World War I and II - tell me about your relatives

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

My dad was drafted in 1943 and spent 2.5 years in the army stateside. He did training in Biloxi and Madison followed by teaching radio/electronics in Sioux Falls, South Dakota until the summer of '45. I believe he then went to gunnery school in preparation for the Pacific theater, but then Japan surrendered.

My maternal grandfather’s cousin was killed in his house by Allied bombings of Germany. I believe he lived near Hanau am Main. I’ve never met the German side of my family, but we still have some old letters from them. I was in the area a couple of years ago, but had no idea how to find any of them.

22

My father quit high school in January of his senior year (1942) to join the navy. He was involved in some action along the coast of Africa at first, then went to England to train for the Normandy invasion. He was a crew member on an LCI which delivered several loads of soldiers to Omaha Beach.

My father was proud of his participation in D-Day and kept in touch with quite a few fellow participants until he died a few years ago. He didn’t talk about it to me much. He told me once that he had stayed on the beach at Normandy for a few weeks after the battle. When I asked what he did during those weeks, he said “Played football and buried people.”

23

Grandad was a founded member of a battalion based out of Lewisham, a district of London. He was on the Somme in 1916. Dad was a trainee air navigator by VJ Day - he was in Canada cross-training to Liberators (I don’t think we tended to call them “B24s” in RAF service) when the big one got dropped on Hiroshima. Uncle, two years older than Dad, flew to Germany a number of times. The rest of my family, on one side or the other, were too young for whichever war was going on in their generation.

24

My greatuncle was an MP with the American army. Near the end of '44, because he knew the war was going to be over soon, he started to worry about getting home, because he knew that after the war was over, the MPs would be the last to get shipped home. He had heard that the infantry would be the first out, so he managed to get himself a transfer to the infantry.

About two weeks later, he was shot in the head and killed.

25

No direct ancestor of mine has ever fought in any war as far back as I know of, which isn’t that awfully far.

My uncle was in the battle of the bulge. A shell exploded near him and completely tore the arm off of his leather jacket, but didn’t scratch my uncle.

26

My paternal grandfather was an artillery grunt on a troop train to the front on 11/11/18.

27

My grandpa went and signed up in WWII even though he was the definition of exceptions - he had two kids, one of whom was an infant, bad joints, too old, etc, but as Grandma said, “Well, they were all waving the flag.” He was away for a few years but never left the country. When he left, my mother was physically ill for months and missed a year of school. When he came back, my aunt didn’t know him and ran back in the house screaming “That bad man threw me in the snow!” Some homecoming, eh? But thank God he went - I don’t know where we would have come up with what wasn’t covered by Medicare if it wasn’t for the VA.

My uncle Howard, who died two days before my grandpa two years ago, was at Pearl Harbor on a battleship the name of which I forget (but obviously not the Arizona.) A lot of people who met him later in life thought he was retarded, because his hands shook a lot and he was really shy, but he was actually very well read, especially on military history. He was absolutely obsessed with the attack on Pearl Harbor and had a crazy-extensive collection of books on the subject. He’d talk about it with my dad but not with us kids in the room - didn’t feel it was appropriate.

My dad was on a destroyer in Korea, and I can tell you a lot of stories about that because when your dad volunteers to be the secretary for his ship reunion, that means you’re now the secretary for a ship reunion. You didn’t ask about Korea, though.

28

My Irish grandfather served in WWI - he had a great tale of staggering for miles having been run through with a sabre. He showed me the scar on his stomach. I rerelated this story at his funeral wherein my aunt - his daughter laughed raucously - it was his appendix scar.

My dad was first an evacuee from London to Herefordshire during WWII. He then became a courier, riding around England on a motorbike delivering secret documents. Lost his way one day and when stopping to ask directions was told “you’re where you are”. All the road signs had been taken down in case of invasion & spies. At one of the POW camps he noted that the German prisoners were being allowed to parade - he reported this and it was stopped. He broke his arm coming off the bike and got a war pension for the injury, the arm was rebroken and fixed a couple of times. He learned to sew as rehabilitation. Years later it was giving him problems and the x-ray showed a piece of wire bend and twisted in a knot at the elbow. He then joined the RAF but the war finished before he got his wings. Years later I was playing a 12" version of “Vienna” by ??? He begged me to stop playing it since the introduction sounded like anti-aircraft guns.

