Peggy Terry & E.B. (Sledgehammer) Sledge, Marine

Peggy Terry:

During the war, Peggy worked at a shell-loading plant after the depression. She was not very sure how her work impacted the war. She wasn't even positive what she was making. It never occurred to her that she was making things that would kill other people. In the factories, the sanitation was horrible. Tetryl, a chemical in the shells made the worker's bodies turn orange and made people have hard time breathing. Peggy never questioned if it was dangerous because it never crossed her mind. This example shows how bad the working conditions are and how people can become very sick from all of the chemicals that are used. Men were involved in workers unions and human rights protests, but women were just happy to have a job that it didn't apply to them yet. Peggy wrote, "The war just widened my world." This was because she travelled to Michigan because they paid women more money for her job. In Michigan, she started learning more about workers unions. She had little idea about how the war was going and she didn't even know about the concentration camps. However, she did know about the Nazis and knew that they were evil. She also knew the Japanese were bad. "They were yellow little creatures that smiled when they bombed our boys." When she watched movies, the Japanese would look evil and the Nazis would look short and stout. Now, she looks back at the war with sadness because her husband returned from the war as a different person. He was always drunk and had nightmares that would keep him up for hours. Peggy stated, "Wars brutalize people. It brutalized him." This is a very common affect when soldiers come back from the war, but Peggy did not like it and was very upset.

E.B. (Sledgehammer) Sledge, Marine

Sledge made a point that the Japanese fight with not surrender because they think it is cowardly to surrender. They fight to their death and they are brainwashed to expect to die. He said, "To be captured was a disgrace." The Japanese would strap bombs onto themselves and jump into a building and blow it up with them. Sledge doesn't like violence, but he thinks there are times when he can't help it. At the beginning of the war, he said he was really scared, but after a while he was tired of being scared. At that point, he had so much anger built up in him and he aimed it all towards the Japanese. He witnessed some rare incidents when the Japanese have surrendered. He said, "When they surrendered, they were guys just like us." The soldiers think to themselves that the Japanese aren't human so it is easier to kill them. If they had the mindset that they are humans just like themselves, it would have been a lot harder to kill the Japanese because then they could relate. Sledge had seen many people brutally abuse the Japanese even when they are dead. Many knock the gold teeth out of the dead Japanese, but Sledge never did it because he held onto his morals throughout the war. He stated, "We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting each other like wild animals." He feels that war can be necessary at certain points, but people have to be respectful for others who are dead.