Millions of men and women suddenly found their routine lives forever altered. Everett Bass, Alice Wygant and Charles Manley were part of that generation.

At the time, Bass was working at a dry cleaners in Oklahoma. Wygant was a surgical nurse in Wisconsin, and Manley was at San Francisco Junior College studying to be a pharmacist. After the attack, Wygant and Manley enlisted; Bass was drafted.

The next four years would be like none these residents of the senior living community at Atria Willow Glen would ever experience again.

Bass, who was 25 at the time, says, "If you have never been there you don't have any idea what it was like."

What it was like, says Manley, who kept a detailed chronology of his years in the Navy and then the Marines as a corpsman, was hell.

"In our battalion we had 5,000 men. Each time we went out to battle, we averaged a loss of 1,000 dead and 1,500 wounded," says Manley, who was attached to the 1st Corps Medical Battalion, Fleet Marine Force.

"Every time we returned from a battle we got the talk. What went wrong. What we would do the next time. How it would be better," he says. "Then the men would go to their tents and a rifle would go off. Two or three men would put a rifle to their chin and pull the trigger. They just couldn't go back out there again and fight another battle."

His experiences as a corpsman were such that he tells his stories of war as if they happened yesterday. The 84-year-old, who after the war became an X-ray technician, used those same skills to help save lives on the islands of Emerau, Guam, New Caledonia and Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

On one of those smaller islands, close to the equator, the hot, sticky weather was too much for one soldier who had been traipsing everywhere carrying a 10-pound pack of high explosives on his body.

Fed up with the weight, he took off the pack and threw it on the ground.

"We saw through the brush this big explosion and helmets go in the air," Manley says. "Pretty soon we heard, 'Corpsman, corpsman,' calling for us."

What the medical crew found were five guys on the ground. The doctors began administering first aid when one of the Marines came up to the chief petty officer with a boot in his hand and said, "Hey doc, what do I do with this?"

The doctor looked at the boot and then he realized inside the boot was a foot, Manley says. He looked down at all the men and they had all their feet.

They took a patrol out looking for the missing Marine and eventually found him. All his clothes had been blown off except for his belt because it had been buckled.

"That's how we found our missing Marine," Manley says.

There were other incidents equally telling.

In New Caledonia one soldier was hit by a shell that didn't explode. Instead it became lodged inside his body near the pelvic area.

"He was a human bomb," Manley says. "They brought him into the X-ray department to locate it. They had to operate to get the shell out."

The entire building was cleared because it could have exploded any time, Manley says. Doctors attached a metal shield around the operating table because no one was certain what would happen. The operation was a success, and the soldier lived to tell the tale.

Ravages of War

For the corpsmen stationed in the South Pacific the mental stress was exacerbated by the physical conditions they had to endure.

In Manley's battalion, men loss massive amounts of weight. Manley, who was in the South Pacific from 1943 through 1944, dropped to a frightening 97 pounds. He was struck with malaria and other topical illness. Part of the problem was nutritional deficiencies. The men had only dehydrated food. Occasionally the soldiers would go out in a paddleboat supplied by the locals and throw sticks of dynamite in the water to catch fish. Fresh water was also a luxury.

"We drank only what you could gulp down when it was available," Manley says. "You never carried any water."

Throughout his time in the service, Manley was able to do something quite remarkable. He kept a photographic journal of his experiences, first as a corpsman in the Navy, then as a corpsman in the Marines on loan from the Navy. He took countless pictures and developed the negatives with the X-ray solution he used out in the battlefield.

"I had understanding officers," he says. "They looked at the strips of negatives and saw there was nothing that would jeopardize our missions."

Miraculously those strips of negatives made it to his mother, Emma Manley, back in Alameda. She had the negatives developed into photographs that eventually were compiled into a scrapbook. This personal accounting now sits in his residence in Willow Glen. Manley keep meticulous records of his experiences. The first page of his journal looks like a frequent flier's log, listing the dates and locations of all the battles he was in and where he was stationed throughout the war.

Inside the well-worn pages there are photographs of men dying and men joking around. There is a picture of a very large fish caught from one of those sticks of dynamite. There are photographs of war buddies who made it back safely, and those who lost their lives. Newspaper clippings are included along with other mementos that round out the World War II scrapbook, including V-mail that the soldiers sent home. It is the history of war through the eyes of a medical technician who once considered the Navy as a career. It is a time he was proud to be part of.

Women step up

Like Manley, Alice Wygant also enlisted in the Navy and served on the medical side of the war. She followed in the footsteps of her mother, who was a World War I nurse. But Wygant says her mother had it a lot tougher because she administered aid to soldiers on the battlefield.

Wygant, 79, was stationed at a San Diego naval base in the orthopedic wards. Her job was not simple: on her ward, there was one nurse to every 70 wounded men.

Those who were very sick were placed in the "quiet rooms." The other soldiers helped take care of themselves, Wygant says. The nurses spent most of their time with the infirm.

Even now, one incident still stays with Wygant.

"I remember one man wasn't transferred to the quiet rooms," she says, "He was out on the ward. And the thing that most impressed me was going home at 11 p.m. and hearing him say, 'Good night nurse, see you in the morning.' But in the morning he was dead.

"That really got to me," she adds.

Not only was the ratio of patients to nurses skewed, but the working relationship between the doctors and nurses was out of the ordinary.

The doctor Wygant reported to was rarely on the floor. As an orthopedic surgeon he was primarily in the operating room. It was Wygant who signed for the blood transfusions and narcotics to ease the patients' pain.

