Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–8
radio.” And she walks over and turns it up, and we heard the announcement of the attack on
Pearl Harbor.
My mother was particularly concerned, because my father’s youngest brother, Dominic—
Uncle D. to me—who was in the peacetime navy, had been at Pearl the last we’d heard. He was
a chief petty officer on the cruiser Pensacola. So my mother and father were extremely worried.
It was only later that we discovered something that was a surprise to everybody, particularly
[Japanese Naval Marshal General Isoroku] Yamamoto. Shortly before December 7th, the
carriers had gone off on a cruise, accompanied by the cruisers. They weren’t there, and all that
was left in Pearl were the battleships. This was quite a disappointment to Yamamoto. He kept
saying, “But what about the carriers?” The answer was, nobody knew about the carriers. They
weren’t there. And my uncle wasn’t there.
And so that was a day I truly remember. First, it had been a lovely day. It ended, then,
on this note of apprehension. My mother said to the young men who were gathered there, “I
think this may be the last time we are all together for such a holiday.” And it was true. They
were all drafted. They were all sent off various places to do all kinds of things: some into active
war-torn zones; some, because they had been in the merchandising business, to the
Quartermaster Corps, where they made sure things ran smoothly in moving materiel around the
world. But it was indeed entirely predictable that these people did disappear very soon into
World War II.
So that fall I started school. I didn’t like school very much—I was like some long-term
inmate of a penitentiary. I tried to do easy time—don’t volunteer for anything; take a book to
school every day from the public library. Try to read it, and not get caught, and you learn a great
deal if you read a book a day for a long time. So that was my view of the public schools. This
was incarceration. I had to do it, and I had to make reasonable grades, but I didn’t enjoy it much.
I enjoyed playing with my friends. We fought the battles of World War II, and we fought the
battles for the American West, the cowboys-and-Indians thing across the backyards of our part of
Memphis.
For me the war did not bring hardships. I’m sure it was difficult for my parents. There
was rationing. Tires wore out. A car trip was an adventure, because I thought that every trip had
at least one or two flat tires. It was always true for us. We went down to Pensacola, Florida,
once, right at the beginning of the war. It must have been the summer before first grade. But
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