I’ll start with a brief bio of one of my more memorable relatives, my “Uncle Freddy”. (Since he has kids, grandkids and lots of other relatives around I’ll change a few details [such as his name] but all the rest is true.)
Uncle Freddy measured about two feet if you didn’t count his legs. The reason you wouldn’t count his legs is because they weren’t functional, barely growing after early childhood and never capable of supporting his weight; the reason he didn’t count his legs was because he was able to lop several inches off his height when billing himself as “the shortest man in America” (which legs or no legs counted he still wasn’t anymore than he was the only sideshow attraction who made that claim, but “among the shortest men in America” just wouldn’t have the same drawing power.) He suffered from an hereditary dwarfism disorder that in his huge family (about 13 children) affected him as well as a sister who died in early childhood.
Anyway, he received no pity or special treatment by his family (I mean that in a good way) and was a mechanic on his father’s equipment. (His father owned a small logging company in the hills of north Georgia.) Draft age in WW2, he was called to service and when he didn’t report a draft board agent came to the family’s very rural home to take him in; at the time Freddy was sitting under the kitchen steps working on a disassembled truck part and his father pointed him out to the draft rep with a “Thar he sets… hey Boy! Looks like you gone need to grow them legs out and git to marchin’!” Not exactly having a form for teenaged dwarves, the rep asked permission to take him back to HQ where several workers appreciated the break in the monotony, took the opportunity to “get our pictures took with a midget”, marked him “unfit for military service” and sent him home.
Somehow the word got out that there was a 2 foot tall man in the Georgia hills who could work on engines and the family received a letter from a privately owned armaments plant wanting to know if Uncle Freddy wanted a job working on airplane engine parts. Since speed was of the essence in filling contracts and fighting the real Axis of Evil, he was a valuable resource: he could climb into engines to tighten or adjust loose parts that otherwise would have to have been removed.
From here the stories get hazy as, I’m forced to admit, my family is a bit prone towards embellishment. (I knew “Uncle Freddy” when I was a kid though not well and at the time I was a kid and not much interested in WW2 so I didn’t ask him firsthand.) According to one elderly aunt, Uncle Freddy was actually taken into the Army Signal Corps, received ordnance training and was sent to England to work directly for the Army Air units doing maintenance and quick repairs on plane engines to get them back in service as soon as possible. I do know that the part about the plane factory is true, but I’ve no idea if the part about actually serving in the armed forces is so.
Afterwards for Uncle Freddy: He wanted to remain an industrial mechanic but with the end of the war came a major downsizing of defense industry personnel, a decrease in the need for speed of assembly and a return to “dwarves are freaky” type thinking, so he lost his job. He returned home, occasionally exhibited himself in carnivals with the pragmatic attitude “the money’s a helluva lot better than farming and people are gonna stare anyway, they might as well pay for the privilege”, became fairly well to do by the standards of his rural community through the sideshow money, rental property and other business interests (among other things he co-owned his sister’s barbecue place and often came in to boost business/profits) and was very active in his church. He married a normal sized woman, had several kids (two of whom had his condition, though not as severely as he did) and died in his early fifties (due most likely to complications from being a heavy smoker with a tiny body).
Sorry for the long intro, but… for some reason I’ve been thinking of Uncle Freddy lately. I know that his wife is now dead as well and I never knew his kids well enough to call them on the phone and say “how’ve ya been?” and I haven’t seen them in 20 years and have no idea where they’ve gotten to. I’ve been wondering if the story of his Army Signal Corps training is true and, if so, if any other “little people*” were employed by the armed forces or in the defense industry due to their special skills during WW2. Does anybody happen to know of any literature or, for that matter, any other true stories of special people employed in the war effort?
I’ve done some simple to medium searches for literature and haven’t found very much at all. However, given that the war provided the first decent paying highly skilled jobs that many women, black people and others ever had and that even small dogs and dolphins were being trained for the war effort, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if other “Little People” weren’t also specifically recruited for some positions where normal intelligence and dexterity combined with small size or low weight was an advantage. If I can find some information I think it would make a very interesting article for a historical journal. Any info appreciated.
*I dislike the term “Little People” as, if only to me, it sounds far more condescending than either “dwarf”, “midget” or even just “extremely short”. However, my understanding is it is the PC term of choice, so I hope it’s not offensive to anybody reading this.