Calvin Hooper, WWII Marine

When Grandpa Hooper was alive, he didn't like to talk about the War.  Calvin Muir Hooper was a young man around the time of World War II (born March 1925), and I know he served in the marines, but that's all anyone would tell me.  Dad told me, "Grandpa would always change the subject.  You knew there were some really bad memories there that he didn't want to discuss."  I asked Dad, as one of Grandpa's next of kin, to help me figure out the which group in the marines he served.  I lucked out, though, as I found some information in the family books Mom let me "store" at my house for a little while.

Calvin Muir Hooper

Uncle Dennis (Grandpa's son), delivered a speech at a reunion in 1997:

"With the start of World War II, Grandpa Hooper encouraged Dad to go to Machinist School in Sandy, Utah, which he did.  He then got a job at Hill Air Force Base where he worked until he joined the Marine Corps."

Kamikaze about to hit the USS-M 

(http://s580.photobucket.com)

"Calvin was stationed on aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean throughout the war.  Several times Japanese suicide attacks hit his ship and came very close to killing him.  Dad's marine group was the first Marine Corps unit to enter the city of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped, and Japan had surrendered the war.  The experience was so unpleasant that Dad did not talk much about it.  After three years in the war, it was over and Calvin returned to Ogden."

Nagasaki was bombed by Fat Man shortly after Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bombing_of_nagasaki.htm:

"As Nagasaki had been targeted in the past, people in the city had become blasé when the air raid siren sounded. The same was true on August 9th. The irony was that Nagasaki was well served with good bomb shelters and far fewer people would have been killed or injured if the air raid sirens had been listened to. The surrounding hills had tunnels dug into them which would have been very effective for the people who could have reached them.

"Fujie Urata, who lived in Koba and had seen a large flash, could not believe what she was seeing. She described people with great sheets of skin hanging off of their bodies; grotesque swollen faces; torsos covered with large blisters.  As in Hiroshima, many in Nagasaki died after the immediate impact of the bomb had gone away from mysterious ailments which we now associate with radiation poisoning. No-one, understandably, knew what to do to help the victims of this newest of illnesses.

"In 1953, a report by the US Strategic Bombing Survey put the number of deaths at 35,000, wounded at 60,000 and 5,000 missing. In 1960.  Later, the Nagasaki Prefectural Office put the figure for deaths alone at 87,000 with 70% of the city's industrial zone destroyed."

The reenactment of the Hiroshima bomb is on youtube:  http://youtu.be/_rHrV2QhArA

I can't imagine what it must have been like going into Nagasaki, not knowing how you could help these people.  Seeing what the bombs did to their bodies, the animals, and buildings.  That must have been heart-wrenching.  I still don't know exactly which unit it was in which Grandpa served, but nps.gov talks about some of the early Marine units in Nagasaki after the bombing:  

http://www.nps.gov/archive/wapa/indepth/extContent/usmc/pcn-190-003143-00/sec2a.htm

Note: There is now a part 2 post, which I wrote after finding out from family on which ship Grandpa actually served. http://morningnahptime.blogspot.com/2011/08/calvin-hooper-wwii-marine-cont.html