Bradley Hart
I'm Bradley W. Hart at The National WWII Museum. I recently sat down with writer Rona Simmons during one of our Meet the Author events here in New Orleans to talk about her new book, No Average Day The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944. You'll hear why that day deserves to be remembered, even though it may not be one that you've heard about before.

Rona Simmons, thank you so much for joining us here at The National WWII Museum. It's a real pleasure to be with you tonight. And thank you for sharing this book with us and our audience before it's officially come out, which is very exciting for all of us here. I had the pleasure of reading your book in preparation for this.

I've been sort of talking about the themes of it with some of my colleagues here at the Institute and some of our visitors and the other groups that come to visit with us. And I tell people, you know, it's about the deadliest day for Americans in World War II. And they say, oh, you mean Pearl Harbor?

And then I say, no, no, it's not Pearl Harbor. And they say, oh, well, you mean D-Day? And I say, no, it's not D-Day either. And they sort of look at me confusedly then, and say, well, what are you talking about? I say, it's October 24, 1944. That's when you get a totally blank stare out of almost everyone I tell about this.

So it's a fascinating concept for a book. How did you come up with the idea—before you get into the events of that terrible day—how did you come up with the idea, and what were some of the challenges you encountered researching and writing a book like this?

Rona Simmons
Well thank you. Thank you, everyone, for being here and for the Museum having me. It's truly an honor, and especially even a week before the book comes out. So, it's a great preview. It is about three years in the making. And as all of you know, there are countless, I won't even say, books, countless bookshelves full of WWII books.

And so if you want to write about World War II or you choose to write about World War II, you have to come up with something that people don't know about. You know, you can't write about my father, the P-38 pilot, or D-Day or Midway, or any of the big battles people who have spent their lives. Historians have already written that.

And so you have to look for something very different. And there's not one answer. And from a very pragmatic standpoint, I tried to find something that people don't know. Like you say, people know about Pearl Harbor. People know about D-Day or think they do. And so those events were blasted on the newspapers, you know, on the two-inch-high headlines.

So I started thinking, well, what do people not know? Is there maybe another day that we haven't heard of for some reason? So that thought was at the back of my head. But then I decided that it's really more basic than that, with that premise, it was. I do this because I am passionate about World War II, having come from a military-based family.

But I also, as the generations pass and you meet young people who barely know that there was a World War II or barely know who fought in World War II, and the thought of what my father and my father-in-law did for us, and all of the 16 million men and women who fought, that I didn't—I just can't let that go without some recognition and doing what I can to preserve their memory. So that started me down the path. I know I'm going to write about people, but how do you tell the next generation or the one after that what war really is? And especially from someone like me, I didn't go to war.

I didn't fight in war. And thank goodness I haven't yet or had to. How do you tell someone what war is like if you're not going to write about the battles, great naval battles or army ground battles? And to me, it's always been, and through my earlier books talking about individuals taking the war from, say, the 26,000, 30,000-ft person up in a bomber or fighter and bringing it down to the ground, not necessarily meaning to the army, but to an individual, whether it's someone in the back of a plane or someone on the ground, and then helping a young person put their feet into those shoes and walk their walk.

And so that's that. I knew I would do a story about individuals again. I knew I would find something that no one had found. And so I looked past those big headlines, and I knew I wanted it to be global because so many people I talk to, if I write a book about Europe in the war, they say, well, why didn't you address the Pacific?

And if you write about the Pacific, someone said, well, why didn't you write about what happened in Europe? And I wanted it to be global. I wanted people to know that there was a global war going on, that people were fighting and dying across the globe. It wasn't just D-Day, it wasn't just Pearl Harbor. So that's when I said, I've got to find a day.

So it's going to be later in the war when there were people fighting across the globe. And I started just picking off different days, different battles. I didn't again want it to be about a single battle. And I do a lot of research about individuals and profiled them. And I kept—this date, just kept coming up, October 24.

What's that? And I would, being the obsessive compulsive person that I am, I had my little checkboxes of who, what day, what month, and that block just kept filling up faster than most others because if it was D-Day, I was ignoring it. If it was Pearl Harbor, I was ignoring it. And I kept coming back to it. I thought, well, what happened on that day?

And that's when I stumbled on, if you will, and I guess half of this is luck, so that's when I found out that day in [history], and then we went from there.

Bradley Hart
Luck is always good for historians when it comes to finding those stories that no one else has told before. More than 2,600 men and women lost their lives on October 24, 1944, which is a really astonishing amount, even in a conflict as bloody as World War II was. How did you, from this mass of people who lost their lives this day, how do you choose which stories to focus on and profile in the book?

