World War II and a Grand Matriarch

On December 7, 1941, Pauline Peyton Forney, like all Americans who heard the fateful news of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, knew everything was about to change. The United States was at war, and for her and millions of others, nothing would ever be the same. With over 2,300 American dead, more than a thousand wounded, and the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet severely crippled, the US had suddenly been hurled into a global conflict of unprecedented proportions.

Over the next four years, my great-grandmother, Pauline Forney, and every person, family, and community in the vast American Republic would endure unimaginable hardships and sacrifices. No one would go unaffected by the calamitous events unfolding on the land, skies, and seas of Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

Pauline’s story is typical of countless thousands. It's hard to imagine how she, and so many women like her, kept the faith, pulled together, and persevered through such a difficult and devastating chapter in human history. Were they superwomen? Were they cut from a different cloth, somehow able to keep a stiff upper lip, make the best of a bad situation, and ultimately prevail? Or were they just doing what (hopefully) we’d all do if we had lived during that time? The answer might be all of the above.

When the US declared war on the Axis Powers in 1941, Pauline and her husband, Edward, a hard-drinking Treasury Department officer with declining health and a penchant for losing money, were living in Hollywood, California. They had moved there 14 years earlier, in 1927, with their three children, Edward Jr., Gerard, and Polly, all of whom were now grown and married with children of their own.

By late February 1942, Edward had been appointed as the person in charge of the “evacuation” of Japanese-Americans from Little Tokyo, an area of Los Angeles that was home to one of the largest Japanese communities in the United States. Operating under President Franklin Roosevelt’s now-infamous Executive Order 9066, Forney and his men began rounding up and forcibly moving thousands of bewildered and distraught Japanese-Americans to “relocation,” or internment, camps in the desert.

It was a shameful and sad episode in American history, and I have no idea what my great-grandfather and his wife thought of the mass exodus of innocent men, women, and children, but I do know that less than 18 months later, Edward Hanna Forney was dead. His health had steadily deteriorated, and at the young age of 59, he died from a heart attack while in the hospital with pneumonia. Pauline and her children were devastated.

From left to right: Edward Jr, Polly, and Gerard Forney, circa 1916

With little money, too many bills to pay, and a crushing sadness enveloping her life, Pauline did what many women of that time did when confronted with adversity. She immersed herself in the war effort. She became a “Rosie the Riveter,” working double shifts at a factory that produced bomber planes. It kept her busy and made her feel that, like her two sons in the military, she was part of the American team. She was making a difference. (Edward Jr., her eldest, was an officer in the US Marine Corps fighting in the Pacific, and Gerard, her second son, was a US Army officer about to deploy to India and Burma).

And when she wasn’t working, she was writing. She wrote hundreds of letters to her children, grandchildren, and friends. She seemed more worried about them than herself. Her daughter, Polly, who was married to a Marine fighter pilot and had young children, worried her. Her sons, on the other side of the world and in harm's way, worried her. Even the fate of all those unknown sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands fighting in Europe and the Pacific worried her.

But she did more than worry. She prayed. I’ve been told she went to Mass almost every day of the war (and throughout her life), and I can only guess how many hours she spent asking God to end the war and bring everyone home alive. On August 15, 1945, her prayers - the nation’s prayers - were answered. World War II was over.

But even with Pauline’s two sons safely back in America, she found it hard to celebrate. Her husband was dead; Edward Jr. had divorced his wife in 1944 and remarried, leaving his two children without a father; and Polly’s husband had died in a plane accident off the coast of California, just weeks before the war’s end. In a cruel twist of fate, after surviving years in the Pacific fighting the Japanese, a mechanical problem occurred in his Corsair during a routine training flight, causing the plane to suddenly dive into the ocean. His body was never found.

Life had undoubtedly been hard for Pauline and for all Americans during World War II, but somehow they endured. As her great-grandson, I hope I've acquired some of her tenacity, faith, and perseverance. I also hope that if put to the test, I would follow her example.

With social media sites, news outlets, and talking heads making our 21^st century problems look unparalleled in history, it’s easy to think we’re in unchartered territory. As the stories of World War II clearly show, however, we aren’t. This too shall pass, and, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, if we can “keep our heads when all about us our losing theirs,” we, like all the courageous women of the greatest generation, will prevail.