His dad (my other grandfather) was one of Dad’s Army and the legend is that the Nazis were so terrified of this small gentleman vigourously waving his walking stick from the beach at Middleton-on-Sea, Sussex at the spy planes that they decided to cancel the invasion of England. Go Grandad!

29

I had several relatives who served. Most of my relatives on my mom’s mom’s (maternal grandmother’s) side served in the Pacific to avoid being mistaken for German spies and shot. They were from a Texas German community and spoke with English with heavy German accents, despite having lived in Texas all their lives. My mother’s uncle Fritzi was an NCO in the Seabees, and was assigned to make landing strips on islands. He bunked with Henry Fonda for a time, and his letters home to his mother occassionally included a nice postscript “from Henry.”

One day Fritzi was in the mess hall and saw across the hall his younger brother Bobby in the officer’s section. Bobby was an officer who I think was on board the USS Houston (the second one, not the one that sank). They hadn’t seen each other in almost four years, and Fritzi was so overjoyed that he let out a yell, ran across the mess hall, jumped the rope separating the officers section, and kicked him square in the ass. A collective gasp went up in the hall, and several onlookers began to subdue Fritzi from his apparent suicide attempt, until Bobby wheeled around and delightedly embraced his assailant. They were allowed to eat together.

Bobby and Fritzi’s brother Herman was assigned to the USS Shasta, an ammunition ship disconcertingly named after a volcano. Tours on board ammunition ships were supposed to be short (I’m trying to think like three to six months) due to the nerve-wracking nature of the work; ammunition ships had a notoriously bad habit of being volatile and explosive (Halifax explosion, WWI, USS Mount Hood). For one reason or another, he spent a year and a half on board.

My mom’s dad’s brother enlisted in the Seabees, but got booted on the colorblindness test and ended up in the Army. He ended up as a driver for the Red Ball Express, but would never talk about the war.

30

I would love to know more about my grandfather’s service in WW1. I know that he was in the 167th Alabama Infantry, bka The Rainbow Division (heh heh) and saw action in France, but I’m not sure when or where. I do know that by the Armistice he was out of the fighting due to fallen arches and a mild injury and was assigned to a carpentry unit building, among other things, coffins.

Stories he told me or to others who told me:

When I asked him “What was the biggest difference in Alabama and France?” he said “A lot more Germans shot at me in France than ever did in Alabama.”

Several of his buddies were people he had already been friends with/related to back home in Alabama. (He was from an enormous extended family- he was from a family of 15 kids and his parents and grandparents were from huge families as well so he had literally hundreds of cousins and knew a great many of them.) He had a friend who was also his cousin who was also his uncle* who was killed during the last days of the war. Mustang traded all kinds of things to get the message that the boy was dead home as fast as humanly possible and to “the right people” because he was terrfied of his aunt/step-grandmother learning about it when she was alone as the boy was her baby (of about 14 kids) and she worshipped him.