Rona Simmons
Well, as I was going around the globe documenting these individuals, and we'll get back to some of the individual people out there, but, they were stories that stood out. And as I would research one, I would find, you know, more than just a ticked box because to me, honoring these people is more than just getting the their birthdate and the day they died and where they died—it was really drilling down into their stories. And I've picked a few, and I always hate to do this because I feel like I'm doing a disservice to all of the rest of them, but just to give you an idea of the breadth of what we have found, on the far left is Girvis Haltom. And he was actually the first story I found. And I say, again, luck. It was the internet.

I was researching and just saw this story, about Peter [?] who was looking for his uncle, who was killed in a plane crash in the Pacific. And he had gone to a number of the islands because there was very sketchy information about his uncle. So he was going to the different islands, and he was on Yap Island, and I did not know where Yap Island was.

I did not know there was a Yap Island, but Yap Island is between Peleliu, where Girvis Haltom was stationed in Guam. So really in the middle of nowhere. And Peter [?] went to that island. And had searched for his uncle and the citizens there said, no, we don't have any records of your uncle, but there is this grave we want to show you.

And they had found the grave, at the end of the runway where his plane crashed. And they had been attending it. Now, he was actually found in 1947, two years after the end of the war, when we repatriated many of the men in the Pacific. But in those two years after he crashed and died on October 24, the local people dug his grave, buried him, and tended to it, and keeping the jungle from encroaching on that.

And they told him the story and showed them where it was. And he ended up erecting a monument to Girvis Haltom. So that was the first story. And I said, OK, this is this book. So we'll go on from there. And then the second type of story, when you say, how do I pick them? They sort of picked themselves and came to me.

The next one is Herman Joseph Adolfae. And in my research, I always try to find, if I can, find a relative of one of these people, because the story comes so much more alive when you can talk to someone about the person. I found his son and daughter-in-law, and they sent me reams of paper about Herman Adolfae, who was also a pilot.

He was killed. He was flying. Actually, he joined the Navy originally, long before the war. He did two tours of duty before the war broke out. And then he got bit, as I say, by the flying bug. And he wanted to fly above all else. But America was not in the war. And of course, a lot of the young men thought, well, if I don't get in the war now and get to fly, it's going to be over.

Little did they know. And so he went to Canada because Canada was recruiting. They were in the war and they didn't have—they knew they did not have enough citizens to fill the need for their bombers or fighters. So he crossed over and in Canada, it was against the law to actually solicit men from the United States to go to war for a different country.

But they got the word out, and word went from person to person. And Herman heard about this. So he went to Canada, got his wings, flew for Canada, actually was transferred to Europe and to England and was over there fighting for Canada when D-Day happened. And he said, that's it. So he joined the American Air Forces.

And he was traveling, carrying cargo into Belgium on a mission, and they got just a few degrees off course, and a few degrees became more than a few degrees. They came in over Dunkirk, which was still under occupation and actually a fight between the Czechoslovakians, Germans and the British there. And his plane was shot down and he, they could not find him. And he actually—his plane crashed into the opening area where the submarine, German submarine pens were.

So his plane was blocking the submarine pens, and they had to bomb it to get it out of the area. And of course, all the men were killed instantly anyway. But, what happened? That was that for years and years. But then the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which is the organization that is still working today to bring home our men across the world, they went overseas.

They found witnesses who told them where, the men that did survive the crash were they exhumed the bodies, they buried them and unfortunately not Herman's body. So he remains at the bottom of the sea. So that was a great connection to be able to talk to some descendant, it makes all the difference.

The third gentleman is Shiro Togo, who was with the 442nd Combat Regimental Combat Team. I picked his story, it's just one you, you can't overlook. There's the Lost Battalion, and every war has had a lost battalion. I think, but these men from the 141st Infantry were stranded in the mountains in northern France.

And, they had been cut off. They went up to the mountains to fight with supplies for one day, food for one day, ammunition for one day, anything they could carry for one day and got cut off. And team after team from their other battalions with their group went in to try to rescue them and failed.

Now a week later they're still up there. They’re existing on almost nothing. All of our attempts to drop in food failed as well. So the American Army called in the 442nd. The 442nd was a Japanese Nisei troop—all Japanese American citizens who had volunteered to fight. And they sent them in.

