Vets express how WWII changed their lives and the world

By Melanie Byer
Edited by Kimi Timmers
April 8, 2009

When he was 17, Edward Hard was a forward for Elyria High School's basketball team, whose mascot he can't remember. He built a model Fokker D7 - a German plane in WWI - was shy around the ladies and went on hayrides around his Ohio hometown.

Then, he was drafted. In November 1945, Hard became one of 16 million U.S. soldiers who served in World War II.

"It's such a change to go from a carefree high school kid to being a number in the military," he said.

Hard, now 82, lives at Veterans' Victory House nursing home in Walterboro, along with other WWII veterans such as Robert Melvin Bullock Sr., an Army medic during the war.

Hard remembers "goofing off like everyone else at that age" the day he got his draft letter in the mail. He knew it was coming.

"It was one of those things of life," he said. "We were in a war and we'd been in one for four years, and it was just something that everybody was aware of all the time."

Hard knew people were still dying at the time he received the letter, but his youth made him unafraid to serve.

"When you're 18, you're never gonna die," he said, laughing.

Bullock, who entered the Army as a medic on Jan. 16, 1941, said he volunteered to serve when his recruiting officer said he didn't need a physical.

"I didn't want to wait," Bullock said. "I wanted to get in and get out."

Hard reported to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois for basic training on Jan. 13, 1946, and became a Navy medic. But his son, Matson Hard, said his father might not have been 18 when he was drafted.

"I was 18 by the time I went in," Edward Hard said with a wry smile. "Didn't do anything illegal."

He served in Great Lakes, Ill.; San Diego; and Washington, D.C., and traveled aboard several ships based in San Diego to the South Pacific for a few months treating fellow soldiers' blisters and other minor injuries.

Hard said he was happy to receive notice while at sea that his service was over. He thought he wasn't suited to military life and didn't like being given orders.

Hard said he wouldn't consider his middle-class social status to have changed since his service, but that he matured faster than he would have otherwise.

One thing that didn't change during his time in the Navy was Hard's love life. He didn't marry his wife, Betsy, until he was 39.

Unlike Hard, Bullock continued his love life during his service. While overseas, he wrote to two women, Gladys and Gertrude, he knew before the war.

Gladys married another man during his absence, but Gertrude promised she would be there for him when he returned. He married her during a monthlong furlough, a hasty decision he said surprised or angered his uninvited family and friends.

 When Bullock was discharged from his service in China, India and Burma, he settled down with "Gertie" on a Virginia farm and says they "went right on about our business like we'd been married 40 years."

Hard seldom wrote to girls back home, but he made friends during his service, though he isn't in touch with any now.

"Your life changes so much. You'd be very close friends at one time, but your life changed, you know," he said.

Hard thinks World War II changed the world, not just his life or the lives of other soldiers, sailors and pilots of his generation.

The war was "a watershed," he said. "It was a different world before World War II. There were kings and queens and parades, but World War II changed that."

Bullock said his hometown, Scotland Neck, N.C., and the people there seemed much smaller when he returned.

"The people looked like they had shrunk," he said.
 
But Bullock says another person who knew him told him he was simply used to bigger things.