Before the five Sullivan brothers died together on one ship, the Navy had a policy of not allowing siblings to serve together but didn’t really enforce it. It’s been much more strictly adhered to since then.
ETA: @Roderick_Femm – Your father’s service in the Merchant Marine was just as dangerous in its own way as if he’d been in the Navy!
@DoubleG – Wow. The 101st Airborne played a hugely important and hugely dangerous role in the invasion, and throughout the Eurpoean campaign.
My father was an aviation radioman in TBMs in the Atlantic on a jeep flattop hunter-killer task force. D-day it was somewhere in the Bay of Biscay looking for U-boats that might be headed towards Normandy.
I have since read that the Kriegsmarine tasked 49 U-boats to try and disrupt the invasion but because of heavy air and marine patrols, the first eight were not dispatched from Brest until dusk on the 6th. Even so they came under immediate attack with two returning to base too damaged to continue, and forays on subsequent dates fared little better.
By the other side of the planet, I meant the Pacific.
My uncle was navigating bombers in the Pacific theater, mostly over China. My dad was either in navy radio school in Mississippi or in a convalescent hospital after a bout with Scarlet Fever.
Yes, my uncles were in the Pacific
My father was Navy, served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Heading for Japan, when Hiroshima.
My father was in the pacific. Also, prepping for the invasion of Japan when Hiroshima
My grandfathers were too old and my father was too young for WWII.
I had an uncle (now deceased) who may have been part of D-Day. He was a paratrooper and I know he participated in Operation Market-Garden. Many of those same units had also participated in Overlord. But I don’t know when my uncle became a paratrooper so I don’t know for certain.
My father was too young. My grandfather was too old.
I did have a maternal uncle who died in Burma.
I don’t know of any relatives who fought in Europe in WWII.
Dad and his brother were in the Pacific; the former as fire control a destroyer escort then a troop ship ferrying Marines and the latter in some capacity on a carrier.
My father tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor. They found out how old he was, wiped his nose, and sent him home. He did get a WWII ribbon, but in 1945. (After the Army, he enlisted in the Navy and got his commission in 1956.) My grandfather was born in 1902, so at 42 he was too old for military service. My grandfather’s brother-in-law, Captain Chaplain Thomas Leroy Kirkpatrick, was killed on USS Arizona on December 7th 1941. (So since Capt. Kirkpatrick was my grandfather’s wife’s brother, I guess that makes him a great-uncle. This has been a source of confusion for me, until I looked it up just now.)
Dad served in the U.S. Navy in Korea (enlisted) and Vietnam (officer).
My maternal grandfather was a German Army radio operator, and by then he had already been captured in Russia by the Russians. They would eventually turn him over to the Poles to work in a coal mine, and he would return home in 1950.
My paternal grandfather is unknown to me.
To us, my maternal grandfather is just a name on Mom’s birth certificate.
That’s interesting, I wonder how common that sort of thing is.
My dad and his mom fled the Soviet occupation from Eastern Europe, just the two of them, and were in a Displaced Persons camp for a number of years. I think the one or two times I asked about my grandfather, she said he had been grabbed by the KGB…which even then sounded to me like so much horseshit, and given she was Catholic, I often wondered if she just abandoned him for some reason.
Both my Grandfathers were in the Navy in the Pacific. One was in a submarine and the other was some sort of mechanic or engineer. He would show up after the battle to build or fix things.
Both my grandfather and great uncle were in the 29th Division. My grandfather was an MP, my uncle was in the 81st mortar battalion. I know my uncle was there at D-Day, I think my grandfather was as well, but I think he came in a bit later that day.
My father was too young and my grandfathers were too old for the war, but I had a number of relatives. My dad’s uncle fought in the Army in Europe in the artillery, as did one of my elementary school teachers. Great uncles on my mother’s side wound up in the Pacific theater.
On D-Day my dad was in Florida doing underwater demolition training. After that they headed to the Pacific and participated in operations including a big one on Okinawa. In September 1945 they did reconnaissance of Nagasaki.
One grandfather arrived in Europe in late 1944. He was wounded in 1945, recovered, and served in Europe until late 45 or 1946.
Other grandfather was a farmer and considered essential.
Nope, my grandfather finished up his combat service about six months earlier when he completed his 25th mission as a B-17 gunner.
But he was on the Second Schweinfurt raid of October 14, 1943, otherwise known in the USAAF as “Black Thursday”, because it was the bloodiest bombing raid of the war.