Their motto was “Go for Broke.” They did not fail whatever mission they took. And they went in and found the Lost Battalion, got them out at an enormous cost to their unit, and Shiro Togo was one of the ones who was killed on October 24 in rescuing these men. So again, a story that you just can't overlook.

And then the next one is George McElroy. He had been in World War I, and he was with his Veterans Administration in Mason City, Iowa. And he had been with the American Legion—he was on their board or director. And he said, when World War II came, he said, I've got to sign up again. He thought he was maybe too old, but they accepted him, and he was on a destroyer in the Pacific.

And as you know, things change and the Army is in charge. And you might think you have your position in the Army and things change. Well, they decided when they got to Alaska, Adak, that he—and I don't really know the reason—but they transferred him to shore. And I don't think it was anything he did wrong, but the records don't exist.

He went to shore. He was a newspaper man. He finds himself in Adak, Alaska. And who was in Adak, Alaska? Dashiell Hammett. He's writing a newspaper. He’s head of the newspaper for the armed forces in Alaska. And here's George, and he's, I mean, he must have been beside himself, to be able to work on the newspaper. His hometown newspaper put an article about their hero who was in Adak. And a couple of weeks later, they put a second article that he died of a heart attack. And, that, you know, that to me also spoke to all the deaths that weren't necessarily the people who were fighting. And he had chosen to enlist. But that's not how he died.

And then, I'll say George W. Pittman, I can't look at that face and not say he's going to be on this book. He was a seventh-grade educated Black man from Scotland Neck, North Carolina. I live in North Carolina. I don't know where Scotland Neck is. It's a very small town. He came from a family of six children, joined the Navy and raised through the ranks. His middle name was Washington. George Washington Pitman. Believe it or not, I encountered several George Washingtons, several John Pershings, Woodrow Wilsons, all who died on October 24. But this George Pitman was very special to me. He died on the USS Shark, which we will come back and mention a little bit, like kind of a spoiler to the book, but we'll mention it anyway.

And then the last one, if I were jumping the gun, we're going to talk about women. There were only 350,000 women who served out of 16 million men in the war. It wasn't that women didn't think about serving, but they were put into traditional roles, nurses and clerks. I could not find a single woman who died on October 24, and I was distraught. And I know when I talked to University of Missouri, they would really want to have a well-rounded book.

We had all 24 chapters finished. The book was pretty well making its way down the road, and somehow Margaret Neubauer shows up on my computer, died on October 24 at 9:45 a.m. in the Proving Grounds in Virginia. She was a specialist. And, I'll talk a little bit more about her when we talk about women later, but she was killed … was hit by a truck on the proving grounds, and she was returning to her barracks. So, again, she had to make the book.

So, it's a little bit of everything. And, I thought that was as it should be.

Bradley Hart
What I think what the book illustrates so well is the truism of history that everyone has a story. Right? It's so easy to reduce casualties and fatality lists to mere numbers, whereas you've done a fantastic job really giving personality really to the characters that you talk about, the real individuals, obviously, in the book.

There were two really tragic stories that stuck out to me when I was reading the book. And they're both naval stories to some extent. But these are the two sort of highest casualty events you talk about in the book. And the first one is an incident involving two ships, USS Birmingham and USS Princeton at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which is raging on October 24, 1944. You know, this was a story that I was vaguely familiar with as someone who studies the war, but you really flesh the story out in considerable depth, and I learned quite a bit from the book. So what is the story of the Princeton and the Birmingham? And why is it so tragic?

Rona Simmons
They had both been traveling throughout the Pacific, involved in many of the battles up and to until the time that we went back into the Philippines. For those who may not recall, the Battle of the Philippines was going on, we landed back in the Philippines—General MacArthur made his famous I have return speech on the 20th of October.

So the war or the battles there had just started, but he, and the troops were moving inland and there were many, many deaths as they tried to cross to the Philippines. But the ships were still out at sea protecting our troops or delivering more troops, delivering more supplies. And there was constant enemy activity around.

And the Princeton was out at sea just off of Leyte, where the landings had taken place. And, there were some Japanese bombers, airplanes flying through and harassing the ships, bombing, making strafing runs on the shore, etc. And, they called a Judy bomber—our men gave the Japanese bombers women's names, I still haven't figured out why—but so a Judy bomber came over and dropped a bomb on the Princeton, and it hit the deck, went through one level deck down into the next level, down, down to the next level.

And that's where it exploded. Captain Buracker said, he looked at the damage and said, I thought it was a small hole and that it wouldn't do too much damage. Well, it didn't until it kept going through these levels of the decks until it exploded.

