the Pacific and bring in more resources to stop the Japanese advance. Finally, after months of bitter struggle, the Bataan peninsula fell in April, 1942. This was double the amount of time the original invasion plan called for.

The Japanese rounded up an estimated 75,000 captives. They were forced to march 65 miles, in triple digit temperature with 100% humidity, to a prison known as Camp O’Donnell. There were no provisions for food, water, shelter or medicine during this 5-day trek. Those who couldn’t continue the march were beaten, bayoneted, shot, some were even beheaded. Up to 10,000 Filipinos and 650 American troops died along the way, which is why it is called the Bataan Death March. 

Once inside Camp O’Donnell, another 20,000 Filipinos and 1,600 Americans died from disease and starvation. Many others were sent on cramped hell ships to slave labor encampments in Japan and Manchuria for the duration of the war.This was a steep price to pay – but they bought enough time to save Australia and New Zealand from invasion. This provided the US and its allies a secure base in Southeast Asia from which to start pushing the Japanese back.

As the Bataan Death March was underway in the Philippines, some American “payback” for Pearl Harbor was on its way to the Japanese Home Islands roughly 2,000 miles to the north.

Bob Fish will then discuss the Doolittle Tokyo Raid, arguably the most legendary air raid in US military history, and its effect on the war. Bob, a long-time resident of Danville, is a Trustee with the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda and has written several articles about the Doolittle Raid. He was instrumental in helping the Raiders be nationally recognized with the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015.

Immediately after the Pearl Harbor surprise attack, President Roosevelt challenged his Chiefs of Staff to retaliate against the capital city of Tokyo. He knew this would do little material damage but the psychological aspect was enormous, both to the allies and the Japanese.

The US Navy could not handle the mission by themselves as their aircraft had a very limited flight range, which would imperil what was left of the Pacific fleet. The US Army Air Forces could not handle the mission because they had no bases left in China or the Philippines from which to launch a long range raid. In a moment of inspiration, Navy officers approached the Army Air Forces and said why don’t we launch Army bombers from a floating airfield in the Pacific Ocean, i.e. a Navy aircraft carrier?

The commander of the AAF agreed and turned the Army’s part of the effort over to his best aviator, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle.

The twin engine B-25 Mitchell bomber was selected as being ideal for such a daring and hazardous undertaking. The mission profile required the aircraft to take off in the short distance of a carrier flight deck, fly 500 miles to Tokyo at a very low level over open ocean, drop the bombs and then fly on another 1,250 miles to China because it could not land back on the carrier.

On February 2, 1942, there was a single test to see if Army bombers could actually take off from an aircraft carrier. Two B-25s were launched from the USS Hornet (CV-8) off the Virginia coast. Based on that success, Doolittle had 24 aircraft modified appropriately, mostly with expanded fuel capacity.  He then sought out USAAF volunteer pilots and crewmen, telling them only they would fly a “secret mission that was highly dangerous.” There was no shortage of volunteers!

They only had a few weeks to train in Florida, learning how to do a carrier-type launch of the B-25 (full throttle, full flaps, and lots of prayer). In late March, they flew to California where 16 of the aircraft were craned aboard the USS Hornet (CV-8) at Alameda Naval Air Station. Once the Army personnel were onboard, the ship and its escort vessels steamed out of San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge being their last sight of the homeland.

A week later, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they rendezvoused with another US Navy task force commanded by VADM Bill Halsey aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6). They steamed together until reaching a point 650 miles east of Tokyo when they were discovered by Japanese picket boats. It was decided to launch the raid immediately, even though it was 150 miles further away than planned. All 80 USAAF fliers had serious doubts about having enough fuel to reach China.

But launch they did, starting at 8am, and in a storm with high winds and large waves, whose crests were coming over the bow. All 16 bombers got off safely in just an hour and most flew separately on their way to the island of Honshu.

Once they completed this air strike, they flew on to China.  The airfield where they were supposed to land was unprepared for their arrival. Hence, each bomber eventually ran out of fuel that rainy night. Most aircrews bailed out, landing in rice paddies and on mountain tops. A few had to ditch along the seacoast. Three men died during this end-of-flight period and eight were captured by the Japanese (three were executed and one other died in captivity). Within weeks, sixty nine of the eighty crewmen eventually made their way out of China and back into the US war effort.

All of these young men volunteered for what was essentially a suicide mission. Only due to a timely tail wind did they reach the Chinese coast. But the sacrifice they made, and the risks they took, had a significant impact on the war effort. American and Allied morale was boosted while the Japanese were shocked they could be attacked so easily. Only 6 weeks later, the Japanese launched a hastily prepared attack on Midway Island to prevent further air raids on their home islands. It was a disastrous defeat for them, shortening the war by years. The sacrifices of 80 volunteers provided immeasurable benefit in keeping the US, the arsenal of democracy, alive and well, ending in defeat of the Axis powers.

