Pearl Harbor
attacked Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island and Midway Island during the surprise offensive in the Pacific.
As commander in chief, Roosevelt ordered that all measures be taken in defense of the nation.
“No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” the president said. “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God,”
The joint session of Congress erupted in applause.
‘Went through hell’
In quiet moments at his Spring Township home, on anniversaries of events like Pearl Harbor or the Battle of the Bulge, Burns thinks back to a time when he was young and the world was at war.
Growing up in Shamokin, a hardscrabble coal town, he’d been toughened for what he was to face after he entered the Army on Feb.
13, 1943, his 19th birthday.
“We were diehards who were willing to fight,” he recalls. “Eight of us from my hometown went to World War II together.”
Assigned to Gen. George Patton S. Patton’s 3rd Army, he rose to corporal during nearly three years overseas.
“Seeing people dying,” he says, “is an unpleasant memory that’s hard to shove out of your mind.”
During the Battle of the Bulge, fought in bitter cold in December 1944 and January 1945, Burns came down with pneumonia. He has little memory of it, except that he awoke four days later in a Paris hospital. He credits penicillin and sulfa drugs, relatively new at the time, with saving his life.
“I remember a doctor looking at me and saying, ‘Don’t you want to live,’ “
Burns recalls. “I think that helped me get through it.”
One of his most disturbing memories was of encountering former inmates of forced labor camps in Austria after Germany had surrendered on May 7, 1945. His unit was assigned to guard and feed them.
“Sometimes I wonder how on earth they ever got back to their hometowns,” Burns said.
He was unemployed after World War II, but got a job at the Reading Railroad roundhouse on Sixth Street. He also worked at Textile Machine Works and worked in maintenance at Sovereign Bank in Wyomissing until he was 90 years old.
In his mind’s eye, Burns confides, he sometimes recalls amputees he saw while in a Paris hospital.
He thinks of his brother Gerald, who wore a back brace for the rest of his life due to combat wounds. And, of a buddy from Shamokin who survived the war, only to take his own life a year after returning home.
Despite the hardships he endured, Burns remains proud of his service to his country. It was, he insists, the right thing to do.
“I went through hell,” he confides, “but it was worth it.”