Page 31 - Desert Oracle June 2020

Acres where he’s lived since 1952 and raised his family.
RECENT TWEETS

Ask him the secret to his long life and a sill very active Tweets by @starsandstripes
Hanna will joke, “It sure wasn’t clean living. I was the

rebel of the family. I sure raised hell growing up.” More

serious, though, Hanna quickly adds that his father lived
to 99, so he believes longevity is in his genes.

Hanna graduated from Cathedral High School in the
spring of 1941, months before the Japanese attack on

Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that propelled the US into
World War II. After graduation, he had followed in his

father’s footseps onto the factory foor at Smith &

Wesson, but, like other young men of his generation,
Pearl Harbor changed the course of his life.

Hanna, followed later by his younger brothers, enlised in

the Navy and headed of to boot camp in Newport, Rhode
Island, in early 1942 and later to 16 weeks’ school for

gunner mates before being assigned to the
Massachusetts-built LST 308. A shakedown cruise for the

brand-new ship preceded its crossing the Atlantic in a

convoy with a load of tanks aboard, bound for North
Africa where the Allies were battling to wres control from

Nazi Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

The 308 landed frs at the port of Arzew in Algeria and

then went on to Tunis in Tunisia after its capture by the

Allies. It was in Tunis that LST 308 became part of the
Allied forces which prepared for an assault on Sicily

where the Nazis had retreated from Africa.

It was of the shores of Sicily that Hanna says he

remembers being frs sruck by fear as an amphibious

force of some 3,000 ships brought troops, tanks, trucks
and war materials across the Mediterranean to the island