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I thought I was going to retire from the brewery, but then they shut it down.” “It was kind of interesting and a little more important. “I missed it a lot when I went ,” Hernando said. He enjoyed the challenges that the many charts and precise measuring offered.
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There was a German brewing master who took a liking to me and showed me the whole business.”įrom fermentation to finishing, Hernando learned the entire brewing process. “I was one of the smartest ones when I got there,” Hernando said. He says he didn’t enjoy the work there, so he quit and got a job at the Harry Mitchell Brewery While there, he transported pants to and from the sewing room. I had eight sisters and there were 11 of us all together.”Įven after serving in the war, Hernando and his family couldn’t rely solely on the government paychecks he’d received, so he began working at Farah, an El Paso-based manufacturer of men’s pants. “I kept seven dollars and the other 23 would go to my mother to help the family. “We got paid 30 dollars a month,” Hernando said. While a member of the CCC, Hernando says he did various types of construction work, including building barbed-wire fences in New Mexico and constructing a holding facility for German U-boat captives. Hernando attended Bowie High School in El Paso for three years and at 17 dropped out to join the Civilian Conservation Corps in order to financially support his family. His experience in supporting his family at an early age translated easily into supporting his country when it called upon him. Though Hernando didn’t start out as a mechanic before the war, he was no stranger to hard work. You wanted to participate, you wanted to, but I didn’t expect anything.” “There was something else in the air during the second world war.
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When asked what he was told to expect in the Southern Pacific, he says he had few ideas of what it would be like. “We had to watch the water and the sky and report anything we saw to the bridge, even a can.”Īfter arriving in New Caledonia and unloading the Army troops the ship had been carrying, Hernando was assigned to an aircraft repair unit on an aircraft carrier. “The ship had four sections and the lookouts would watch one-fourth each,” Hernando said. While aboard, Hernando served as a lookout. His first post was on a troop ship headed for New Caledonia, an island just east of Australia. Hernando was trained as both a lookout and a fighter-plane mechanic. “We were from the barrio ,” Hernando said. Although he was drafted into the Army in the fall of 1943, he chose to enlist in the Navy with two friends from his neighborhood, Frank Acosta and Tino Morales.
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Hernando was born in 1923 in Cloudcroft, N.M., but was a resident of El Paso, Texas, when he entered the military. “Now we see everything right away, but then there were no pictures.” Hernando describes the mood of his unit, which was stationed on the island of Guam, about 100 miles north of Tinian. As the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian to drop the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Ernesto Hernando waited alongside his fellow servicemen to hear about the destruction.Īccording to the Navy’s online database of WWII casualties, the United States had been engaged in the two-front battle of World War II for more than four years, and had already lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the process.