Ronny Herman de Jong

What a sight it was this morning! Space Shuttle Discovery piggybacked in flight, on its way to its final resting place at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Annex in Washington DC, circling a couple of victory rounds, flying at 1,500 feet over various parts of the city before  landing at Dulles International Airport around 11:00 a.m.

Since August 30, 1984, the 100 ton spacecraft flew 39 missions in its 26 year flight history, more than any other vehicle in the shuttle fleet, according to NASA.  It meant the end of  NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program.

A reversed image came to my mind. On August 5, 1945  a B-29, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of the US Army Air Force was maneuvered over a bomb loading pit on Tinian Island, a small island in the Pacific.  ”Little Boy”, the first atomic bomb, was hoisted into its bomb bay and after lengthy preparations, the Enola Gay, named after Tibbetts’ mother, carrying “Little Boy” inside its bomb bay, took off  at 2:45 a.m. in the early morning darkness of August 6, direction Hiroshima. The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. Japan time – it meant the beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific.

Until next time,
Ronny

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Women’s History Month is a relatively new phenomenon. It began in 1978, when the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women initiated a “Women’s History Week” celebration. The week was designated to encourage learning about the contributions of women in history. Organizers chose the week of March 8, which is International Women’s Day, for the observance. That first Women’s History Week was a big success, and subsequent years saw an increase in interest and activity by schools and communities in the whole nation.

The growing interest in Women’s History Week led the National Women’s History Project to petition Congress to expand Women’s History Week to an entire month. Since 1987, the month of March has been designated as Women’s History Month. Each year, the President of the United States issues an official proclamation, and encourages US citizens to observe the month with appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities that honor “the history, accomplishments and contributions of American women. During Women’s History Month, we recall that the pioneering legacy of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers is revealed not only in our museums and history books, but also in the fierce determination and limitless potential of our daughters and granddaughters.”

On an international level we find the International Women’s History Month Literary Festival taking place this year in Baltimore, where a panel of four women writers from across the globe discusses the intersection of place, time and culture in literature and in the lives of women.

Looking back in history, I remember my mother Netty Herman, a courageous survivor of Japanese camps for women and children on the island of Java in World War II. She gave me and my sister a second chance on life. With her positive mind and loving heart she lived to be a centenarian. She was my inspiration. To read more about her exemplary life, please check out my memoir titled Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy, published by Booklocker.com. Partially based on my mother’s camp journal it is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Until next time,
Ronny

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A person who is capable of critical thinking, creative problem solving and technological and communication skills has a far greater chance of being employed today than someone without those skills. The ability to think broadly and read and write clearly can provide better positions in all branches of society.

Public elementary and high schools can develop those skills in their students through an education in history where critical thinking and research are emphasized in addition to memorizing facts.

Studies show that through historical research students become critical thinkers who can absorb and evaluate information and articulate their feelings. These skills in turn create better performance in other skills like math, science and economics, which altogether improve one’s chances to advance in life.

I am offering my readers a small but important part of history: an eyewitness account of the conditions of life in Japanese concentration camps for women and children during World War II in the Pacific. My new book, Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble in print and electronic versions. 

Until next time,

 Ronny

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In the year 1993, Mike and I traveled to the country of my birth, now Indonesia and flew from Bali to Java. A day after our arrival in Surabaya, we found out that the city was celebrating its 700th birthday with a display of flags in front of City Hall. A large statue showed the fighting shark and crocodile (Sura ‘n Buaya), from which Surabaya derives its name. The kali (river), its water a dirty brown with all kinds of objects floating in it, was being used for a toilet even as we passed. The whole city was chaotic and dirty. A lack of traffic lights in Surabaya made traffic unbelievably hectic.

Quite a different scene presents itself this year in Prescott, Arizona, where I live now.

The Arizona State Centennial will be celebrated from September 2011 to February 2012.

In Prescott, Arizona’s first Capital City, the year-long Celebration will officially commence with a State-sponsored event, the “Best of Arizona Festival: Prescott” to be held September 16-18, 2011. It will be followed by “Best Fests” in Arizona’s two succeeding capitals, Tucson (October 2011) and Phoenix (February 2012).

