war hero of my childish imagination. Instead, I have come to embrace the intelligent, opinionated, complex, and sometimes difficult man I found. I still do not understand everything about why my father knew he had to fight. But I have found what I was looking for. The words of two of my father’s very dear friends help explain. “I shall always remember Roger’s courage,” John Reilly wrote to my mother when he heard of my father’s death: I believe it’s one of the most glorious things I have ever seen. I am no witness to his physical courage to any large degree; of that there is abundant evidence. But of his moral courage during his last six months I saw enough to make me know that he was of the stuff of which true heroes are made. This can be but slight consolation to you now; but what better or finer thing can you have to tell your children of their father in the days to come? “His was no empty gesture,” wrote Louisa Morton, “he knew exactly what he was fighting for.”27 In the end, that is enough for me.
--Kathleen Broome Williams is the Director of General Education and professor of history at Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, California. Her published work includes Secret Weapon: US High-frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic (Naval Institute Press, 1996); Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the US Navy in World War II, (Naval Institute Press, 2001), winner of the History of Science Society’s Women in Science award in 2005 and the North American Society for Oceanic History’s John Lyman award for U.S. Naval History in 2001; and Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Naval Institute Press, 2004), winner of NASOH’s John Lyman award for biography/autobiography in US Naval History (2004). She has just completed a memoir about her father, a World War II Marine, forthcoming from the Naval Institute Press in 2013, and is presently at work on a new naval technology project. 27 These
two quotes are from among the many letters my mother received after my father’s death, all of which are now in my possession.
12 ・ Marianas History Conference 2012