‘Blitz Boom’ Town : Dec....

HOWARD LEWIS

Howard Lewis, an Illinois native, was working for the Bank of America in El Centro when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Eight months later, he was transferred to San Diego, and retired in 1974 as manager of the Bank of America branch at 42nd Street and El Cajon Boulevard. Lewis, who is now 74 and lives in Coronado, was drafted into the Army and spent the war as an enlisted man working in the Pentagon.

“I was playing golf with three other bank employees at a country club outside El Centro. We played nine holes and came in and sat down. The guy who ran the place told us what happened. We then walked outside to play the remaining nine holes, never giving much thought to how the war was going to affect us.”

Lewis was drafted 15 months later, about two weeks after he was married. But, unlike most soldiers, Lewis skipped basic training as well as advanced individual training. His office skills sent him directly from the induction center at Ft. MacArthur in Long Beach to the Pentagon.

Lewis’ Pentagon assignment allowed him to bring his wife to Washington.

“That happened because the Army quickly found out that I could type and take shorthand. I didn’t have one single day of basic training. I was ordered to report to the Pentagon, where I was assigned to the American Theater of Operations section.”

The American Theater covered North and South America, Iceland, Greenland and the Azores.

“I was assigned to a major general who reported each morning to (Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C.) Marshall. . . . My unit digested incoming radiograms from all areas and wrote reports that had to be ready by 7 a.m. The reports were about combat actions that took place in all theaters.”

“We had a company of 96 enlisted men. . . . We had some very talented guys. One was a stage designer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He did a lot of the map work. Another guy was a newspaper reporter from Seattle.”

“In one respect, it was a great time. Many people were dying, but people nowadays have never seen a United States that was as patriotic and united as the country was then.”

When the war with Japan ended, several members of Lewis’ unit got copies of the surrender document signed by the Japanese on the battleship Missouri.

“You can’t tell it from the original. It’s written in English and Japanese . . . I’ve kept it all these years with the intention of giving it to my great-grandkids one day.”