Brooks family mentioned in new online article

Curtis Brooks, and his family, are mentioned and pictured in a recent CBS News article about VJ Day titled The day of U.S. victory in the Pacific is often forgotten. Survivors hope its lessons won’t be. The article, by Cindy Sui, begins:

Robert Rosendahl was just 19 — too young in those days to drink a beer or cast a vote — when he was sent to Pacific theater in World War II. There, in that deadliest of the war’s arenas, he would see things that no man, let alone a boy, should ever see.

He had just graduated from high school in a small town in Minnesota. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, so in 1941, he joined the army.

Soon after arriving in the Philippines, he was sent to the front during the Battle of Bataan. In that bloody struggle, American and Philippine forces tried to hold fast against the Japanese invasion of the Philippines — and failed.

More than 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the Pacific theater during the course of the war, compared with the 15 million to 20 million killed in Europe.

But remarkably, as the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Asia approaches, on Saturday, Aug. 15, few remembrance ceremonies are planned…

Curtis is quoted in this article. Follow this link to the entire article.