At California's Long Beach Naval Hospital, Amy's mother-to-be, Janet Grant, couldn't rest  without using her social work skills to secure every civilian perquisite available to her  airmen. Perhaps learning from Annie how to  live well  with  the horrors of the sea equipped Janet to support her airmen as they told her of their nightmares of  a "particularly horrible mission  in the air."  

 

Dear Mother and Dad,

 

    V.J. day has just been announced, but the Base is still very quiet. The tension has been mounting in the last few days & the boys have dashed in to listen to our radio & dashed out again. The atmosphere has been peculiarly quiet.  No one seems to be able to believe it and I’m sure the real relaxation from tension will not come for sometime. Peace seems strange here where so many of the boys are still nervous wrecks from from combat experience and still dream night after night of that one particularly horrible mission. They can’t forget easily what they have been through. I hope to God we won’t either and let this happen again.

    Sometimes you get a little weary of hearing horrible details over and over again, but it’s only because one can’t possibly understand. The boys are a funny contrast. I don't know whether you’ve heard the classic Air Corps line. “There I was – flat on my back at 30,000 feet. Flak so thick you could walk on it.  And two of my engines conked out” [no period] There follows a long tale of the wonderful way the pilot pulled out of the mess. That’s one side, but then you may mentioned a boy’s Distinguished Flying Cross and he says flippantly that he did a couple of barrel rolls over the channel. Flippant and superficial as they seem they really think a lot and have a lot of good ideas on what should be done after the war. Of course, they’re mostly concerned with personal problems, so few of them have ever held a job & beside a salary of almost $300 a month a civilian job looks pretty rough.

    What got me started on all that? I suppose the end of the war makes introspection inevitable. As for me, I have no ideas how long Red Cross will maintain its large staff.  They were still advertising for staff a few days before this. Undoubtedly [we] will still be needed for quite a longtime. The most sensible thing would probably be to get a civilian job that would “advance my career” for no one thinks much of Red Cross experience. But I think I can conjure up whatever time is necessary to help the boys that still need help. Having sacrificed nothing in this war my own career can wait a little while. This base will probably remain open for some time since we are a redistribution center, but then we may be shifted around. I guess we can only live from day to day & see what happens.

    I understand that the Grant family is still a going concern with a few argument over our youngest member’s marital aims. I can imagine what goes on and all I have to say is :”Fight clean and may the best man win.” If there is a wedding, I’d love to be there & and will try although it is probably impossible. 

              Loads of love to you

                                 Janet