As I ponder Memorial Day I think of the Veterans in my family, both military and civilian. Two of my uncles and two of my aunts were Navy in World War II. In World War I my grandfathers, both immigrants from Czarist Russia served. My paternal grandfather was in the Army at the Battle of Belleau Wood; my maternal grandfather was in the Merchant Marine on the New York to Murmansk run dodging U-Boats with war supplies.
My father couldn’t enlist due to a heart murmur from childhood Rheumatic Fever and served as a civilian millwright - machinist for the Army Air Corps at Hickam Field in Hawaii.
My mother was a Wanda the Welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
She welded on the battleship USS Missouri, where the final surrender of the Japanese Empire would take place in 1945. She had scars on her breasts which proved her patriotism. Some women were there just for the money. Some were there for the war effort. The leather coverlets they wore over their breasts were inadequate. Hot metal would burn right through, but they were under orders not to stop in the middle of a weld because it could become like a “cold solder joint” (anybody who’s ever taken basic electronics knows what that’s like) and could sink a ship. The women who were there for the money stopped anyway; women like my mother let the metal burn right through until they finished the weld.
