On HawkEye, Klinger and WW2/Korea/draft etc. One of the reasons the Korean “Police Action” was so unpopular was that to fight the war the US had to rebuild its Army and this meant recalling hundreds of thousands of WW2 veterans to active service. This was especially true in the first 12-18 months. These guys were often recalled to do less glamorous but necessary duties. Like reactivate support bases which had been closed for years and train new soldiers. Many also got a spell in Korea in addition. (I think the novel mentions some people).
Richard Winters, of Band of Brothers fame was one such person recalled. He spent several months in an ultimately successful effort to avoid being sent to Korea.
Always felt the writers could have explored this. Richard Hornberger would have been old enough to have served in WW2, actually prime draft age. No idea if he did.
Possibly, but Hawkeye is talking about the songs of WWII (as if they were the distant past), and mentions “I remember lying on the rug, listening to them sing that on the radio.” which really sounds like he was a little kid at the time.
And Hawkeye’s mother was either alive during the war, or died years earlier. Fortunately, Hawkeye did remember his bully of an older cousin and the kids he sledded with.
Getting back to the OP’s initial question, I found this MAS*H fan wiki which states Frank Burns was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana (though no indication of when).
While this isn’t necessarily the definitive word, it’s a pretty good indication that no other birthplace was ever mentioned. I also recall (though it’s been some time since I watched the show) that Burns was uber-patriotic, rather bigoted, and ignorant of other cultures. Not qualities you might associate with an immigrant.
And remember the fictional Captain Jonathan S. Tuttle, who got his medical degree from Berlinisches Polytechnikum, right after he graduated from Adolf Hitler High. How old would he have been when Hawkeye and Trapper introduced him to the 4077th?
Actually, yes. There’s a type of immigrant who wants to be “more Catholic than the Pope”. They’re very gung-ho, they’re more likely to rant against current immigrants than people who’ve had nationality for generations (the Idiot Boyfriend was ranting to immigrant-me against immigration one week after his own swearing-in); if they’re from a place which speaks a different language from the one where they’ve moved, they only teach their language to their children inadvertently (most immigrants never learn to swear or cook in the new language).
My dad was one of those guys. There was a regulation that if you didn’t serve a full 365 days in combat in WWII and were a member of the inactive reserve, you were subject to recall to fight in Korea. Charles Schulz mentioned he almost had to go back as well under this rule. My father served something like 10 months in the Navy before the war ended, and when Korea started, he got recalled. He didn’t want to go back on a ship in the Navy (which he had hated), so he ran downtown and enlisted in the Air Force before they could stick him back in the Navy. He owned a photography studio in 1950 and thought he could get a job as a staff photographer or journalist in the Air Force, instead they made him an aerial photographer and he had to fly over enemy-held territory to take surveillance photos and the planes he was in got shot down twice. He narrowly escaped being captured and held as a POW.
