The Cupertino Courier
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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Charles 'Charlie' Baker served as a sergeant in the Air Force with the 19th Squadron, also known at the Red Raiders, during World War II. Baker is heading to Alabama next month for the 58th annual reunion of his squadron.
Digital Clubhouse celebrates Air Force vets
By Cody Kraatz
Charlie Baker sees the destruction the United States military inflicted on Japanese soldiers and civilians during World War II as steps necessary at the time to save American lives.
"I don't think anyone that was in there during that time thinks that the atomic bomb shouldn't have been dropped," he says. "At that time it had to be done, but they're still doing the same stuff in Iraq now."
Baker, 83, opposes the conflict in Iraq. Sitting in his Cupertino home, an American flag pin on his shirt, he talks about The War, Ken Burns' current series of documentaries about World War II on PBS.
The films arouse his mixed feelings about what happened during the 1940s. Overall, he says the war produced a national unity that still seems to awe him, but says the internment of Japanese-Americans was a mistake.
"After Pearl Harbor happened, the whole country took a 90-degree turn," says Baker. "The whole country went to war production."
The airplane mechanic began his combat experience leapfrogging from island to island through the South Pacific on the way to Australia. He joined the U.S. Army's 22nd Bombardment Group of the 5th Air Force in 1944, the precursor to the modern U.S. Air Force, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
Story of service
Baker is the subject of a documentary produced in 2001 by young people through Digital Clubhouse Network, a nonprofit group once based in Sunnyvale that promoted intergenerational service and technology education. The clubhouse is celebrating the Air Force anniversary with a focus on World War II Air Force veterans from its Stories of Service series.
Meanwhile, PBS is working with the Veterans History Project, started by the Library of Congress in 2000. Warren Hegg, clubhouse founder, says the time is ripe to hear these stories.
"Suddenly people have awakened to the fact that we're losing these guys at one every 90 seconds," says Hegg. "We really feel we're in a race against time. We do what Ken Burns does, but on a much smaller scale."
Hegg founded the clubhouse in 1996 as a NASA initiative, and now operates out of San Jose. His son runs the national Stories of Service program out of New York City.
Whole story
The documentaries and discussions are likely to open up old wounds.
"It's hard for me to watch," says Juanita Harris, 82, whose husband Stanley Harris was a Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot in World War II and narrates his own video produced by clubhouse youth.
"I think what Ken Burns has done is put the humanity into it and it brings it closer to home. You see the effects it had on people at home," she says after watching the first Burns film, A Necessary War.
Baker narrates his five-minute documentary over a jazzy soundtrack and frames that zoom in and move across old photos. He describes a mission to bomb six airfields on Borneo from a nearby island, flying six planes per day, seven days per week.
"If there was anything wrong with an airplane, we spent all night getting it ready to go the next morning. If it took 24 hours to fix, you did it," he says. He returned to work as a car salesman in Sunnyvale and on the Peninsula.
Baker has accepted that he was a part of missions that inflicted great suffering, including blockades of Japanese-occupied islands to starve out the soldiers.
"The goal was to neutralize them," he says. "It saved a lot of people's lives."
Sometimes those islands were used for bombing practice. While the Stories of Service films are too brief to fully explore the depths and complexities of war, veterans remember the darkness and misery they saw along with the bravery, camaraderie and sacrifice that is never overlooked when war is memorialized.
For more information, visit www.stories-of-service.org or www.kqed.org/thewar.
