Marines in World War II Commemorative Series Illustrated (1937 - Tarawa)

Download or read book Marines in World War II Commemorative Series Illustrated (1937 - Tarawa) written by Jay F. Hooper and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about my father Jared J. Hooper during some of his WWII years (enlistment through Tarawa). I used three of the pamphlets in the Marines in World War II Commemorative Series to highlight these years (all of the title page information is in appendix -b- in the back of the book).If something in the text affected him directly it is highlighted in bold. Timeline markers and other events that impacted him are set off with a different font.Even though I have his complete USMC personnel record the information about his enlisted years is practically nonexistent in it, while his time as a warrant officer is quite extensive at times.I have relied on the stories that he told me as a child and a teenager (he talked about WWII only if I asked him about something). I have also found some US Marine Corps muster rolls to fill in some of the storyline of who, what, where, and when. The one confusing battle timeline is the Guadalcanal and Tulagi operation as he was originally discharged from the service on July 31, 1942 on board ship just about a week before the operation started (his enlistment was up). He re-upped of course but he was temporarily attached and detached several times in the confusion of the landings, the Navy leaving Guadalcanal after an intense naval engagement, the ensuing battles, and his utilization by various outfits due to his scout sniper training.In this book I have started with his time as a ranch hand in Wyoming in 1937. He did heed Horace Greeley who said, "Go west, young man." My father then told me tongue in cheek that "I walked down the wrong side of a street in Denver one day in 1938 and I ended up joining the Marine Corps." His enlistment date is Aug. 1, 1938.Then there was time spent at both the recruitment center near San Diego and at Mare Island in the San Francisco area. He was assigned pretty good duty starting June 1939 in Pearl Harbor but he was sent back to the states to be with the 2nd Division in September of 1941 before the December 7th attack. His scout sniper training was used at Tulagi, Guadalcanal, and at Tarawa for which he received a silver star.