A few thoughts on yesterday’s post: during WWII, my father was young enough to enlist and be stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas.
He had two older brothers, one a captain serving in the Pacific. The other’s letters home were heavily censored and pieces snipped out, but one letter that got through declared to his mother simply that, six weeks after he got overseas, the war would be over. She dismissed it as a young soldier’s boasting.
My Grandmother Jeppson, meantime, anguished that the war had taken the last of her three sons, headed the local Red Cross effort to knit for the troops; as she put it in a letter I have read, she felt that the harder she knitted, the faster and more likely her sons would somehow arrive safely home (and they did). Hours and hours and hours a day, and how, I do not know; nor do I know at what age her rheumatoid arthritis began and whether it was an issue to her at the time.
But her middle son proved correct in his declaration. He wanted to put a stop to all the killing. He wanted to put a stop to the evil that threatened the world, and felt it had to be done before the Germans’ own efforts became what the Americans had at hand. Oppenheimer had had his group sent to Yale, Harvard, and MIT to learn as much as they could of what they needed to know.
Morris R. Jeppson did what he felt had to be done on the world’s most famously-named airplane. Hoping hard there would not be a second plane, nor any other such flight ever.