us18

I interviewed my mom Kay Houghtaling. The interview took place on January 28 2008 in my house. During the interview I typed notes on my computer. The reason I choose to interview this person was because her dad was in the war and her mom was living in St. Louis at the time and they were both in there 20’s at the time.

Kay’s parent’s names were Charles and Ann Berra. Charles was 24 when the war started and Ann was 19. Charles was born February 16th 1917 and died May 2nd 1982 and Ann was born November 6th 1922 and died August 23 2006. Charles was drafted and became corporal in the army corps of engineers in 1941 he served until the end of the war in 1945. He and Ann were engaged and she was in St. Louis.

For the first half of the war he was stationed in Alaska and he worked on building the Alaskan (or Alcan) highway, this was important to the war because if anyone invaded the United States from Alaska, the highway was for transporting supplies. For the second half of the war he was stationed in the Philippines. There he saw some actual combat against the Japanese.

There where some good things at the time. Ann remembered going on a train trip to Little Rock Arkansas to meet her future sister-in-law. On the train there were a bunch of soldiers and Ann said she was very flattered because they were all flirting with her (even though she was engaged she had a good time on that train trip). Charles remembered that he liked fishing in Alaska and even though it was a lot of hard work and conditions he liked this part of his service.

There were also some bad things though. Ann knew several boys from her high school class that were killed during the war. She never knew day to day if Charles was ok. There were shortages of gasoline and rationing of food. The people at home were making a lot of sacrifices to help the war effort. Charles never talked a lot about the Philippines because there where some times when he was involved in combat and he didn’t like to talk about it.

I asked my mom how she thought the war changed her parents. She said “I think that living through World War 2 changed my parents for the rest of their lives. They were never wasteful with what that had because they knew what it was like to be without. They appreciated important simple things like being with your family they appreciated being Americans and were patriotic”

There was also some other interesting stories my mom remembered. When the war was over Charles and Ann wanted to get married and build a house, they got married in march of 1946 and moved into a flat while they where building their home but because so many returning soldiers where doing the same thing there was a shortage of building supplies so it took almost 2 years to finish their house.

There are a lot of things I think people should realize when reading this. One is that in world war to it was very different than the war today. Now only some people personally know someone who is in the war but then virtually everybody knew a lot of people who served, and maybe even died during the war. Also, that so many people sacrificed a big piece of their lives for the war and if they hadn’t life might be very different today.