‘The Greatest Generation’ still remembers

PUHI — It’s hard to find many who were directly affected by D-Day nowadays. It’s getting even harder to find anyone who fought in the invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944.

On Kauai, if you ask the younger generation what their thoughts are on the invasion that led to the allies victory over Japan, Germany and Italy, you will get some strange looks, even considering it is the 75th anniversary of the biggest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare.

For residents of the Regency at Puakea in Puhi, several of them were directly affected by World War II, like Susan (Yoshie) Matsumoto, who wrote the book “My name is Yoshiko” to chronicle her experience of getting put into an internment camp in Santa Anita, Calif., during the war that is now a distant memory of the past.

“My husband served in the U.S. military as a colonel for four years and four months, and still they say he had to prove by taking the bastards test and keep it a secret for eight years,” Matsumoto said of her husband’s time serving during World War II. “That’s what made me write the book.”

Matsumoto and her husband had not met yet when the war ended, but his experience and hers was something that she says “changed real lives.”

“I’m happy that my life turned out better than I expected because the people here treat me so well,” Matsumoto said of her Japanese heritage. “In the beginning it was terrible. They didn’t know what to do with us, so they put us in a horse stable for five months, temporarily. After five months they shipped us to lower Arkansas for two and a half years.”

Other residents have memories that have turned to stone over the years of the allied invasion.

“We were on the front line of Italy and we saw all these planes flying over,” Ike Muraoka said of D-Day. “Somebody said, ‘oh, that’s the invasion.’”

For many, they have only seen the invasion on television or the movie screen.

“Well, I’ve been watching a lot of television, and it means a lot of wet guys getting on the beach of Normandy, and it looks terrible,” said Linda Rozelle, an employee of the Regency at Puakea.

“I can’t even imagine being that wet, let alone risking your life, and I’m like, ‘how does anything work after you’re that wet and you’ve been dropped off?’”

For David Mona, the reality of D-Day really took shape for him when it was portrayed in the movie “Saving Private Ryan” when it came out in 1998.

“I gotta say it didn’t mean a whole lot until I saw ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” sdaid Mona, an employee at the Regency at Puakea. “And then it just made it real. It’s easy just to read about it, but when you kind of see it and the impact. Reading about and knowing it happened is one thing, but to kind of see the recreation of it just makes it more impactful, more sobering.”

Others saw their significant others fight in World War II.

“He was in World War II, Korea and Vietnam,” Betty Caroll said of her husband, who passed away six weeks ago. “What he had to do was go get the boys who were injured and put them in his plane and he had to take them to hospitals in Washington state and they would never recover. War is hell.”

It’s many like Caroll and “The Greatest Generation” who still hold many of the memories of the invasion and war that changed the course of history in their daily thoughts still to this very moment, even after 75 years.

•••

Ryan Collins, county reporter, can be reached at 245-0424 or rcollins@thegardenisland.com.