Please.
Not sure how creepy this is, but it’s from my dad: During WWII, he was serving in the Navy on a ship in the Pacific. One afternoon he and a friend were looking over the side and saw a something in the water floating by. “Hey, isn’t that a mine?” asked his friend. My dad looked. “Yup.” They watched it float away.
Uh, how sensitive were mines? If the ship had been, I don’t know, a few feet to starboard would it have blown up?
Maybe not creepy but in sense comical. 
I guess magnetic mines are designed to explode when ship goes near enough. I guess this one must have been touch triggered. They are probably not very sensitive.
The most amazing war story I know of is my dad.
My father was a tank commander in WW2. During the Battle of the Bulge, it was so foggy that the driver couldn’t see through the little vision slits. In such cases, SOP was that the hatch was opened and someone climbed up to where he sat with his head out of the hatch opening and his feet on the driver’s shoulders. He gave directions with foot pressure.
A German shell blew up on his tank. If it had been about six inches higher, I wouldn’t be typing this today. As it was, Dad had a huge scar on his face and his left ear was blown off. The plastic surgeon did such a good job that I didn’t know until age 15 or so that his ear was fake. He also had shrapnel left in his hands and every 4-5 years, one of the pieces would decide that it was time to go back to Germany and would start working its way out. He’d go in for minor surgery to have it extracted.
My father was in the Navy during WWII, and was at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was on the fleet flagship USS Eldorado.
He didn’t speak much about his experiences. As something that bothered him, though, he once mentioned his ship having to pass by sailors on another sinking vessel and leave them to die without trying to rescue them. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but that situation was no doubt common in battle.
There was this one time I was with Brian Williams, you know the NBC anchor…
Just A story, but a nice one.
One of my relatives was a young pilot in WWII. Plane lost somewhere in China. At some point his remains are found by villager who gives to local priest. MANY years later that priest gets bones to officials who get it to US officials.
Now this story made the big time news. At the time one of my relatives wondered if that was Bob. Of course, odds seem pretty damn low so it is forgotten.
A few years ago, a relative doing online research finds out it WAS Bob. And apparently the whole little mid western town threw a homecoming parade/funeral for Bob nearly 70 years after he went missing.
I don’t know about creepy or amazing, but I was a little surprised when my grandfather explained that on one mission, an 88 shell took out the ball turret hydraulics, oxygen and electrical connections on his B-17 somewhere over Germany… with him in the turret.
What surprised me was what concerned him the most at that point; not getting stuck in the turret, not enemy fire, not even his emergency oxygen running out. What concerned him the most was that with the electrical connections to the turret out, his heated suit wasn’t working, and he was afraid of freezing to death! Apparently despite the sheepskin jackets and pants, without the heated underwear, aircrews got really cold really fast at 35,000
Apparently the hand-crank worked, and he cranked it around and got out and went to the radio operator’s room and fired his gun for the rest of the mission.
My ex-husband’s grandfather was in France during WWI. Most of the stories he told were funny, but one was scary.
Okay, his unit had been marching since forever, and tired as hell the guys were told to scatter into the trees to sleep. He and his buddy were together. They woke finally to find they had missed the recall, and the unit currently marching by on the road was German, so they were now behind enemy lines. They managed to stay free in the woods and a day and a half later found their own guys. That had to have been nervewracking.
This didn’t happen to me or to anyone I ever knew. This happened to a local newspaper reporter I knew casually years ago.
Some elderly WW2 veteran sent the reporter a skull with the words ONE DEAD JAP written on it. The man had brought it home as a souvenir in 1945, but decades later, he’d become a devout Christian and was heartily ashamed of himself. He’d had years to reflect and to realize the Japanese soldier had probably been a young, naive farm boy much like himself. Anyway, he begged the reporter to find some way to lay the Japanese soldier’s skull to rest somewhere back in Japan.
With great difficulty, and after making many strange calls to assorted Japanese diplomats, it was done.
My Dad was in New Guinea, and the Army was under strict orders to not interfere with the headhunters (who hated “The Japs”) . There were even rumors of cannibalism.
A Japanese soldier ran out of the Jungle, speaking passable English, trying to surrender. Behind him came two headhunters. The other guy wanted to save the enemy soldier, Dad had to order him “No interference” and even stood up and made some sort of peace gesture. Thy headhunters dragged him into the jungle, pleading all the way, and Dad said the screams were horrible. However, note Dad had also witnessed several “Jap atrocities” (which he would never give any details of).
Short version of the story from my mom about her dad on Iwo Jima. He was a smaller guy so was given the big machine gun. He was the only survivor of his platoon. Twice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Writer’s_Society_of_America
My mom (Joyce Faulkner) literally tells people’s war stories for a living. Not sure how much I’m allowed to plug her wares here, which is why I linked to wiki and not her websites.
My grandfather’s ship was mined in WW1 off the coast of Africa. We have a letter of his somewhere describing the events.
However, the story I wish to tell relates to Gulf War 1. British pilots flew airstrikes, and initially had their radar set to measure height as Above Ground Level. Unfortunately the radar was so sensitive that it picked up all the ripples in the sand and made the flight very bumpy. So they set it to measure height Above Sea Level instead. This went well until the day one plane encountered a sand dune higher than expected. The plane flew over with not a lot of height to spare, but the poor camel sheltering the other side got the benefit of the afterburners being on full.
During WW2 my grandpa was in a trench in Sicily when Germans shot a mortar bomb. His arm got almost blown off and was hanging by some skin and ligaments. It was floppy enough that he had to hold on to it so it didn’t fall off.
He ended up with maggots in it which ate the gangrene and saved his life. Doctors were able to reattach it but they had to cut off the goopy bits, so his one arm was about 4 inches shorter than the other and never really worked properly after that.
A family friend who was an American pilot in the Vietnam war. He flew a single-engine prop scout plane (forget the type) on recon and scout missions.
The planes were pretty rugged, and he and fellow pilots would (dangerously) compete to clip off the tips of leaves/branches from the tree canopy with the fixed landing gear.
Much minor equipment and foliage damage ensued, no accidents though. He freely admits it was “head-in-asshole stupid”, but typical of crazy unauthorized stuff that everyone did without punishment.
I thin this one wins the thread.
Great stories! And yes I admit DrDeth’s one is quite creepy.
I once met an elderly customer at Blockbuster who says he arrived at Pearl Harbor on the Saratoga a few days after the Japanese attack. It was still smoking.
My Grandfather and our family priest were both at Normandy. They described a herd of pigs feasting after the battle. Apparently they can chew right through a human femur like it was a doughnut.
I am terrified of pigs.