"One time the doctor wanted something from the pharmacy, but I had been the one signing his prescriptions, so when he signed it himself the pharmacist sent it back saying it wasn't his signature," she says.

"The next day the doctor simply came to me and asked if I would please sign the prescription," she says. "We got the job done one way or another. That was all that mattered."

In the two years she was stationed at the San Diego hospital, it became especially difficult when a ship full of wounded arrived.

"We had to clear out the wards and put the men in the outlying buildings," she says. "That was a sad day."

It was also particularly trying when men arrived from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima with casts in terrible condition.

"We had to cut them off and re-dress the wounds," she says.

And there was the time when a large shipment of wounded arrived and the doctor, who Wygant describes as a "wonderful man" said, "Anyone who can crawl can go home. Sign everyone out."

He just wanted them to go home and see their families, before returning to the hospital for care, she says.

Wygant never made it overseas. While she was en route to the Pacific to work at a front-line hospital, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When she was discharged from the Navy in 1945, Wygant came to Northern California and enrolled at UC-Berkeley to study journalism. She continued working as nurse so she could put herself through school. Eventually she became a journalist full time, married a Navy man, Willis Wygant, and had two children.

During those years Wygant says, "Patriotism was great."

A different role

Everett Bass had a different assignment when he was drafted by the Army Air Corps in January 1943. He was one of only 102 soldiers plus eight officers attached to the 807th Chemical Warfare Company. His job was to trail behind the 3rd Army, or Gen. George Patton and his troops, with a stash of chemicals ready for a retaliatory attack should the Germans discharge mustard gas, phosgene, napalm or other deadly poisons on the Americans and the Allies.

Bass never considered his job unusual or threatening. In fact, he says, "I was in the Boy Scout outfit compared to Alice and Charles."

His "Boy Scout" outfit carried around 50 gallon drums of mustard gas that he says weighed 300 pounds. It also hauled 100-gallon tanks of napalm on military trucks. Added to that, the 807 had to transport all the necessary decontamination equipment, which included tents and hoses.

"Moving it was quite an ordeal," he says. "Fortunately we didn't have to use any of the stuff."

He acknowledges that what the army was transporting throughout Europe was extremely volatile.

"They would say to a guy, 'Would you like to test the mustard gas to see how bad it is?' They would take a pin and just stick the hand and within 30 seconds a huge blister would form," the 87-year-old Bass says. "Boy, that was bad stuff."

As protection, the men in the 807 were issued a pocket-size paper card labeled "Chemical Warfare Pocket Reference." The card listed a series of dangerous chemicals, what they smelled like, looked like, and the reactions they caused. One item, diphenylchorasine, was described as smelling like shoe polish, another like almonds.

Bass doesn't know how he became part of such a small unit, considering 16.1 million U.S. armed forces personnel served in the war. But he thinks it might have had to do with his background in the dry cleaning business in Elk City, Okla.

"In the old days we cleaned with kerosene and just took the flash out," says Bass, referring to the flammable portion of the kerosene. "You had to mix your own chemicals to remove spots like blood and rouge. Maybe they thought I knew a little something about chemicals."

Bass says he never felt that his unit was in danger, except during the Battle of the Bulge. They were behind Patton's army but the weather was so bad and the visibility so poor the Americans had no idea where the Germans were. The Americans worried they'd be attacked unexpectedly.

Bass' unit only lost two men during those years, a miniscule number considering 292,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in World War II.

He did have one significant family scare.

Bass and three of his brothers, Noah, Ray and John, were all fighting in the war. Bass and Ray were stationed in England together. Ray was an Air Force pilot. They were supposed to meet in London when a letter Bass had written to his brother was returned stamped "Missing in Action."

His brother had been shot down by the Germans but managed to belly land his plane in Sweden. Ray was able to get back to England through the underground. Bass' other brothers also survived the war. Back home in Elk City, the siblings became known as the Bass Boy Battalion.

Although Ray Bass was reassigned to the California Marine Corp base in Twentynine Palms as a flight instructor, Everett Bass would not return to the states until November 1945.

Before he could return home, there was the matter of chemicals.

The amount of chemicals the company transported grew in size as American and Allied forces captured the German depots, Bass says.

"We had to dispose of all that mustard gas," he says. "We had captured depot after depot. We dumped drums and drums into the English Channel. Some was dropped from ships, others were dropped from airplanes into the water. The English Channel is full of that stuff."

Then, after the job was complete, Bass and his company ended up stranded in Brussels, Belgium, for three months with only one set of fatigues and one pair of underwear apiece because the longshoremen were on strike in the United States.

When he finally boarded a Liberty ship, it became caught up in one of the worst storms at sea--so ferocious that another Liberty ship also heading home was torn apart. The men on that vessel were saved and many doubled up on Bass' ship. The meals were cut to two a day. Out of Boston, Bass's ship ran out of water.

Once he arrived back in the states, he took a troop train to Arkansas. He was finally getting closer to Oklahoma, but he missed the last train. He and his buddies decided to take the bus, but when they arrived at the bus station, they were told there was a bus strike.

"That was it," he says. "We took a cab 250 miles to Oklahoma City."

From there he hitchhiked home.

When he did get home, it had been three years since he had seen his wife, Gladys, or his daughter.

"When I first saw my daughter she was 3 months old. The next time I saw her she was 3 years old," he says.

Once home, Bass picked up right where he'd left off--working at Gowdy Cleaners in Elk City.

Sixty years have past since Bass, Wygant and Manley were honorably discharged from the armed forces. The memories are still strong and the experiences haven't faded.

The reason these veterans served their country without hesitation was simple, Bass says: "We felt like we had something to accomplish. We were there for a reason."