Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Marjorie Cartwright married a sailor a week before he shipped out with MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet. She accompanied him to San Francisco, his ship’s home port, and promised to wait there for his return. It was the first time she had traveled beyond the borders of West Virginia. “I was on my own, living in a city I didn’t know and where I knew very few people. It was like being an orphan. I felt completely alone.” She found a furnished room in an apartment and took a job as a keypunch operator for Standard Oil. “I learned to knit at that time and spent many nights knitting socks for my husband and listening to the radio for war news,” she recalled years later. “I lived alone for four years during the war, and they were the most painful, lonely years I think I will ever spend. I look back and wonder how I ever got through those years, but when you’re young you can do a lot of things that you can’t do as you grow older. I spent many nights by myself in my room, crying because I was so lonely.”