Inwood Chatter
In January of 1943 America, Inwood and much of the globe were transfixed by the horrific battles of World War II. That very month, as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sat down for their famous meeting, allied forces were finally able to force Japanese troops off of Guadalcanal. The news from this far off spit of land in the Pacific was certainly a moral booster, but so many lives had been lost. Nearly every family was affected by the war. They had lost loved ones, they had endured food rationing; it was as if the whole world had been turned upside down. But still, patriotism persisted. And when Inwood lost one of its native sons, Navy Lieutenant John James Powers, in a bombing raid over the Coral Sea the previous year, the students of P.S. 52 dedicated an issue of the school’s “Inwood Chatter” to Power’s heroic sacrifice. After all, Powers was an alumni. He had attended the school as a youth and later went on to George Washington High School after graduation.
Before the suicidal raid, Powers told his men, ”Remember the folks back home are counting on us. I am going to get a hit if I have to lay it on their flight deck.”
Lieutenant John James Powers
After posthumously awarding Powers the Medal of Honor, President Roosevelt, in a national radio address, delivered these stirring words: “He led [his squadron] down to the target from an altitude of 18,000 feet, through a wall of bursting anti-aircraft shells and swarms of enemy planes. He dived almost to the very deck of the enemy carrier, and did not release his bomb until he was sure of a direct hit. He was last seen attempting recovery from his dive at the extremely low altitude of two hundred feet, amid a terrific barrage of shell and bomb fragments, smoke, flame and debris from the stricken vessel. His own plane was destroyed by the explosion of his own bomb. But he had made good his promise to ‘lay it on the flight deck.”
After her son’s death, Power’s mother, who later christened the USS John J. Powers, came and spoke to the children of P.S. 52. Her talk, and the thought that he, like them, had wandered the halls of the school they knew so well, had a profound impact on the youngsters.
This is the story of the children of Inwood in time of war.
Scroll through the below gallery to see the entire January, 1943 edition of the “Inwood Chatter”.
