How a World War changed an Alabama Family, Part 6

by Glenn N. Holliman

A Holliman Joins the U.S. Navy....

Autumn 1941

Below, German infantry in the Soviet Union, 1941

By November 1941, the Soviet armies and cold weather finally slowed the mighty German army in front of Leningrad and Moscow. Casualties were monumental on both sides. By late autumn, Germany, which already occupied with Italy most of Europe, had driven deep into Russia.



In North Africa, the German and Italian Armies threatened the British protectorate of Egypt and the Suez Canal, the life line to the British Empire in Asia.

In the Pacific, a Japanese fleet of aircraft carriers prepared to sail as relations between the Emperor's military government and the Roosevelt administration neared a breaking point.  In late November, based on decoded radio intercepts, the War Department issued a 'war warning' to U.S. forces in the Pacific. For the United States, events were moving to a tragic climax.

Rather than take the Army draft, Bishop Holliman of Irondale, Alabama, a student at Birmingham-Southern College, decided to join the U.S. Navy. November 13, 1941, his parents, Ulyss and Pearl, brother Ralph and brother-in-law Robert Daly, Vena Hollman Daly and Mary Daly saw him climb aboard the Seaboard in Birmingham and take the train to Norfolk. Bishop's war began at the Naval Training Station in southeast Virginia.  Below, the young Bishop Holliman as a Navy trainee as the nation approached Pearl Harbor.

 

Brother-in-law, Robert W. Daly, Sr., ever the humorist, wrote in his first letter to Bishop, a devout Methodist, at boot camp on November 15, 1941, these words 'quoting' Ulyss S. Holliman, Bishop's father, who accompanied him to the train station.

For Bishop's sister, Virginia, who graduated with honors from Shades Cahaba High School the year before, her romance with fellow class mate, Walter Cornelius, was deepening.  Below Virginia's attractive photograph from her yearbook and the list of achievements.  These leadership positions foreshadowed the successful career she would have in the Alabama banking business from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

 

Above right, young Walter Cornelius, business manager of the Shades Cahaba High School annual in 1940, would serve in World War II and go on to a successful career as an attorney in Birmingham, Alabama.  He and Virginia, his high school sweet heart, would marry in February 1942.  The couple would have two children, Carol and Susan.  Their marriage was ill fated; it was one of two Holliman marriages created during World War II that would end in divorce decades later.

 

Next, with one son in the military, Pearl Harbor and war would blast their way into the lives of an Alabama family.....