So the other ships in the area came to the Princeton's rescue. A couple of destroyers and cruisers came over there. They are designed to fight fires and had many crew members on them who were trained in firefighting. And the Captain Inglis of the Birmingham—ships were docking and actually, tied up next to, on the Princeton while it was on fire. And the Birmingham said, I really have the capability, I have more hoses and more men who are trained in firefighting. So some of the ships pulled back, they tethered up to the Princeton, who was now dead in the water, and they had to keep moving their engines with the tides. The current was pushing the Princeton one way and Birmingham the other way. So they finally strung ties to keep the two together while they fought the fire. And they actually put out the initial fire, over about a five hour period of fighting these fires.

And they were pretty well satisfied that, you know, it wasn’t all over but things looked pretty good. And so then there was more enemy activity. And so they had to untie and move away. And that turned out to be nothing, so the Birmingham moved back. They tied up again. And five hours after that initial explosion, the ammunition in the lower deck exploded.

It caused untold havoc on deck. Many of the men on the Birmingham, because they had been tied up for hours and were successful in fighting this fire, had come on deck to watch the firefighting. These are men that didn't have anything else to do, so they all came up on the deck. And some of them, you see, were just watching, although many of them were helping fight the fires themselves, even though that might not be their training.

So, what happened is, when the Princeton exploded, debris as small as pieces of shrapnel and as large as cars flew up into the sky and landed on the Birmingham, mostly, and some on Princeton, of course. It killed 300 men on the Birmingham and another 100 on the Princeton. … Horrific deaths. There was a chaplain and a medic who saw the men and were running to everyone's rescue, and they said this was one time when the blood ran like rivers on the deck.

It was horrific. And men were terribly burned. Many, many killed, obviously. And, the captain, actually, John Hoskins on the Princeton, was hurt in the, in the explosion, his foot was actually amputated or cut in half. And so, actually a surgeon cut the other half of his foot off while he's on the deck, and the man retains his consciousness and is talking to people.

And finally, when he gets ready and they bandage him up, he actually went to the—went to the captain and said, permission to leave the ship, sir. And, you know, this is going on in the middle of all this devastation. So it was a horrific accident. the second most, as you say, deadly of the day.

And, it really required, as I look back on the numbers, an event as big as this in order to get to that 2,600, you couldn't there weren't 2,600 individual men who died around them. Or you had to find incidents like this. And as tragic as they were, but the Birmingham survived, but the Princeton had to be sunk.

And I tell the story. It was also a tragedy in the way, it had to be sunk. They gave a destroyer, the Reno, orders to go ahead and sink the ship when they knew the Princeton couldn't be saved, it was so badly damaged. They fired, much like the Tang experience if you haven't seen it here at the Museum, they fired five torpedoes that all missed or hit a part of the ship that wouldn't take it down. And they finally discovered that battleship, a cruiser, had been tied up to the Princeton during the early parts of the day and had been, they had been colliding back and forth. And they believe that damaged the torpedo, capabilities or the function.

So they finally had to call another, the Erwin, in to actually sink the Princeton before because they couldn't let it survive or be taken over by the Japanese. So that was one tragic event.

Bradley Hart
It's one of those scenes that’s almost impossible to fathom what it must've been like. And it really is disturbing in so many ways. The other really disturbing story and tragic story that you highlight in the book, and you kind of weave it through narratively, no spoilers here, is the story of the Japanese ship Arisan Maru.

The Arisan Maru represents the largest single loss of life that you talk about in the book. And in fact, unless I'm mistaken, the greatest maritime loss of life in American history. This is a story that I was somewhat aware of as someone who studies this, but I think the vast majority of Americans are not familiar with sort of the Arisan Maru or the similar ships that were sailing at this point.

So what does the story of the Arisan Maru, and why do you think that Americans aren't more familiar with this part of history of the war in the Pacific?

Rona Simmons
Those are easy questions. They have great answers. [The Montevideo Maru] was the first hell ship that was sunk by the American forces. The hell ships, and I had no idea what hell ships were, and I say in the book, many people, many of the soldiers who were on hell ships may not have known what a hell ship was before they got on, but when they heard the word, they knew what the hell ship was.

Again, this is October 24. The Japanese had known that the Americans were coming back. They had enough intelligence out there that they knew our ships were coming, and they knew that we wanted to take back the Philippines. And so it wasn't unexpected. And by this time they had, and you've heard of the Bataan Death March and all of this, troops that surrendered after we lost the Philippines were in the prisoner of war camps, and Japan was going through a difficult time in their own economic situation back in their homelands, and they needed labor.

