DALTON, Ga. — On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Alton Cadenhead, then 17, had wrapped up a weekend of visiting his parents in Chipley, Ga., (now known as Pine Mountain) and was returning to school at a satellite campus of the University of Georgia about 26 miles away.

“The antenna of my car ran under the running board, and when I got about five miles away from a radio station, the reception was pretty bad,” he said. “From what I could hear, I knew they were talking about something bad, but I could not make out what it was. I reached my room about midnight and found out that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.”

Cadenhead, who now lives in Gordon County, said he and most of the people around him didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was.

“We hadn’t heard about it before that day. We couldn’t have told you where it was, but they had attacked the United States. And we were angry. Both with Japan and with the United States. Japan for doing it, and the United States for allowing it to happen,” he said. “We all knew that our lives would be changed. We knew that our schooling would be put on hold because we would all be going into some branch of service.”

Dr. M.L. Carpenter, who now lives in Murray County, grew up in Rabun County. He was 20 on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“I and a bunch of other fellows was playing touch football out in a pasture,” he said. “When we got through, I went home, and my Dad had been listening to the radio. He told me what had happened and said, ‘We are at war now.'”

Cadenhead tried to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor but was turned down.

“Growing up working on a farm and a sawmill, I’d injured my right leg, and they said it wasn’t strong enough to meet the requirements of the Marine Corps,” he said.

But Cadenhead didn’t give up.

“It took me a year of working out at a special gym to build the muscles up in that leg, but eventually I was able to meet their requirements,” he said. “So I was not able to go in until 1943, when I was 18.”

Carpenter was enrolled at a local junior college at the time. When he finished his academic year, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy.

Both men were assigned to the Pacific Theater of the war.

Carpenter was assigned to an LST (landing ship, tank) which carried troops, equipment and vehicles onto the beach during amphibious landings.

“I served on an LST for about two years and made a dozen landings,” he said. “We saw a few torpedos and had a few skirmishes, but I didn’t see nearly the amount of trauma that others serving on my type of ship did, especially those serving on D-Day in Europe.”

Cadenhead was assigned to the 3rd Marine Battalion, 9th Marine Division and saw combat at Guam and Iwo Jima, some of the deadliest battles in the war.

“We were up against a hard-fighting foe, a foe that did not mind dying, a foe that just wanted to take as many Americans with him as possible,” he said. “It was not a pleasant journey. Iwo Jima was … I just can’t imagine having to go through that again.”

Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers on the island at the start of the battle, an estimated 18,000 were dead when it ended 36 days later. The Americans received some 26,000 casualties, including 6,800 dead.

By the fall of 1945, Cadenhead was back on Guam, preparing for an invasion of mainland Japan.

“We were told American casualties would exceed 1 million,” he said. “We knew it would be extremely difficult.”

But one day, after hours of hard training, he took a shower and went back to his tent and immediately fell asleep.

“The next thing I knew was that one of the other boys in my tent was shaking me awake and shouting at me to get up. He said, ‘We’ve got a bomb stronger than a trainload of TNT!’ I thought he’d got into the raisin jack (a type of moonshine),” Cadenhead said. “I went to the radio shack. I couldn’t quite make out what was going on, but a captain came out and said, ‘Boys, it may be over.’ That’s when I first heard the words ‘atomic bomb.'”

Carpenter said he first learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from U.S. Navy news.

“We knew how horrible it was, but we celebrated when we heard,” he said. “We were scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan. We had been told there would be more than a million casualties on our part and much, much more on the Japanese side. Now, we could see the end and a chance of coming back home.”

Cadenhead recalled what it was like later when his unit received word that the Japanese had surrendered.

“I sat down and cried, and someone asked me, ‘Why on Earth are you crying?’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna go home,'” he said. “That million casualties didn’t take place. I know there is some debate today about whether we should have dropped the bomb, but for those of us who would have been on those landing barges, it was the thing to do.”

Carpenter says he doesn’t plan to do anything special today to observe the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Cadenhead will be giving a talk to students in Cartersville.

“I will be reminding them that it was not just a dark day but the beginning of a dark time for America and the world,” he said.