What with Armistice just having passed, and having yesterday visited the Imperial War Museum (London), I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about what my relatives did during the wars. My better half commented that she wished she’d interrogated her grandparents before they died, which made me realise the stories are dying out. We’ve ALL got relatives/ancestors who were involved - I’ve got dozens - but do any stories stand out? I’d love to hear them.
The one that sticks out for me: My Great Uncle Harry is alive and kicking at the grand age of 94. He still drives a car, lives alone, and has an 80 year old girlfriend who he doesn’t want to live with because he likes his independance.
He joined the RAF at 16 from a working class family in Manchester (England). During the war he was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow, where he met Churchill and Stalin (he was a message runner between the two). He had to escape from Moscow as the Germans marched into Russia. He left the RAF as a Squadron Leader, even though in those days it was incredibly rare for a working class lad to make officer.
My maternal grandfather, who was a farmer and had 2 small daughters at home, got called up for the draft towards the end of the war, even though he’d been put on a list of “don’t draft these guys unless we’re in dire need.” He was on his way to Pittsburgh to be processed when it was announced that the war was over.
My dad tried to get into the Army but they wouldn’t take him due to his flat feet and profound hearing loss in both ears. He said he looked the recruiter straight in the eye and said, “The flat feet, I can understand. But you folks yell so darn loud I won’t have much of a problem hearing you!!” The recruiter almost hurt himself laughing, and ended up finding a couple of his buddies who recruited for the Navy and Marines to have Dad tell them what he’d said.
Paternal Grandparents rented parts of their house to first British (then US) officers who were stationed in northern Iceland. No fighting witnessed, but quite a few Navy ships seen.
Maternal Grandparents were to young. Don’t think their parents were involved in any way.
My paternal Grandfather joined the Navy in WW2. He was a supervisor at a local factory that was important to the defense industry and could have gotten a deferment, but he wanted to go.
IIRC he drove/flew to California, took a ship to Hawaii, and a big ship to the Philippines. He didn’t see any combat but was a MP in the Philippines, had plenty of trouble with both soldiers and the locals.
One grandfather was basically too old to enter WWI (33 at the time). The other grandfather almost certainly would have enlisted in WWII, had he lived, dying at age 27 in 1939.
One uncle enlisted in the Marines in WWII. He saw no combat, and at the end of the war was in Hawaii, where his group was informed that they would be involved in the invasion of Japan, which (I think) was scheduled for maybe November, 1945.
My father, his brother, enlisted in the Navy. Got some medical discharge early on because of bad knees or something. He always seemed to be jealous of my uncle, and I wonder if part of it might have been that my uncle was able to come back as a “war hero,” despite spending several cushy years in Hawaii.
Several uncles by marriage served in WWII or Korea, but they’ve all been dead for many years, so I have no idea what their experiences might have been like.
As the Russian army approached the camps, my grandma was involved in a forced march from the camp (I believe this was the Jan. 1945 death march to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, because the timing fits with the Jan 27 1945 liberation of the camp by the Russian Army, although it might have been one of those things were they randomly rounded up some people and shot them in the woods). My Grandma and her younger sister actually escaped the death march by sneaking away and hid in an abandoned barn. When the shelling stopped, she didn’t know who had won. Did I mention she was about 17 at this time? The two of them were the sole survivors of her 13 brothers and sisters.
My grandma had balls she carried around in a wheelbarrow. When her family lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she was a young teen she used to sneak out for supplies, and, I suspect, adventure - she could “pass” because she had red hair and very fair skin, which I have also. You could be shot on sight for leaving the ghetto.
My Papa (seen here with my Grandma, probably just after they were married Feb 14th, 1942 - the Valentine’s connection is only a coincidence, as that was when he could get leave) was a driver in the army for the Third Armored Division (Spearhead). For some reason, we never knew what exactly he had done to earn his Bronze Star. Anyways, my husband wheedled it out of him a few years before he passed away. He captured 2 Nazi officers at the Battle of the Bulge, where he was also injured by shrapnel, receiving the Purple Heart.
Family legend Uncle Earl (he was the Uncle of my maternal grandmother, pictured just before) was in the army during WWI but caught influenza and was never deployed. The legend has it that the reason he survived the influenza was because enlisted men were put outside, while the officers stayed indoors and perished. I don’t know how accurate that is.
My paternal grandfather was also at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a medic. That is about all I know about his doings. I keep meaning to get his records.
No generals in my family line, just some guys that did their duty.
Paternal grandfather was in the merchant marine and was sunk several times in WW1; paternal grandmother was a doctor and in WW1 had a hospital that treated soldiers. The two of them tried to extract Jews from Vienna before WW2.
My Polish Great-Grandfather had the luck to fall off his horse around the turn of the century, or he might have wound up a casualty of the Prussian Army in WW1 instead of recuperating and migrating to America.
My Grandfather, got drafted by the Air Corps in WW2 and had the luck to be 6’5" so spent the war repairing planes…and so I got to be born
My maternal grandfather was in the army in WWII, and spent most of his time on a small island in the Pacific manning flak guns. I wish I could remember the name of the island.
These stories are fascinating. Thank you all.
When WWII started my dad was 16 and living on a farm in Iowa. He ran away from home to join the Army. He was found out and grandpa had to go fetch him. My dad begged and pleaded to be a part of the war and grandpa relented, though he put his foot down and said, not the Army, but that he would sign the papers for dad to join the Navy. Dad saw some action in the south pacific (the most horrific was seeing a kamikaze pilot crash into a nearby ship), but during a drill he was climbing up some hand-over-hand stairs, slipped and broke his back. He was airlifted to Hawaii to recuperate, and was never sent back to his ship.
