Book Notes: Book explores struggles of getting home after Pearl Harbor attack
By Will Broaddus, Staff Writer Salem News
Feb 9, 2017
Doris Lee first appeared in The Salem News about 75 years ago, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
She had been living with her first husband, a sailor named Andrew Marze, at the American naval base in Hawaii when it was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. Marze was killed, but Doris and their daughter made it back to Salem alive.
"There is a quote from her to a reporter where she said: 'You don't know what you have to take until you have to take it,'" said James Lee, who recently published a book, "Safe Passage," about his mother.
Survivors of the Japanese attack were often treated as heroes by the press, and Lee's mother was interviewed three times by The Salem News.
But most of those accounts appeared only shortly after the survivors had arrived back home, and they all missed a bigger story that Lee discusses in his book.
"When I started this, my intent was to tell the story of my mother and her journey from Hawaii back to Salem," he said. "But what I discovered was that she was part of a larger event that took place over eight or nine months."
Forty-thousand civilians had to be evacuated at the same time that the country was trying to send sailors, soldiers and equipment out to fight in the Pacific.
"The problem the government had was getting enough ships," Lee said.
They ended up commandeering as many commercial vessels as they could find, and converting them to their purposes.
The government also needed to keep the civilian convoys secret, to protect them from Japanese attack, and didn't tell evacuees when they were leaving until the ships were ready to go.
Lee, who taught journalism at Bucknell University and is now retired, spoke to around 20 survivors who were evacuated from Hawaii. He said that while some were traumatized by their experience, for others it was an adventure.
After she had settled back in Salem and remarried, Lee's mother never talked about her experiences.
"We knew there was a story, but we didn't know what the story was," Lee said.
In addition to describing the civilian evacuation of Pearl Harbor in "Safe Passage," Lee also shares a great deal about his mother's personal life that he discovered while writing this book.
Lee thinks there is also a lesson to be learned form Doris Lee's example, when she picked up and started over after losing a loved one in war.
"She would say, 'Get on with it, you've been dealt a bad hand, but you played the hand and don't cry about it,'" Lee said. "Not only does it sum her up, but it sums up that generation."