Thomas E. Warne was born in August 1930 on the dining room table of his parents' home on the Del Monte Plantation in Mindanao, Philippines. There was a betting pool among the families of when Warne would be born. Warne's father's boss picked the right date and won 16 dollars, which he in turn gave to Warne as a gift. Warne's father opened a bank account in his son's name and put the money in there. During World War 2, Warne spent the money on a war bond. Later, he cashed the war bond to pay for his first child's birth. The plantation consisted of about eight families, each having their own house. After his father graduated from the University of California in Berkley [Annotator's Note: Berkley, California], he went to Maui [Annotator's Note: Maui, Hawaii] for a job with a sugarcane company that was already taken by the time he arrived. His father taught agriculture at an all-boys Hawaiian school. He then found a job with Del Monte working on a pineapple planation on Oahu [Annotator's Note: Oahu, Hawaii]. His father did very well and one of his companions, Neil Crawford [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify], asked him to help start and manage a pineapple plantation in Mindanao, Philippines in 1928. His mother stayed behind because she was pregnant with Warne's older brother. She joined her husband after her son was six weeks old. By 1932, there was enough pineapple to perform the first canning. His father worked as the business plantation manager of the Del Monte Pineapple Plantation with Norris Wadsworth who was the business financial manager. While Warne was growing up, he often played with the other children of the seven other families who were employed by Del Monte. He said he enjoyed his childhood but, in many ways, they lived a crude life. His clothes were washed in the river. They had to boil the water before they could drink it. In 1937, Del Monte finally dug a deep well for fresh water and all the families celebrated. Seven homes were built in a horseshoe cluster which included a one-room school run by the Calvert Method, a pool, and a clubhouse. There was one road that led to the cannery. The clubhouse had spare bedrooms for guests and a large dinner room and dance floor. Every Friday night, the families would go to the clubhouse to watch a movie and socialize. When Warne needed medical help because he had a fever for over a month, he and his mother went to a hospital in Cagayan de Oro [Annotator’s Note: Cagayan de Oro, Philippines]. The doctors and nurses put a charcoal pot with herbs in the room to help him breathe. Another time, his body was covered with skin boils. Mercury was used as a treatment. He was forbidden to swim in the public pool because the other parents did not want him in there with the boils on his body. Another time, he had a cavity in one of his molar teeth. There was a missionary, who was also a dentist that pulled his tooth out with a pair of pliers and a mirror.

In the 1930s, Thomas E. Warne was living at the Del Monte Plantation in the Philippines because his father was the manger of the plantation. Every three years the company offered a six-month vacation to the families because it always took one month to travel back to the United States and one month to return to the Philippines. On their trip they went to California to visit with family. Warne's father loved orchids and had a large collection. His family went to Singapore and Hawaii and his father bought orchids to take back with him. Warne's father and uncle started a nursery in Hawaii. His father bought a piece of property from a Hawaiian matriarchy for the Orchard nursery near Honolulu [Annotator's Note: Honolulu, Hawaii]. Warne's uncle married a girl from California, and they moved to Hawaii and lived in the house that was on the estate that Warne's father purchased for the nursery. The Warnes left the Philippines in 1938 as a reaction to the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Japanese sent a contingent of their fleet into the Philippine Sea. Warne's parents were concerned, but he mostly did not give it much thought. Warne and his family left the Philippines on a German ship, where they made a stop in Singapore and went through the Suez Canal. They got off in Sicily. They toured through Italy and France because his father wanted to visit a large orchid nursery and purchase some of the plants for breeding. Then they went to England and bought another breed of orchids to be shipped to Hawaii. His family sailed on the USS Normandy [Annotator's Note: SS Normandie] and landed in New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York]. They rented a car and drove it across country and eventually ended up in Hawaii. By this time, his father left the Del Monte Company because he did not want to return to the Philippines with the rising Japanese hostilities. His father put all his time into the Orchid nursery and built a house in the valley. Warne’s new neighbors were Hawaiian and Japanese-Americans. He recalled never feeling animosity during the war. But there was one Japanese-American family that had a son in the Japanese Navy. Warne attended school with the Japanese and Hawaiians and were very friendly to them.

