Myers Bernard Rosenbloom was born in June 1922 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He has three sisters, many nieces and nephews, and many cousins in their nineties. His father was his idol. His name was Benjamin, and he was born in 1889. His father came to America from Czechoslovakia when he was in his twenties. His father was married to his mother at the time. His mother did not want to go to America while her mother was still living. When his father came to America his mother was pregnant with his oldest sister. His grandmother died in Czechoslovakia. His father was in America for eight years before his mother came over. His father was a shoemaker in Czechoslovakia. When his father came to America, he did not have any money. His uncle who had come here before his father got his father a job in the steel mill in Pittsburg. His father went to work in the steel mill and saved up as much money as he could to open a shoemaker shop of his own. His father learned to speak English, but he never learned to read or write it. When his father arrived at Ellis Island [Annotator’s Note: Ellis Island, New York] they asked for his name. His father’s name was Pinchas. This was his name in Europe, and it had the Jewish spelling. The man at Ellis Island checking him in asked to see identification for the spelling. It was not in English. The man got annoyed and put down that his father’s name was Benjamin. On his father’s citizenship papers his name is Benjamin Rosenbloom. He learned a little bit of English when he needed to buy supplies for his shops, such as threads and needles, rubber heels, and soles. Rosenbloom’s mother was quick to learn English and she looked down on his father for not wanting to become Americanized. They did not have a happy life. She wanted his father to learn how to drive a car. His father agreed to learn some English to pass the test. He got his learner’s permit. His mother was teaching his father to drive one day. They lived on a steep hill. She told him to go down the hill and turn right to get back to their house. He did not follow the directions well. He ended up running the car into a rock wall. Nobody in the car got hurt. His father never drove a car again.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom’s mother worked by having boarders. His mother was able to buy two houses with the money she earned. The boarders lived in the house with the family. His father became handy with tools, and he would fix things in the houses. His mother bought three houses from the roomers/boarders. She would feed them. Some only lived there. His father was not a strong healthy man. When he was 75 years old, he died in Rosenbloom’s arms. His father would go to his shop early in the morning before they were up. He never came home from the shop until they were asleep in bed at night. They only saw their father on Sundays. They only saw their mother. In those days when the children were in kindergarten or Elementary School, they had to buy milk from the school. They needed milk money. They knew their father loved them because he would leave coins in their shoes for milk. They always loved him dearly and they loved their mother a lot less. He remembers sometimes the electricity used to go out and they didn't have electric power. The Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945] was in the thirties. He was seven or eight years old when it happened. His oldest sister was in high school. The power would go out a lot. They did not have an electric refrigerator. They had a box they put outside the window with ice blocks in it.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom was working in an office in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania of the United States Steel Corporation when the war broke out in Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He was not married yet. He worked with a friend in the United States Steel office. Rosenbloom ran the mail car. He and Dick Rogers [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling] became good friends. They were 20 years old. In August of 1942 he became engaged and the next month after that his friend Dick Rogers suggested to him that they should go down and enlist in the Marine Corps. They went to the Marine Corps office in Pittsburg but could not enlist because they were not 21. They had to get their parent’s permission to join the Marine Corps. He told his parents he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. It was not an easy job to get a signature. His father could not read or write English. His mother finally signed it. He had just gotten engaged and then he was going to fight in the war. He left on a train the same day as Dick, but somehow, he was in one car and Dick was in another car. He never saw Dick again and could never find out anything about him. He wrote to Marine Corps headquarters in Washington DC for his whereabouts. They had no record of Dick Rogers. He did not know if his name was Richard or Richardson, but he always called him Dick. He did not have this full name so they could not find him. Rosenbloom went to boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina [Annotator's Note: Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in Port Royal, South Carolina], in September 1942. After many months of training, he transferred to Camp Lejeune in New River, North Carolina Annotator’s Note: Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina] for advanced training on 8 February 1943. After training was finished, he was transferred over to a barrage balloon [Annotator's Note: large, tethered kite balloon used to defend ground targets against aircraft attack] unit. They had them all along the east coast and they were used to try to detect submarines. He was not in the barrage balloon unit very long before getting notice that he was going overseas.