My mom joined the WACs (Women’s Army Corp) but was never deployed. They met at the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars association). Mom’s buried at the cemetery at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and when dad dies he’ll be buried in the same plot, on top of mom.
My father, (living in Monterey, CA at the time), volunteered for the Army after Pearl Harbor but was rejected either because he didn’t speak English well, or just because he was Italian. Accounts differ, but he did serve in the Merchant Marine and was on one of the first merchant ships to sail into Yokohama harbor after WW II.
My Uncle, (living in Monterey at the same time as my Dad) volunteered for the Army and was accepted. He fought in the famous battle over the Bridge at Remagen.
My paternal grandfather—for whom I am named—had a metal plate in his head “from fighting the Turks” either in WW I vs. the Ottoman-German Alliance…or in some bar. (He was a rather unpleasant fellow by all accounts.)
I still haven’t gotten over walking into his funeral when I was 13 years old and seeing ‘my name’ on the casket. :eek:
My dad joined the Army in '44 at age 36 and served in Guam as a supply sergeant. No big hero except to me. He’s buried in Golden Gate Cemetery in San Francisco, mom with him on top part of the grave.
My maternal grandfather lived in Germany at the start of the war and was drafted and sent to the army. After being stationed in what is now the Czech Republic for two years, his unit was told to prepare for the “Ostfront” (the eastern front, in battle against the Russians) in 1944. Knowing that few ever returned from the eastern front alive, he deserted and headed back to his hometown. Since deserters were shot on sight, he had to hide out among the pigs is a cousin’s barn for several weeks. When the American soldiers arrived in February of 1945, my grandfather was the only able-bodied male in the town, so he met them with a white flag, which was actually a curtain tied to a pole. He recalled from that meeting that Americans liked white bread. Forty-six years later, when my mother took us to Germany to meet her family, he bought a loaf of white bread just for us.
My paternal grandfather was a graduate student in math at Columbia University in 1942, when he was offered a position in a “very much top secret research facility” in New Mexico. He was stricken with pneumonia before he had a chance to respond, and spent most of the war in the hospital. He then joined the Air Force, but never saw combat.
Dad’s older brother had been rejected by the Draft Board; he had spots on his lungs and he was a rolling foreman at a steel mill. So when the Draft Board was going to reject Dad because he was too fat (see, it runs in the family), he convinced them it wouldn’t be a problem and after a chat with the psychologist, they drafted him. He trained at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and went through New Jersey when he was shipped out to England as an 18-year-old rifleman in the 69th Infantry Division. He was apparently shipped into the Battle of the Bulge as a replacement troop but rejoined the 69th in the drive to the Elbe.
I could fill pages with things he told me, but the main thing seemed to be that it was cold, they were scared, there were dead men everywhere, they were hungry, they were wet…they’d lean against each other as a human tripod to sleep so they wouldn’t have to lie in the snow…they’d sit on a frozen corpse to eat like you’d sit on a log at a picnic. He never got the feeling back in his feet after that winter. He could never get close enough to the ground when they were under fire and he hated towns because the shooting came from all directions. They went through Malmedy shortly after that happened. Dad was good at scavenging for food; his letters to my grandparents would talk of finding a ham hidden in a farmer’s corn crib and big jars of preserved ‘cheeries’…it’s a family joke that he always misspelled cherries in his letters home. He was a runner for his unit and said the scariest part was approaching his own lines without getting shot. Wierd, the happy man I knew was once a gaunt-looking teenager sneaking around alone in the middle of WWII. He saw a death camp and had to guard its survivors in a ‘displaced persons camp’. A lot of his friends got killed; Dad started smoking cigars when ‘the Senator’ (an elderly man - almost 40!) got killed and Dad got his cigars.
At some point, he was moved to the 29th Infantry Division, then to SHAEF. He was stationed in Paris for a while after the war ended, where he worked as a clerk and a truck driver. He also dated a couple of French sisters and drank a lot of whiskey and cognac. He told me never get drunk on cognac. I believe it was in 1946 that he was shipped back to the States, disembarking in New Jersey. There, he boarded a troop train, along with another corporal under the nominal command of some sergeant. As I recall, he was mustered out at Fort Sam Houston. He went to Houston, Texas, where his parents lived at the time and went to the University of Houston under the GI Bill. That’s where he met Mom (and no, that scar on his cheek was not a bayonet wound, that’s just some line he gave her). When he graduated, he found out nobody wanted him as an employee, because he was a Jew-boy. So he moved to St. Louis and ran a small business. When I was growing up, in the neighborhood I grew up in, he was just another veteran; everybody’s dad had been in the shooting war.
Most of the fighting done in WWI by my family was against the British Army, seeing as how they were all staunch Irish nationalists.
Apart from that all I know is that I had a great-grand aunt who was an Army nurse in WWI and a relative from Rhodesia who in WWII flew for the RAF and was killed when travelling in a transport plane that was shot down.
My father was a navigator on a B24 in WWII. He was based out of Fenton, Australia. Flew the second longest mission (1,000 miles) of the war and received both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star. He died 5 years ago and never talked much about his military service except to say “that’s what we did back then.” He never considered what he did special or noteworthy. He got out of the Army in late 1944 and went to work for his father laying brick. Wore his leather flying jacket to work. I have the original patch from his jacket.