The Veteran’s Day activities will take place in the Veterans Memorial Building at 400 Hartz Avenue in downtown Danville on November 10, 11, and 12. The public presentations will be at 2pm on Saturday. More information is available at www.vmbsrv.org.

 

Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Emma Lazarus: “The New Colossus”

Engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty

In the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow” the bigoted Southern senator Billboard Rawkins is trying to buy up the entire valley in order to sell it at an inflated price. One of his henchmen informs him that someone is now living there.  The senator asks who it is and gets the answer: “Immigrants.” He then exclaims, “Immigrants! Damn!  My whole family has been bothered by immigrants ever since we came to this country.”

In the senator’s angry reply, we have a condensation of at least one part of the immigration puzzle that is currently being debated in our country. (Perhaps, “screamed” would be a better verb than “debated,” as debate implies some degree of rationality.) 

Sometimes it appears that the longer one is in this greatest of all lands, the shorter his or her memory becomes about the ancestors who came here from so many different places. Even those with pedigrees that go back hundreds of years forget, or ignore, that a good number of those who came here in the 1600s and 1700s were “indentured servants,” fugitives from debtors prisons, or other forms of jailbirds (bad word, even if accurate). Supposedly the Mayflower carried a total of forty passengers, but today the descendants far outnumber the mathematical possibilities for four centuries of descendants.

Some think they know, of course, that immigrants often wear strange clothing, eat even stranger foods, are, by definition, morally inferior to the rest of us, tend toward criminal activity, and have carloads of children. When those charges are leveled in the 21^st Century, they usually refer to—and let’s get it out in the open—Hispanics from Central and South America, as well as some Asians.  In past years those exact same charges we aimed at Italians, Poles and Greeks in the early 20^th Century; at Asians in the late 19^th; at Irish and Germans in the mid-19^th, and even at the French before that.  Jews, of course, were chosen to receive these charges from 1650 until—let’s see, what day is it?  Oh, yes, today!

Mormons, who originally came from all over Europe, joined the Native Americans in a program especially designed for them: extermination. (Years later this became referred to by others as a “final solution”). African–Americans or Blacks or Negroes usually do not have these charges leveled at them, because they could hardly be called “immigrants,” a term which implies at least a modicum of acquiescence.

The most emphatic cries relate to immigrants who are UNDOCUMENTED. That word has replaced the less politically-correct word “illegal” in the tirades.  “Illegal” was preceded by the even uglier term “Wetbacks” during the insensitive 1950s.  And some still use the term “Mexicans,” regardless of national origins. 

I have not done any deep research or study to support my supposition, but it seems to me that most of the people who speak the loudest about modern immigrants have last names that indicate Northern European origin.  Their comments often imply and sometimes even announce with pride that their ancestors came to America properly and with DOCUMENTS.  When their ancestors were still in Europe, they often had to have these DOCUMENTS to travel between villages and districts within their own countries. When traveling between countries, proper DOCUMENTS were not only a vital necessity, often they were a matter of life or death—at least, incarceration. (Italian immigrants got the ugly, disrespectful name of “Wop” because some were With Out Papers.)

My maternal grandparents came to America about 1905. Did their journey to freedom require papers in good order?  No question!  They left what is now Lithuania, but was then part of Czarist Russia, and needed to transverse Poland.  From Poland it was on to Germany; from Germany they needed to travel to either Belgium or The Netherlands. Perhaps, I really do not know, they may have had to crossover to England. Either way, they then suddenly encountered a rather large problem: a little wet spot called the Atlantic Ocean. For those who may not be aware of that “little wet spot,” let’s just say it ain’t a dry river bed.   (How many anti-immigration people remember how difficult it was for the survivors of the “Titanic” to wade across that ocean, even though Leonardo and Kate were halfway across the Atlantic before the trouble started?)

 When we throw in the complications that my grandparents had: my infant mother, and her siblings were Jewish—a group loved, admired, and persecuted beyond anything we can imagine by the Russian government and people, by the Polish government and people, and by the German government and people–we see that they damn well better have had complete, correct, and impeccable DOCUMENTS.

If someone should be wondering about my paternal grandparents’ immigration, so do I. My father was born in England, but his parents were from Germany and Poland—I do not know which was which. 

Are there some criminal elements in the immigrant community? Darn tootin’! Guess what! There are also criminal elements in families that have been here for generations. We can, of course, send any criminals back to their native countries. Then Reno and Las Vegas can start giving odds on how long it will be before a given baddie crosses the border again. 

We are “A Nation of Immigrants,” some with pedigrees, some with rap sheets. Perhaps we will see the day when the Daughters and Sons of the Revolution, the Civil War, or any other historical event will pick lettuce in the Central Valley. Perhaps someday they will bus tables and do the vital, if not glamorous, menial labor so necessary to our culture’s existence. Perhaps! But I, for one, would not bet on it.