In February or March 1943, Myers Bernard Rosenbloom went to Camp Pendleton[Annotator's Note: Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California]. It took about a month before they were put on troop transports. They left out of San Pedro Harbor outside of Los Angeles [Annotator’s Note: Los Angeles, California]. There were thousands of them aboard the troop transport. They had no idea where they were going. They did as they were told. The first stop they made was American Samoa [Annotator's Note: American Samoa, United States Territory]. They put them to work building roads. They built the roads out of crushed coral. From there they went to British Samoa, and they did the same thing. They did not have combat training or anything. They were work crews. From there they went down to New Caledonia [Annotator's Note: New Caledonia, Oceania] to the capital, which was Noumea, New Caledonia. There they trained in jungle warfare, and then went to the Marshall Islands and the Gilbert Islands, followed by Melbourne, Australia. They did not stay there long. Next, they went over to Wellington, New Zealand, where he joined the 2nd Marine Division. They were in Guadalcanal [Annotator’s Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands]. They came back to Wellington for R&R [Annotator’s Note: rest and recuperation]. They were with an engineering battalion, and they were taught about demolitions and manners of destroying enemy bunkers. He knew they were going to engage the enemy in their first contact at Tarawa [Annotator's Note: Battle of Tarawa, 20 to 23 November 1943, Tarawa Atoll, Gilbert Islands]. It was a small island. They lost a lot of men there. He was working out of the company commander's office as a runner to go down to the beach. He went down to tell the beach master what supplies they needed. He did not go in on the first wave. He went in on the second or third wave of defensive action against the Japanese. When they hit the shore, he had to climb up the hill to where their company command was situated. He came with a message from the company commander down to the beach master. The trail down to the beach was made from crushed coral. He ran zigzag down to the beach and could hear pings all around him. There was a sniper trying to kill him. He could see where his bullets were hitting the coral road. He gave the beach master the message. He had nothing to do with getting the supplies back up the hills. The enemy was not too far away from them on the other side of the hill. At night they used to try to get closer with their troops. One time they were instructed to get into a trench. His First Sergeant had a slit trench right next to him and there was a tree it was a young sapling tree ten or 12 feet high up in the air, but the Japanese were trying to overtake their outfit at top of that hill. They got about 35 feet from the company outpost. They knew how close they were getting because they were knocking the leaves off the tree next to them. Their supply outfits were able to push the Japanese back. They were never bothered after that. They did not have another close attack from the Japanese.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom was sent to Honolulu, Hawaii for R&R [Annotator's Note: rest and recuperation with the 2nd Marine Division]. They were pretty far away from where the Japanese bombed on 7 December 1941 [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. When they got to Honolulu, they thought they were going to have a pretty good time. They were shipped to a Marine camp up in the mountains about 60 miles outside of Honolulu. They were freezing up in the mountains. They had five or six blankets just to keep them warm because they had just come from a tropical climate in Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific. They were in the mountains for a few months. Then they shipped to Saipan [Annotator's Note: Battle of Saipan, 15 June to 9 July 1944, Saipan, Mariana Islands]. That was a long battle. It took them months to secure the island. There were a lot of native people from Saipan who were afraid of the Japanese. The Japanese made slaves out of them. They were horrible to them. A lot of people used to go to one end of the island of Saipan to the cliffs and they would throw themselves off. They committed suicide rather than being taken prisoner by the Japanese. When the Japanese would attack, they would stay in caves. When the Japanese overtook the islands that's when they started to jump over the cliffs and killed themselves. They were there on Saipan for several months until the campaign was over. When they got to Saipan, Rosenbloom had to learn how to do office work. He was a pretty good learner. He was promoted to PFC [Annotator’s Note: Private First Class]. He worked a typewriter with two fingers. He was under Captain John W. Branson [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling], from Manhattan, Kansas. Captain John did not call him private, he called him Rosenbloom. The captain assigned him to do the payroll. He had never done payroll before. The payrolls have to be exact with no errors and no mistakes. Payroll came down a page and went up on the other side. If he got down to the bottom of the page and made a mistake he had to start over. Everything has to be just right. Rosenbloom told him he was asking the impossible out of a two-finger typist. He told Rosenbloom he could do it. After about a month of having to do it over again, he learned to be more careful. He did payroll until the next campaign came up. The next campaign was several months after they were on a small island alongside Saipan called Tinian [Annotator's Note: Battle of Tinian, 24 July to 1 August 1944, Tinian, Mariana Islands]. Tinian was occupied by the Japanese and it was also a small island. He did not enter combat on Tinian. After Tinian was secured, they went all the way back to Saipan again and were there for 19 months. It was from there that they dropped the atomic bombs [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945].

