The End of the Beginning

In April of 1945, life-altering events happened. The old order was dying, and a new America was being built.

And many people died, including world leaders. April, they say, is the cruelest month.

In 1945, Americans were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor where many men remained unidentified four years later. Hawaii had once been a peaceful and idyllic island chain in the Pacific. One resident, Gene Paterson Ames, wrote to her mother immediately after the attack of hearing the tinkling of Japanese shell casings falling from their planes as they flew overhead, looking for anything to shoot. "At first, I just went to pieces-all of us did," she wrote frankly. She also wrote of the carnage there, of trenches being dug around houses, about her husband being deployed to help guard the beach against a possible invasion. She was shortly evacuated to the mainland. Her husband, Major Alan Strock, later became a much-decorated soldier, fighting for four years in the Pacific.