Historians receive transmissions from past
Published 5:00 am Friday, March 2, 2007
BHS students learn about World War II through
a veteran’s tales.
A trail of dots, dashes and decades fills the expanse between Vincent Wolf and six curious history students at Bainbridge High School.
As a third class petty officer in the Navy, Wolf first set foot on the island in the early 1940s, amid the tumult of an escalating war overseas.
He spent eight hours each day tucked away at Fort Ward, launching message after encrypted message from the machine in front of him through the transmitter at Battle Point and across space to military brass in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
“I had no idea what I was sending,” recalled Wolf, now 87, from his Manor Lane home. “But the messages kept piling up faster than I could send them out.”
For the BHS students, already several months deep into a research project that will take them across the globe to England, Wolf’s past – and the pasts of other islanders who lived through World War II – will form the marrow of the message they transmit this summer to a group of international students taking similar stock of their hometowns’ histories.
On Bainbridge, the research is just beginning. Wolf is among the first people the students have interviewed, and they’ve only begun digging through the island’s archives for local accounts of life on Bainbridge during a war that claimed some 60 million lives.
When they’re finished, the students will gather in Bath, England, with students from England, Germany and Poland to compare their findings.
Along with showing a homemade movie that will include clips of interviews with locals who lived through the war, the students will swap stories, artifacts and perspectives with their European counterparts.
The projects will remain on display in England following the meeting.
The group is now raising money for the trip – which will cost about $3,000 per student – and will host a Scrabble tournament at 1 p.m. today at Bainbridge High School.
As they unscramble the tiles of history, the students are finding that no small measure of flexibility was required by islanders during the war.
People endured changes large and small, from internment to rationing, said student Ariel Smith.
Some went away to fight. Others stuck it out at home. But all were affected.
“A lot of them were high school students like us,” Smith said. “Every aspect of their lives was altered by this huge global event.”
Some of the findings have hit close to home.
One building over from Zonoff’s classroom, where Commodore Options School now stands, students learned that a peculiar sort of “radar” station had been established during wartime.
“Women were sent to stand there and look in the sky for Japanese planes,” said student Naomi Smith. “They may not have seen anything, but they spent hours studying the shapes of the different planes so they would be able to identify them.”
Katie Zonoff, the BHS teacher who will accompany the students overseas, said the project will be divided into several parts.
The group will highlight the travails of the 227 islanders of Japanese descent who were the first among 120,000 internees nationwide to be forcibly sent to internment camps following the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But they also want to tell the stories of other residents who remember the war.
The goal, Zonoff said, is to let their findings dictate the final product.
“One of the cool things about it is that there is no preconceived system, where all the different groups just go through a series of exercises,” she said. “We’re still figuring some of this stuff out.”
This is the first such project for BHS history students. The idea was spawned last year by a discussion between Zonoff and a friend, who teaches in Bath.
They thought it would be interesting to ask students from different countries to explore the same historical question and then meet to discuss the results.
The idea gained momentum after Zonoff shared it with her students, many of whom were enthusiastic about the prospect of delving into the island’s history.
The group began with about 15 students, but has since been whittled to six girls – Brooke Shorett, Melanie Trygg, Meg Sonstroem and Kristie Smith, Ariel Smith and Naomi Smith, all unrelated.
The Bainbridge Island Historical Society has been helping with research, and the students have visited the Kiwanis Club of Bainbridge and the American Legion to find people to interview.
They’ve also begun communicating with the European students via a new website, and they took part in their first videoconference a few weeks ago, with a second scheduled for next week.
After Saturday’s fundraiser, they will intensify research efforts as the trip draws closer. In England they will spend a week in Bath and a week traveling around the rest of the country.
Wolf, meanwhile, will remain at home on Bainbridge, but is happy to know his story is traveling abroad with a group of able young historians.
“They’re nice kids,” he said. “I hope their project goes well for them. I know it will.”
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Scrabble battle
To raise funds for their trip to England, the World War II scholars will host a Scrabble Tournament today at 1 p.m. in the classrooms next to the lower gym at Bainbridge High School. Doors open at 12:30. Tournament entry fee is $15 at the door. Save $2 if you bring your own board. The winner will receive a gift certificate to a local restaurant. To share Bainbridge-related WWII experiences with the group, call Katie Zonoff at 780-6801.
