Combat Loaded: Across the Pacific on the USS Tate

Epilogue: You May Never Know

EPILOGUE You May Never Know Seaman 1st Class John J. Toombs’s train pulled into his hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, late at night. Throwing his seabag over his shoulder, he walked to his home, which was just a few blocks from the station. On his uniform Toombs wore the five service decorations Tate had earned: the World War II Victory ribbon, the American Campaign ribbon, the China Service ribbon, the Philippine Liberation ribbon with a bronze star, and the Asiatic Pacific Area Campaign ribbon with a bronze star. Toombs’s son, Jon, three and a half years old, was too young to remember his father. When the boy awoke in the morning, he walked into his parents’ bedroom. There he sat quietly, waiting for his father to wake up, thinking, “So, that’s my daddy.”1 Gunners Mate 3rd Class Clinton Alexander wrote to his wife that he was heading home soon but was uncertain as to what day he would arrive. Alexander detrained onto the same platform in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he had thrown his sailor’s hat with a note inside to his wife, fearing he would suffer a fate similar to that of his brother, who had been killed in Italy. When Alexander arrived home, he found no one there, but there was a note from his wife informing him that, if he came home, she was at his mother’s house and that his dinner was in the refrigerator. Alexander’s war began and ended with two simple handwritten notes, the first based on fear, and the second on hope.2 Like Toombs and Alexander, most of those serving on Tate returned to their civilian lives, which had been interrupted by the war. Promises of promotion did not dissuade most of them from leaving the service. In many cases, the officers making the offers were planning their own departure from the navy. Those who had left jobs to go to war were entitled to return to them for one year after their honorable discharge, but many of the men had no such opportunity . They had entered the service directly out of school and had yet to test their wings in the commercial workplace. Many of them felt a gnawing anxiety concerning their peacetime future. 170 COMBAT LOADED The family men had more complicated readjustment issues. Not only did they have to rebuild a livelihood to support their families, but they also needed to reestablish ties with their children, who in many cases were virtual strangers. The wives they left behind had become independent heads of their households or moved in with relatives. Now they too were in transition, shifting to a more traditional family lifestyle while assessing the impact of the war on their husbands and marriages. For the more than sixteen million uniformed Americans who served in World War II, their wartime experiences, the need to adapt, to meet hardship head-on, and to function in an authoritative culture proved beneficial to their readjustment. With their broadened perspectives from extensive travel, a sudden maturity, and in some cases specialized training, the veterans were honed into shape unlike any other American generation. With the introduction of the GI Bill, education and home ownership became more affordable, and the American Dream, which had lost its way during the Depression, was now within reach. The baby boom was on, and the next generation was growing up on the stories of what their fathers did in the war. The war forever marked a dividing point in the lives of the veterans. Their existence was broken into the years before and the years after the war. The war’s threat of a sudden violent death caused a compression of time and space that affected some men’s minds in ways that would later cause them to question their experiences. The intensity of the experiences tested the limits of cognition and remembrance of the most complex of all war machines, the human mind. How a man’s mind behaved in battle could leave him feeling like a stranger to himself. Accounts of the April 2, 1945, kamikaze battle, Tate’s most dramatic action, contain a common visual theme: the face of the enemy. When aircraft pressed close during their attacks, the veterans consistently recalled the same details: “I could see the pilot’s face, his white scarf, and his flying helmet.” It was the face of an enemy who was resolved to die in battle and take...