If you want to know more about my pilgrimage to Indonesia, please check out my latest book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy. It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Until next time,
Ronny

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As I am writing this, Hurricane Irene is raging in the Atlantic. An extremely dangerous 500-mile wide storm, it made landfall in North Carolina and is threatening the whole East Coast all the way up to Canada with winds of 70 or more miles per hour along the coast and 40 to 60 miles per hour inland, as well as major flooding due to heavy rains, a storm surge at the shore, and power outages. In many low-lying areas mandatory evacuation is taking place. In New York City the subway was closed for the first time in history.

I am thinking back to September 11, 1992 when I was living on the Big Island of Hawai’i and Hurricane Iniki, the most powerful hurricane to strike the State of  Hawai’i in recorded history, struck the islands with devastating power. 145 mph winds made it a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Hurricane Iniki made landfall on the south-central portion of Kauaʻi Island, bringing its dangerous inner core to the entire island where it destroyed over 1,400 homes and severely damaged over 5,000. Strong waves of up to 35 feet in height crashed along the southern coastline for several hours, causing a debris line of more than 800 feet inland. Because it moved quickly through the island, there were no reports of significant rainfall. Iniki caused around $1.8 billion in damage but despite the lack of early warning, only six deaths. The devastating hurricane destroyed a number of chicken farms, which caused an overwhelming number of feral chickens all over the island even to this day.

The population of other islands came to the rescue by offering long-time shelter, food and water, and carpenters, plumbers, electricians and the like flocked to Kaua’i to volunteer in rebuilding homes and churches.

If you want to read more about my life in Paradise after I survived the Japanese concentration camps as a child, please check out my latest book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy. It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Until next time,
Ronny

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Last week, I visited the Smoki Museum of American Indian Art and Culture in Prescott, Arizona to renew my membership and look at the new exhibit. Below the wall on which the first set of framed pictures hung, several books were displayed. One title caught my eye: Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers. Unexpectedly, tears came to my eyes. It had suddenly hit me that these heroes, the Navajo Code Talkers, in whose state I now live, had been instrumental in ending the war in the Pacific, resulting in my survival.

During World War II, as the Japanese were breaking American codes as quickly as they could be devised, 29 Navajo Indian Marines provided their country with its only totally secure cryptogram. Recruited from the vast reaches of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico, from solitary and traditional lives, the young Navajo men who made up the code talkers were present at some of the Pacific Theatre’s bloodiest battles. They spoke to each other in the Navajo language, relaying vital information between the front lines and headquarters. Their contribution was immeasurable, their bravery unquestionable. Thirteen Code Talkers were killed in action and many were wounded, but their code remained unbroken.

After the war, they were all but forgotten and many ended their life in poverty. In 1990, the Navajo Code Talkers  were honored in the book I was looking at in the Smoki Museum, Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers, with many beautiful pictures. Not until 2001, 56 years after the war, did President Bush present four of the five code talkers still alive ― and relatives of the 24 others ― with the Congressional Gold Medal at an afternoon ceremony in the Capitol rotunda. The 2002 movie Windtalkers, a fictional story based on Navajo code talkers enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II did not do them justice. The movie was criticized for featuring the Navajo characters only in supporting roles, not as the primary focus of the film.

Today, only one of the original 29 Code Talkers is still alive: Chester Nez, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1942, 18 years old, Chester went off to war carrying medicinal herbs, a bearskin, corn pollen and arrowheads for good luck, all wrapped in deerskin. He was armed with a secret weapon as well: the Navajo language. He and 28 other young Navajo had been shipped to boot camp in San Diego, put in a big room and told to make a code in their own language that related to military terms, like planes, tanks, bullets. That took them almost 13 weeks.

The code, which they had to memorize, was based on a system in which the Navajo used their own words to substitute for the 26 letters in the English alphabet. What’s more, the Navajo had no words applicable to modern warfare, so they settled on hundreds of descriptive words in their own language. A tank was a tortoise; a submarine, an iron fish; a dive bomber, a chicken hawk; a grenade, a potato; a battleship, a whale. Bombs were eggs, and the commanding general a war chief.

This week, the week after the end of the war in the Pacific, the Navajo Nation celebrated National Navajo Code Talkers week in Window Rock, on the reservation.

I am eternally grateful to the heroic Navajo Code Talkers for their involvement in the Pacific war, which came to an end just before the Japanese Imperial Army would execute their order to “kill all prisoners in all POW camps beginning in September 1945”.

If you want to know more about the WWII concentration camps for women and children of which I am a survivor, please check out my latest book Rising from the Shadow of the Sun, A Story of Love, Survival and Joy. It is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Until next time,
Ronny

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