Sophienburg Museum and Archives
Veterans of Comal County, Texas
World War II
Sophienburg Volunteer Remembers Dec. 7, 1941
“I remember the day so clearly. I was in bed recovering from a broken patella and listening to the radio. My father was in the basement where he had a woodworking shop and my mother was in the kitchen making breakfast. The announcement came over the radio that I was listening to, and when I heard it I called out, ‘The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!‘ My mother told my father, and he came upstairs and turned on the radio. We were living at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and my father was an officer in the Army. I can remember it so clearly; I can picture the house, my room and everything about it. Although it didn’t mean as much to me as it did to my mother and father, as I was almost ten years old at the time.”
“I remember that we had to have heavy, dark drapes because we lived close to the coast in New Jersey. And they had to be drawn every night — we could not have any light showing from the house. That was only in the first year or so because in later years, I recall, we could go out at night and the streetlights were on. It was only the people who lived right on the coast that continued to have blackouts.”
Ralph Koch
LTC, USA (Retired)
From the Archives
 P1075-97B — War effort in New Braunfels, 1942 — L-Fred Harrison, R-Charlie Schwamkrug |