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom was a payroll clerk [Annotator's Note: in the 2nd Marine Division]. Everyone was trained in demolition. They would put down what they called satchel charges which were charges packed in canvas bags. They had to put them up against the bunkers as much as they could. Instead of exploding, they would implode. They received a lot of training in that. All the while he was still doing office work. He got promoted to corporal. He was on Saipan [Annotator's Note: Saipan, Mariana Islands] until the war was over. He spent almost two years in Saipan. After the surrender, they thought they were going to be sent back home to Camp Pendleton [Annotator's Note: Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California], but they needed an outfit to go into Japan for occupation duty. His unit was picked to go to Nagasaki [Annotator’s Note: Nagasaki, Japan] in October 1945. They were only in Nagasaki for about 6 weeks. That is where they were bivouacked [Annotator's Note: a bivouac is a temporary campsite] in a red brick schoolhouse. He did not see any of the people who were devastated by the explosion [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapon dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945]. The only Japanese people that Rosenbloom saw were people who had shops just outside of the schoolhouse. Around the end of 1945, they were told that they were going to be sent home for discharge.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom left Nagasaki [Annotator's Note: Nagasaki, Japan] and went 7,000 miles across the ocean back to San Pedro Harbor outside of Los Angeles [Annotator’s Note: Los Angeles, California]. At the time they left Camp Pendleton[Annotator's Note: Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California] to go overseas in March 1943, it was nothing more than just a bunch of tents. There were makeshift barracks and buildings. It was nothing it was just a transfer place. When they came back from the war, it was more like a military installation. When his children took him to Camp Pendleton for his 90th birthday it was like a different world. It was like a city unto itself with all modern buildings. They had different areas for training and different areas for administration and places where they lived in apartments. In all that time from when he was there in 1943 until he was 90 years old, it was like a whole different world. He was discharged from Camp Pendleton on Christmas Day in 1945 [Annotator's Note: 25 December 1945]. It took three days on a troop train to go back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He worried that he would not recognize his wife at the train station. He had just gotten married before he was shipped overseas. He wrote to her, and he sent telegrams. Every once in a while, he was able to get to a USO [Annotator's Note: United Services Organization] place and was able to make a recording to send to her. They kept in touch, but he was overseas for 32 months. He was afraid that he would not recognize her, but he did. It was a happy reunion. He did not go to school after he got home. After he was discharged, he made a mistake. He was entitled at the time to four years of college under the GI Bill of Rights [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] but he did not take advantage of that because he was a young married man. He had to go and find a job and support his wife. He never did get to college. If he had, he might have had a more productive and more profitable financial life. He had a lot of jobs and always provided for his wife. They never had more than one used car. They loved each other dearly. His son is a doctor in Tennessee. When he moved to Arizona, he was 61 years old. He worked as an inspector for out-of-state vehicles until he was 70. He wanted to retire at 70 in May 1992. His son was on the staff of the Cleveland Clinic [Annotator's Note: in Cleveland, Ohio] at that time. He asked him to come in for a cardiac check-up. When he got there and went through the cardiac check-up, they discovered that his heart was so bad that he needed to have open-heart surgery. His son arranged it for him there in May 1992. It took a couple of months to recuperate then he went back to work. His pension was enough that it took care of his bills and his hospitalizations. He has enough to live on.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom figured God was very good to him in that he allowed him to go through the war and not even get a scratch. He was never wounded. He always felt like God was sitting on his shoulder. He allowed him to go through his life uneducated. He went to high school. He had over 50 different jobs. He always had a job and always had enough to eat. His children were always dressed nice and went to good schools. When they were young, they only had one car. His wife did part-time work for a fine china department of a well-established department store. She worked for a short time but most of the time he just went from job to job. He worked in one place on and off for 28 years and appliance sales where they sold home appliances such as stoves and refrigerators. Whenever he was aboard ship coming into Los Angeles [Annotator’s Note: Los Angeles, California] to San Pedro Harbor he saw neon signs and antennas on roofs as television was just coming into existence. The store that he worked in sold radios, washers and dryers, stoves, and refrigerators. They were starting to sell televisions that had a five-inch screen in a huge cabinet to look like a piece of furniture. When televisions got to 19 inches, they were starting to have color television. After that, they could buy TVs with radio and stereo and record players and everything like that. He could see the progress of that industry and how it developed from the time he came home from the war to the time he was done working. It was like a different world.

Myers Bernard Rosenbloom says that serving in the war was the greatest part of his life. He has a lot of pictures and stuff from the war. He does not know what will happen to the albums after he is gone. He knows that some of them will go to children and grandchildren. It has given to him a tremendous joy to put the albums together. He has never had a financially successful life because he never went to college, but they never wanted for anything. They always had a good, loving life and had good children. His children are all college graduates. His daughter went to the University of Pittsburg [Annotator’s Note: in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania]. He could not afford to give her any tuition money. She worked in a department store to earn money. She is a retired schoolteacher now. His son went to college on minor scholarships and graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago [Annotator’s Note: Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois]. He went to medical school in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia and became a doctor. He applied to Duke University in North Carolina and became a radiologist. He applied to the University of California in San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California]in neuroradiology. Rosenbloom is very proud of his children. The biggest mistake that he made was not going to college. He does not have any regrets. God has always been sitting on his shoulder. And that is the story of his life.