A lighter story, though one that still involves a dead relative: there was a tag along soldier who attached himself to my grandfather and his buddies and none of them could stand him. The guy had a brother who was also in the service and hadn’t heard from him in a while and was evidently obsessed with whether or not the brother was still alive. At first the other men were sympathetic until they learned it had only been a few weeks since he’d had contact with the brother and that there was no real reason to assume he was dead and neither brother coudl write beyond a few words so there was hardly any way for them to be in contact.
Anyway, whenever the guy would get drunk he would start crying: “I know my brother’s dead… I know it in my soul…” and “I just wish God would send me a sign that my brother’s living or that he’s dead” and would just generally make everyone miserable and be a total buzz kill. (Their lack of sympathy may sound mean, but remember that they were trying to lighten up a bit, and that most of them had relatives over there as well.)
One night my grandfather and his buds and the tag-along had were thoroughly piss-drunk, barely able to walk. The soldier started crying about his brother as usual, even worse this time. Somebody stepped in a huge dead frog in the road (that’s frog as in amphibian, not a French slur) and somehow my grandfather and another of the gang managed to convince the tagalong that the dead frog was his brother! “That man fell to his knees and got to squalling over that frog, picking it up in his hands which you think would have told him right there something wasn’t right, kept to squalling over ‘it’s Charley it’s Charley!’ til even we was damned near convinced it was his brother! He wouldn’t leave that damned dead frog! I will give him it was a big frog.” The man actually remained mourning his brother the frog when the rest left.

His most detailed story was about a whorehouse (not surprising- my grandfather loved the ladies all his life). I remember that the name of the town was “St.” something but that’s all I know, and it was a small town that had suffered terribly under the Germans and my grandfather’s unit was either in the group that liberated it or perhaps just happened to be the first to come along after the Germans left, but whatever the case they were hailed as heroes and the prostitutes of the town gave them a party with happy ending.
My grandfather was downstairs drinking and waiting his turn. He was a 25 year old bachelor at this time but not a virgin.
The prostitute sent for him when it was his turn, undressed him, and began bathing him with a basin and water. He thought that made sense- vd and soldiers are dirty and all that- and didn’t think anything of her being on her knees, until she began performing fellatio
Hard to believe there was a time when this was alien, but it was. He was horrified by it and ran out of the room wearing nothing but his dog tags. He thought the woman was crazy or was going to bite it, but he wanted out. He ran into a [higher ranking person- may have been a corporal, may have been a general, story varied] who chewed him out over being naked and disorderly and when he started babbling about what the prostitute had done the [higher ranking person] could barely walk or move from laughing so hard, making a comment about him being one green hick or whatever and walking him back to the whorehouse and explaining the concept of the “procedure”.
Of course on DEADWOOD and other shows this was apparently a not unknown thing in whorehouses even in middle-of-nowhere America, but my grandfather grew up on a farm and most of his experience was with farmgirls. And when you remember the hygiene norms of the time, it’s more understandable why “decent girls” would rather risk pregnancy than go down there.

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My father’s story about WW2 that I heard three million times: “I enlisted to fight against Japan in July 1945. Went through basic in California. I completed it and got on the ship, and on my way over… Japan surrendered. I’m not saying there’s a definite connection, but I was known as one mean as hell son-of-a-bitch around Coosa County Alabama in those days, and word does travel.”
The only “action” he mentioned seeing was one of the GILLIGAN’S ISLAND variety. There really were islands with Japanese soldiers who didn’t know the war was over, most especially in 1945-1946, and they encountered a zero from one of these islands [which they shot down] and some form of attack from Japanese in a boat (I honestly don’t know if it was a rowboat or a rogue cruiser or what), but there were no battle related casualties. I know his ship took some of the Americans held in Japanese P.O.W. camps home and that he hated the Japanese for the rest of his life because of seeing these guys.
He also wouldn’t eat Chinese or any other Asian food because “I saw the rice patties… their fertlized with human sh!t.” He also only left the ship for R&R one time in Asia, when he ended up singing the Georgia Fight Song with other teenaged southern football fans in a bar in Shang Hai (I believe, may have been elsewhere).

That’s about it. I ironically know a lot more about the experiences of my Civil War ancestors than I do about those of the two men above who I knew.

