Photo of Floyd Kiernan and his wife, Harriet, who he met at a Philadelphia USO club in the fall of 1942 and married while on a weekend pass in October, 1943.

In 1941, I was 28, single, an amateur radio operator, and working in a radio service shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Early in 1941, we amateur radio operators were asked to join the U. S. Naval Reserves. In June, I was called to active duty and sent to a radio operating school in Indianapolis, Indiana for three months.

During that course there was a call for volunteers to join a top secret activity called RADAR and be sent to DestinationX. Even the name RADAR was top secret and could not be used in any correspondence. It sounded intriguing to me so I joined up.

I was sent with several others to DestinationX, which turned out to be a RADAR school in Ontario, Canada, run by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain. At that time there were no schools of this kind in the U.S.A.

After five weeks, we were sent out as RADAR experts to a ship at Pier 92 in the New York harbor to await assignment. I was standing watch duty, swinging my billy club, on December 7, 1941, when the O.O.D. walked up and announced that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. He took my billy club and replaced it with a .45 automatic. We were at war.

Article by Floyd J. Kiernan of Citrus Heights, California
(Evidently WWII veterans were asked to write a little about their war experiences but the newspaper and date unknown.)