World War II vets remember Pearl Harbor
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CLAUDE MARTIN
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GRACE SKIDMORE
“We didn’t know what to think,” said Grace Skidmore on Dec. 7, 1941, when her college professor told the class about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
She said that no one in the class knew where Pearl Harbor was. Skidmore, who is now 101, said that all the male students in her class had joined the military.
She soon followed suit and became an Army nurse. She lived part of the time with an uncle who was a colonel and had served in Word War I. “He signed me up,” she said.
She remembers that during World War II there was a shortage of rubber items, including automobile tires. The war ended before she could be sent overseas. She spent more two years at the Arizona hospital and a total of three years in the Army.
Skidmore is now a resident of Oak Ridge and plays in a band called the Golden Eagles, which entertains at senior citizen centers and nursing homes.
“I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Skidmore replied when asked if she would enlist again.
Martin remembers
“I just felt like I needed to do what I was supposed to do” is how Clinton resident Claude Martin explained why at 16 he enlisted, shortly after Pearl Harbor.
On Dec 7, 1941, Martin, then 15, was living on his family farm where Second Baptist Church is now located. The first time he tried to enlist, at age 15, he lied about his age. He was turned down.
A few months later, when he was 16, he successfully enlisted in the Army Air Corps, which later became the Air Force.
In World War II, he served under Gen. Douglas McArthur on five different Pacific islands.
Like most service mem bers, he said, “I did what I was told.” He mostly worked on flight lines.
Martin also served in the Korean war.
