Here is a copy of a letter that I sent to my kids a few years back about my mom and dad's experience of Dec. 7, 1941. In recent years, I have wondered about my dad's U.S. Marine Corps service in China and the Philippines in the late 1930s. He never spoke of his service during WWII to anyone, including my mom. My dad passed away in 1974 with all of his demons and stories.

-- Elliott Manning

Yakima

Dear Heather and Blake:

On a Sunday morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Grammy (Maile Jean Elliott) and her boyfriend, Lee Manning, were at the Lanikai Beach house, near Kailua Beach on the northeast side of Oahu Island, getting ready to have a picnic. As I remember Grammy telling me, she and Lee were sunning on Lanikai Beach when planes started flying low and shooting and bombing the Waimanalo Army Air Force Field, just over the hill. At first, they thought this was just another practice by the U.S. forces.

But when they saw the Japanese markings on the planes and the smoke and fire from the USMC Base at Kaneohe, they realized that this was no practice drill!

Francis Lee Manning (later to be my father) was in the Marine Corps from about 1937 to 1946, serving in China, the Philippines, Hawaii and in California during World War II. He was a patient at the old Tripler Army Hospital at Fort Shafter, just a few miles from Honolulu, when he got a pass to take Maile Jean to the beach that Sunday morning.

Come to find out later that he had been listed as missing in action because the hospital room that he had be in had been bombed! Going to the Lanikai Beach house had saved his life.

Maile Jean and my dad-to-be raced in her car to the USMC base at Kaneohe where Grammy was to stay with the other ladies on base until she was able to return to her parents home in Honolulu. Lee Manning remained at the base with Grammy's car that was fitted out with a machine gun on it for shore patrol work. Grammy still has pictures and a model of her car on her desk in Port Angeles.

Grammy and my dad lived through the attack at Pearl Harbor. Later on Grammy was evacuated by troop ship to California to stay with relatives. In due time, Grammy returned to Honolulu and married Lee Manning, who she had first met on the passenger ship S.S. Lurline between Honolulu and the Mainland USA. (Hawaii was not to be a state until 1959)

I was born in 1944 in Honolulu and grew up during the later war years. ...

All my love,

Dad