Sidebar Information (Alice Harder Sorensen, 3)

SIDEBAR: Central Union Church
“The Church in the Garden” as Central Union Church landscaped lawn was called, was an eight-acre botanical showplace where brides frequently posed for wedding photos. But during the war, the church’s yard was a crisscross of muddy trenches and a civil defense community bomb shelter. The area between Beretania Street and the main drive was plowed up and divided into forty community garden plots, twenty by forty feet in size.

Between 1942 and 1945, approximately 487 newly wed couples walked down the traditional white-carpeted aisle, out of the church and into the community vegetable gardens—taking a photo in front of the cabbage patch.


SIDEBAR: Captain Christian Sorensen citation
In 1945, while in the Marianas Islands, Captain Chris Sorensen risked his life to remove a trailer load of 500-pound bombs from beneath a blazing B-29 aircraft. Captain Sorensen commandeered a 30-ton bulldozer, but was forced away from it by a strafing Japanese fighter plane. When the fighter passed, he drove the bulldozer toward the B-29, and with other engineers, he attached a tow chain to the trailer and used the bulldozer to haul the load of bombs out of the fire zone. Then Sorensen, with other engineers, plowed bulldozers into the burning wings of the plane, knocking them off before the fire could reach the fuel tanks while other bulldozers scooped sand and gravel on the fire.

Women of World War II Hawaii