Thomas E. Warne and his family were living outside Honolulu [Annotator’s Note: Honolulu, Hawaii] where his father owned an orchid nursery. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], the United States Military was practicing maneuvers, and he would often hear ammunition firing at targets. On 7 December 1941, his family had woken up a little later than usual. They were sitting at the table eating breakfast when they heard explosions. The family was remarking how unusual the amount of firing they could hear was. All a sudden, Warne’s uncle Milton ran over to their house and relayed the news that the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor and advised them to turn on the radio. Warne went outside to his front yard and saw an antiaircraft shell explode in the neighbor’s yard. A woman was killed by the explosion. Almost immediately, he saw Japanese planes flying over their house heading to Pearl Harbor. Warne could not see Pearl Harbor from his house because of they lived in a valley, but he saw antiaircraft fire and planes in the sky. At one point, Warne saw a P-40 [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] flying low along the valley he lived in firing at a Japanese plane. While Warne’s family went back inside to listen to the radio, he jumped the fence and went to his friend’s house and watched more planes from his friend’s yard. Every now and then they saw missiles landing in their valley. Families were told to get reports from the police band because the radios were going off the air. Warne mostly stayed outside that day. Hawaii immediately went under martial law and the military was in charge. At one point the Boy Scout master called his house and Warne’s older brother was required to report to the headquarters. Warne’s mother was very concerned for his brother, but finally allowed him to go. It was dangerous to be out on the streets because the Japanese planes were shooting at moving vehicles. His brother was returned to the house by an Army truck, and he carried in a helmet and gas mask. That evening the firing stopped. He and his family suddenly heard a Japanese plane coming nearby [Annotator’s Note: a telephone rings at 0:52:55.000] and saw a bomb drop out of the plane coming straight for their house. The bomb exploded in a driveway near his house. [Annotator’s Note: There is a break in the video from 0:54:58.000 to 0:56:30.000.] Warne heard over the radio that each neighborhood had to defend themselves. He learned later that six people in his neighborhood were killed due to Japanese strafing and missiles. His family and their Hawaiian neighbors grouped together and patrolled and guarded their lane. The military enforced blackout conditions and made all the civilians stay indoors the first night after the attack. Sometime in the middle of the night, the Hawaiian neighbors were patrolling. They heard a noise and saw a Japanese man in a brown raincoat. He started to run and his Hawaiian neighbors after the man. One of the men hit the Japanese over the head with a flashlight and killed him. They realized that it was one of his Japanese neighbors. Warne felt no animosity towards the Japanese in Hawaii.

The day after the Pearl Harbor attack [Annotator's Note: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941], Thomas E. Warne did not return to school for six weeks. His father owned an orchid nursery, so he helped him while his education was on pause. He overheard his father talking to a customer asking his father if he would sell him a Christmas tree for 50 dollars. His father said “no” to the customer and walked him to his car. Warne’s family took the Christmas tree in the house and decorated it. When he returned to school, he continued to learn with Hawaiians and Japanese-Americans. He recalled that there was a German boy at his school that his father was found out to be a spy. The German boy never returned to school. Warne and his family followed the updates of the news of the war and listened to the military. The military issued gas masks and identification cards to families and told them to dig fallout shelters. The civilians had a six o’clock curfew. His brother reported for duty at the Civilian Defense Headquarters [Annotator’s Note: which was required because he was in the Boy Scouts, a youth organization in the United States]. His brother was picked up and returned home in a military vehicle. No one knew what to expect the first few weeks of war. The military told civilians that they would need to defend themselves. Warne’s family thought that they would eventually become prisoners to the Japanese. There was uncertainty for a while so many people stayed in their homes. Once civilians realized that they were not going to be invaded, things began to go back to normal. His father received instructions on how to build an air raid shelter. His father’s workers built a ditch and put boards on top of the ditch with corrugated iron on top of the wooden boards. The air raid shelter was flooded all the time and toads and other animals began to make it their home. One night in February the air raid sirens went off, but no one in Warne’s family wanted to go to the shelter. There was no way to keep in touch with their friends in the Philippines. Wherever civilians went they were required to carry gas masks. He would be sent home from school if he did not come in with his mask. Girls began to use them as purses and decorated them. Around May 1942, the civilians and military became very concerned due to the upcoming Battle at Midway [Annotator’s Note: The Battle of Midway, 4 to 7 June 1942]. Warne’s father and uncle went to work for the military as civilians. All his father’s workers at the nursery joined the military, so he hired a Japanese fisherman to help him run the nursery. Warne helped his mother deliver flowers to flower shops over the weekend. Honolulu [Annotator’s Note: Honolulu, Hawaii] was crowded with military men and martial law legalized prostitution. Some of the brothels were near the flower shop and Warne would see the military men waiting in line outside the houses. To assist in the war effort, he knitted squares that were made into blankets. One day a month, his whole school went to work in the pineapple fields to harvest the pineapple. For fun, he hung out with his neighborhood friends. They could not drive anywhere because there was no gas for the civilians. The military patrolled the streets to make sure people were not out past curfew. Near the end of the war, schools were allowed to have dances. Life became more normal at war’s end. During the holidays, they invited soldiers and Marines to dinner. The war ended when he was 15 years old.

For Thomas E. Warne the war ended on 14 August 1945 when the Japanese surrendered to the Americans. He supported the atomic bombs [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] and felt it was necessary to end the war. After the war, Warne graduated from high school in 1948 and then went to college. Veterans flooded the universities, and it was almost impossible for non-veterans to be admitted. Warne wanted to go to the University of California, but could not get in. He went to a small junior college in California for two years and eventually transferred to the University of California [Annotator’s Note: campus not indicated]. The school did not have enough dormitories and Warne had to live in a boarding house. Fortunately, he was able to get into a fraternity and lived at the frat house which was very nice. Warne reunited with a family he knew when he lived in the Philippines, and reluctantly met Terry again, who eventually became his wife. Warne’s most memorable experience of World War 2 was the attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. The war made Warne a more serious person. He believes that America has forgotten the events of World War 2. Warne believes that there should be institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana], and that we should continue to teach World War 2 to future generations because there was a love of country and love of God during that time. He believes America needs museums to keep the story alive and for the public to understand the sacrifice people made. He remarks about a few pilots that flew into the Philippines to drop medicine in Bataan for the soldiers.