A Child’s Eye View of World War II
Written by Candy Gourlay
This piece is about the event that dominated the family’s storytelling when I was growing up: my mother’s memories of the second world war.
It was a child’s eye version of a brutal event. My mother, Cynthia, was only three years old when Pearl Harbor fell in 1941 and does not remember the bombing of the Philippines that followed. (My father, who was eight, does remember … but that is another story!).
Her father was an officer in the Philippine Army and years later, she discovered that he was responsible for maintaining a supply line to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay, where the American General Douglas MacArthur had removed the Philippines’ then Commonwealth government.
The beginning of the war was marked by a memory of Japanese soldiers banging on the door of their house. They shouted a word repeatedly, it sounded like ‘KURA! KURA!’—like the squawking of angry birds.
Later, she learned that her father had leapt out a second-story window at the back of their house. The shock of the impact somehow left him temporarily blinded and he would not have escaped without the help of another soldier who guided him to safety through back alleys as the Japanese searched their house.
Apparently, her father had left word that the family up stakes and move to Bataan where he thought they would be safer. In fact, Bataan suffered the most intense phase of the Japanese invasion.