A year or two ago when I was on a major genealogy kick I wrote to the National Archives and the V.A. for my father and my grandfather’s military records, hoping I could research their units. (I’ve no idea of my father’s unit; I know he was Navy and served on a destroyer, the U.S.S. TAUSSIG, at some point, but I don’t know if he was on it for the entire time he was in service or not, because I know he also had an office job in Japan for a brief time and was hospitalized for an appendectomy.) Unfortunately they wrote back that my grandfather’s records were among the millions of WWI records destroyed in the 1973 Archives fire and my father’s was among the few thousand navy records destroyed in the same fire. Perhaps as well: I’d probably have found out my grandfather was reprimanded for takign the toes of Germans as trophies and that my father was the inspiration for Corporal Klinger on MASH, but still a loss.
*My grandfather’s paternal aunt was the second wife of his maternal grandfather, thus her children were his paternal first cousins and his maternal [half] uncles/aunts.

31

My maternal grandfather was a pilot with the RAF in WWII. Technincally, RCAF, but the Canadians had far more pilots than they did planes. He said they called him “the Colonial”. He was training someone to fly a “motorless aircraft” over England and they crashed. The other fellow was killed - and they left him for dead as well - triage and all that. Somebody wandered by a few hours later and he asked them for an asprin and they hauled him in to the hospital. The way he told it “they handed me a handful of sulfa drugs and waited for me to die. Guess they gave me too many, cause I didn’t” The picture of him shortly afterwards with his head all wired together gave me nightmares for years.

My paternal grandfather was with the Royal Engineers, also in England. I only recently discovered he spent his time water-proofing tanks. How cool is that?

32

My Great Grandfather fought for Russia during WWII. He died defending Brest Fortress. That was the first attack by Germany against Russia.

His wife, my Great Grandmother, is still alive. A sprightly 90 year old. Germans got to her village in Belarus and told the people to leave. Great Grandma left with her two daughters. The people that stayed were all gathered up in a barn and burned alive.

The Nazi’s did this to a lot of Belarussian villages. There was even a movie made about it called Come and See.

My paternal Grandfather was supposedly a rebel fighter in Belarus. He fought for no army, just him and a bunch of guys in the woods trying to survive and kill Nazis. That’s at least what I was told. He was shot and carried a bullet in his leg for 55 years. By the time American doctors got to it, it was too late. He died shortly after from bullet injury.

The other grandparents were too young to fight and had to hide out during the war.

33

One of my cousins recently sent me a photograph of my Grandfather and his three brothers all in their WW1 army uniforms. All four of them survived the war, but one of the brothers (together with his wife) was killed in the massive air-raid on Coventry in 1940. The anniversary of which is tomorrow (November 14).

34

Here’s my dad

He and mom split when I was about three and I only saw him twice after that, and we never talked about the war. He stayed in the military until 1960, so he must have liked it.

When he died two years ago in California, his friend sent me all his personal papers, which consisted of seven divorce decrees and his military records. From those, I learned that he enlisted in June 1942. (Mom always told me he was drafted.) He trained at Childress in Texas as a bombardier and radio operator. He had some awards – two Oak Leaf Clusters, an Air Medal, two Bronze Stars and some ribbons.

He was shot down on 11/6/44 and interned at POW Camp Stalag-Luft 3, Bavaria, Germany and liberated on 5/1/45. He was there when I was born.

The only thing I can remember mom saying about his POW experience was that he said he was treated well by the Germans. Oh, and he came home saying “The next war will be with the Russians.”

35

My Uncle Don spent the war in Panama. He was a motorcycle messenger, helping defend the Pacific coast from the Germans or the Atlantic from the Japanese. I later went to Panama and fell in love there.

My Uncle Jack was wounded in the Aleutians. He lost his feet and had shrapnel in his chest. Diesel fumes always reminded him of the war. Once at Thanksgiving dinner, I saw a spot of blood appear on his stiff white shirt. My eye must have gotten big, because Aunt Julian took Jack out of the room and removed the little bit of metal that had migrated to the surface.

Dad was a firefighter in the Navy on a little island in Virginia. (Whallop Island?) He burned his hands trying to pull a kid out of a crashed plane. He was too late.

Mom was a Marine, worked at Eighth and Eye. Later she went to work for the FBI.

36

Both of my grandfathers were steelworkers (maternal side, blue-collar; paternal side, electrical engineer). Steel being an essential wartime industry, both were exempt from service.