They needed labor for their mines, to manufacturing to help keep their ships going. So they decided, what better way to fill our labor needs than to get the prisoners that we're holding in the Philippines and elsewhere around the South Pacific and bring them back to Japan and let them labor there. So they began emptying the prisoner of war camps.

And the Montevideo, I forget exactly how many, I think there were 1,200, but these were mostly Australian prisoners on board when they were sunk, because they put them on these freighters, they were cargo ships,t or in some cases, liners that they had refitted to carry prisoners in their holds, not in cabins or anything quite so decent as that, but in the cargo holds. They were unmarked because they were taking sometimes supplies, sometimes passengers and oftentimes the prisoners.

This started, Montevideo was the first one that started in, earlier in ’44 before the—we returned. But it continued at a greater height. No one knows exactly how many of these ships were transported or how many prisoners they transported or how many died exactly. But the next one was the Ōryoku Maru that in the middle that traversed in December ’44.

It, too, was sunk by an American submarine, again unmarked and transporting prisoners back to Japan. And in the Ōryoku Maru’s case, while there were many, almost as many, POWs on board as the Arisan Maru, they actually survived. They were close to land, and the minute the prisoners were in the water after the ship was broken apart, and they swam to shore only, of course, to be picked up by the Japanese and then herded together and put on the Enoura Maru, which is the bottom ship.

Yeah. No prize for surviving. They were then put on the next ship. The conditions on their ships were horrific. So there were prisoners who drew, who did survive some of the ships, who drew likenesses of what occurred. These men, as you need to understand, came out of the prisoner of war camps. They were already emaciated, they were already—many of them, malnutrition. Very, very practically near death. They had been beaten and many other atrocities. And they were then put on these hell ships in the cargo holds. They were given one cup of water, one cup of rice a day. They were put in holds that would carry maybe 200 or 300 people, a thousand, 1,500; nowhere to sit, nowhere to lay down.

They were stuffed body to body. The latrine facilities were five five-gallon cans at the front of the cargo hold. If you were at the back or anywhere past the second row, you are not going to take a—of use of the latrines. They were on these ships for a week. The temperatures in the hull went way over 100 degrees, and they say, somebody said the sides of the ship was so hot, and you know, the men were pressed against them, that it would burn your skin to stand against them.

People went mad. They killed some, killed others to survive, and some of them luckily survived. There were 1,800 American prisoners out of Camp Cabanatuan, people who survived the Bataan Death March, who were on the [Arisan Maru] in this condition. They actually, when they were stuffed into one of the holds halfway through the trip, and they were on this ship for 12 days, halfway through the trip, there were so many people dying. And of course they did not—they left the bodies such as they could, with the men who were in the hold. And, they finally realized they needed to stop the dying because what the Japanese ship captains knew were their orders, were that they had to bring these men in ready working condition to the Japanese homelands.

Well, this was not going to happen. So they transferred 600 of the men out of 1,800 into a second hold. That hold was one third filled with coal. So these men now stood on shards of coal for the other six, seven days of their trip. So miraculously, most of them were still alive on the 24th when it was torpedoed and went down.

It sank in two hours. And I have one more slide about the Arisan Maru. If you can't imagine, and I can't, 1,800 men, I put this graphic, each of these icons is 10 men. There are 180 icons of this. That's 1,800 men were crammed into these holds. They all went into the water, and all but nine, the last little icon, died on October 24.

And it is a tragedy. You ask, well, why don't people know this? Well, in fact, we can talk a little bit about the nine survivors, five of whom are pictured here. There, of course, were no Allied witnesses to this, so there was not going to be any newspaper report. So you can look, October 24, 25, 26, 27, you will not find a headline about the Arisan Maru.

We did not know about it until these gentlemen came home who survived. And they didn't make it back to the United States until December 5 I believe it was. And, they were then brought to the White House, given medals, and told not to speak about the incident. At that time, we didn't really know.

I mean, these five men show up and talk about this horror that, of course, Americans didn't really want to be released if they didn't have to, or until they knew more about what exactly happened. And we really didn't know who sank the Arisan Maru at the time. And it was one of our submarines.

Bradley Hart
So that represents the largest loss of life that you talk about in the book. One more question for I want to open up for the audience. I'm sure there's a ton of great questions out there, but maybe one brief question here.