There are many valid issues relating to immigration, and these issues need to be discussed and resolved as rationally and unemotionally as possible.  Unfortunately, such discussions and actions need to happen in Congress, and we all know how much that body accomplishes. Like most of our “insoluble” problems, this too will be solved given sufficient time and leadership.   Meanwhile, when it comes to breaking up families with children who are American citizens by birth, perhaps our leaders could show just a drop or two of common sense. Yeah! Sure! 

Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(But make sure their DOCUMENTS are in order.)

Let’s put UNITY back in commUNITY

 HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO

 NEW IMMIGRANTS,

OLD IMMIGRANTS,

NATIVE AMERICANS

AND ANYONE ELSE.

Last month, Danville’s Community Presbyterian Church (CPC) put together a record-breaking volunteer workforce for its 2nd Annual Serve Day. What started as a single day at last year’s inaugural event now spans an entire weekend of service, with more than 1,500 volunteers gathering to unleash compassion through “no strings attached” service to the San Ramon Valley and greater Bay Area. Partnering with 25 organizations total, volunteers spread out in all directions, heading out to San Francisco and Oakland, Richmond and Pittsburg, Martinez and Concord, Livermore and Pleasanton, and everywhere in between.

“We like to say Serve Day is what happens when the church leaves the building,” says Tyler Scott, Senior Pastor at CPC. “This year’s theme was inspired by scripture verse 1 John 3:18, which encourages us to love not just with our words or speech but with our actions. In other words: Love Does.”

Scott, a former UCLA football player and Pepperdine MBA that left a potentially lucrative career in commercial real estate to become a pastor, brought the idea of Serve Day to CPC soon after becoming Senior Pastor. And like Scott, CPC’s massive gathering of volunteers come from all walks of life – from regular church members to those that have never set foot inside a church – ranging in age from toddlers to grandparents.

“I was heartened to hear non-church members say they felt ‘right at home’ alongside CPC regulars and ‘thankful for the opportunity to serve on this incredible day,’” said Deana Dickerson, Lead Coordinator for CPC’s Serve Day.

Similarly, half of the organizations supported by CPC’s Serve Day weekend were faith-based and half were not, including places like East Bay Parks, Monument Crisis Center, Del Amigo High School and more.

“We intentionally partner with both Christian and secular organizations that are truly making a difference because we want to promote unity and service in our community,” adds Scott, who spends his Serve Day trying to reach as many of the organizations as possible. “I am blown away by just how many amazing organizations we have around the Bay Area doing incredible work. It is such a privilege to be able to partner with them to meet the needs of our community.”

Volunteers made and delivered more than 300 care bags for the homeless who walk through the doors of City Team Oakland, with handwritten notes expressing love and prayers of support. Others made care packages with Blue Star Moms for the men and women serving in our military, also with thoughtful messages inside.

In Richmond, over 100 Serve Day volunteers worked with the Parks and Rec Department and their “Love Your Block” initiative under the leadership of Rochelle Monk. They essentially gave the area an “extreme makeover” they landscaped, gardened, painted and made repairs at an after-school program, a senior center, and at the main Recreation building downtown.

Across the Bay, dozens gathered at San Francisco City Impact, an organization that cares for the marginalized in the Tenderloin. “City Impact is an amazing ministry,” says volunteer Mark Campbell who is an executive with Stryker Corporation. “They school children that grow up in a district where crime and poverty are rampant. They help adults that may have taken a wrong turn, like the middle-aged gentleman we met that is a UCLA and Cal alum. Serve Day allowed my family to step out of our daily routine and reach those in our community that need help.”

Closer to home, families made and delivered warm meals to Danville’s Police and Fire Stations as a simple way of saying thank you for their daily commitment to our safety. Others did major clean up on the iron-horse trail at Rudgear in Walnut Creek while another group of volunteers ventured down to Kids Against Hunger in Pleasanton, an organization that will send an estimated 2.5 million meals to hungry children and families around the world. Over Serve Day weekend, five CPC groups packed 84,672 meals that were shipped to hungry families in Puerto Rico.

In Concord, many of CPC’s volunteers at Restore Ministries asked volunteer coordinator Ed Manguiat, an engineer at Energy Solutions, about future events and how they could come alongside this incredible organization.

“When we hear comments like that, we know we’re accomplishing what we set out to do – that is, to make serving not just be about a single day, but a lifestyle,” adds Scott. “Our hope is that our Serve Day efforts are more than just a ‘one and done’ chance to serve. We are planning and praying for this to be a launching pad for people to lead a life that loves and serves others.”

Next year, CPC plans to add more organizations to their list, and reach a goal of 2,000 volunteers. For more information on CPC’s Serve Day, go to http://www.cpcdanville.org/serveday/http://cpcdanville.org/serveday/. If you’re interested in learning more about CPC, please email info@cpcdanville.org.