You know, we often forget that the general conditions were hazardous in World War II, even if you weren't in combat. When we think about the war, we often think about people who lose their lives in combat. But you actually talk about individuals, both men and women, who lose their lives in non-combat situations. Can you tell us about some of those stories that you, really fascinating stories, in a lot of ways, tragic stories that you talk about in the book?

Rona Simmons
I also, as you say, I'm very partial to not overlooking people who signed up for the war. I mean it to me, if you volunteered, you went down, you enlisted, you went through boot camp, you're with your unit, you're in. You're in the Army now, as they say. And these people deserve as much recognition, even if they never made it to the theater.

So I always look at the, what they call the zone of the interior of the United States. And on October 24, there was a crew flying on their last training mission. They left Nebraska. Their route was to come to Baton Rouge and then refuel and go back. And within a week, they were supposed to go to the Pacific.

So they took off for 3 a.m. from Nebraska. Sorry, 4 a.m. from Nebraska. Got in here to Baton Rouge, refueled—10 men on the plane, a very experienced pilot—refueled, went to the end of the runway, took off and crashed immediately at the end of the runway. It's in a Barksdale Field at the end that they set fire to the woods.

At the end, everyone perished. And, you know, I'd like these men, as I said but for a week would have been in the Pacific somewhere and maybe have died. And I think they deserve as much recognition as all of the rest. The fascinating thing to me, when I saw that and so how could, how do you top that?

Well, there were two other plane crashes on that day in the United States where 10 or 11 men were killed because their plane crashed. And you can imagine the headlines, the, the Baton Rouge—sorry, the Barksdale Field accident hadn't happened before the news came out that another one had crashed, one in Kansas and one in California.

And this was going on and you think, well, how did these young men fly these planes? We have a hard time understanding this. It was a flight, infancy of flight. And the B-29 had particular problems, and one of the planes that crashed was a B-29. That pilot got in that plane, and in the days before, there had been three B-29s that went down in China.

And yet he gets on his plane, takes off, and, you know, it's an 18- or 20- or 22-year-old who has to say, it can't happen to me. I'm better than that. I'm a good pilot. It won't happen. Well, it did. So there were accidents like that and plane crashes. We talked about Margaret Neubauer being hit by a truck.

There was a gentleman who had visited the Pope. He was a Catholic, and he was moving from, in transit from one, with his group, from one place to another. And they'd gone through Rome and there was a chance to see the Pope, and he got his rosary blessed by the Pope. He was in the truck and it veered off the road, crashed and was killed.

But his rosary made it back to his family. And it's just, again, stories like that that touch my heart and I hope you will find them too, that they touch your heart as you read the book.

Bradley Hart
Absolutely fascinating. I think we should open up to questions from the audience. I'm sure there's a ton. We have a microphone in the back one of my colleagues will bring by. Who has some questions for Rona Simmons?

Audience Member
I'm curious if your research in any kind of, sort of data or demographic insights about where these men came from, what states they're born, if they're from cities or from rural areas, different class backgrounds, different racial backgrounds.

I love the idea of this book just as a sort of snapshot of the war and of the sort of the casualties here as a sort of, a slice of American life. So I'm just curious if you found any, if there are large numbers of soldiers from a specific state or specific regions area, I’m wondering if there's any demographics on these men or women?

Rona Simmons
Well, it pretty much mirrors the war in the sense that largely these were white men or some Hispanics, but that was a minority of the population. I mean, it mirrored the population in America back in the 1940s, which was largely white. There were a number of Black men who weren't allowed to serve until later in the war and only very certain positions, so you can imagine the Blacks were of a minority.v

The Japanese Americans who were interned at camps when the war started for a few years, they volunteered in great numbers. They did not want to sit and not serve their country. And so they joined up. But again, that's a very, very small percentage of the population back in that time as well.

Native Americans, I have read that 99% of the eligible men in Native American tribes volunteered and enlisted. They weren't drafted, they enlisted. And so that's a large percentage of that demographic, but again, a very small portion of the population.

So it really was mixed in terms of demographics. In terms of states, the deaths are again distributed pretty much by population. California's a big one. New Mexico, Arizona—a lot in the Philippines, a lot of those men were in the artillery and were sent to the Philippines. I didn't add it up that way, but I think they probably have a disproportionate share in those, too. But beyond that, it was, for the most part, where the population was.

Good question. Thank you.

Bradley Hart
Our special thanks to author Rona Simmons for joining us for this important conversation. Be sure to check out our website for upcoming Meet the Author events here at the museum. We'd love to have you join us next time you're here. But for now, that's World War II On Topic.