Hey, someone’s got to hold down the home front.

37

My grandfather signed up for the Navy for WWII. He trained in Fort Pierce, FL and became part of the NCDU/UDTs (navy frogmen).

On D-day he and his unit hit the Omaha Beach right before the main invasion. Their job was to use underwater explosives to blow up the obstacles on the beach so the landing crafts could get closer. The History Channel has a program “Suicide Missions Of D-Day” which they air each year that details their teams. One of his unit members speaks about the invasion, and my grandfather can be seen both in pictures shown and a grainy training video.

He was on the Pacific going toward Japan when the war ended. They landed and he was in Tokyo, but the war was over so he didn’t see any action in the Pacific.

He suffers now from dementia, but he can still tell you everything about those days. It’s recent events that escape him.

This is an interesting thread, thanks for posting it.

38

Same with my paternal grandfather. He worked for Ford and they were making tank engines at the time.

My maternal grandfather was a farmer and didn’t serve, I’m not sure why. His oldest son did, although I don’t know where.

My father was too young for WWII and in school for Korea.

39

My dad’s grandfather was an artilleryman in the Great War. He joined the US Army in 1915, was assigned to a Coastal Artillery unit. When the US entered the fighting in 1917, his battalion was shipped to France where they saw heavy fighting. I never got to meet him and only recently learned about his military service in any detail.

My mom’s dad served aboard the USS Dashielle, a destroyer, during WW2. He was a torpedoman and his battlestation was on deck. During an engagement with the Japanese, a kamikaze pilot crashed into the sea beside the ship and exploded, raining debris across the deck. Grandpa saved a piece of that Japanese fighter and told me the story when I asked about the “weird piece of metal” he had on a shelf.

Both my grandmothers were “Rosie the Riveter.” One worked in a bomb factory - she assembled bomb casings.

40

I’ve mentioned before the story of my father’s cousin Pete, but here seems a good time to mention it again. Pete was born with achondroplasia, a genetic condition that causes dwarfism. (Pete’s sister also had it but she died in infancy; Pete’s daughter and one of his grandchildren also inherited it, though Pete’s brothers, sisters, son and other grandchildren were born normal.) Pete got into trouble for not registering for the draft in WW2 until a person from the draft board drove to the farm and admitted “okey doke… we’ll let it pass”.

Pete claimed to be 22 inches tall or some such, but that wasn’t true; he was actually well over 2 feet tall if “stood” but he didn’t count his legs, for two reasons: the first being he could never walk without crutches (and couldn’t walk at all by the time I knew him), and more importantly he made his living later on in the sideshows where little people were a dime a dozen (almost literally) but if you could claim to be the Smallest Man in the World/State or Smalles WW2 Veteran it made a much better hook (and you couldn’t do that if you were 30 inches tall or whever).

Anyway, Pete worked on his family’s tractors and cars from the time he was a boy. He would take apart and reassemble carburetors, slide under the car to work on the undercarriage, and could even be set into the engine to work on belts and the like. He was, per family story, sitting under the porch working on a tractor part when the person from the draft board came.

A few months later the draft board person came back and Pete’s dad basically said “aw’ight, it was kinda funny the first time, but now you’re just pesterin’ us”, but instead the guy said “No, really… the Government would like to use Pete for the war effort if he’s willing.” They were serious and Pete was very interested.
He was sent to ordnance training and was one of many Little People to do so.

Here’s the reason: in peacetime, an airplane with mechanical problems will be dismantled and the problem fixed, but in WW2 when there were far more aircraft than ever before and it was absolutely essential to fix them as quickly as efficiently possible, LPs could be “inserted” into the engines to tighten bolts or replace minor parts, or for that matter into factory machinery or ships that needed such work done. Pete always recalled this period as probably the happiest of his life.

After the war time was no longer an issue for repairs and maintenance so the LP division was disbanded and sent to their respective homes. (I’ve no idea what this unit or program was called- I know they were technically civilians, and I’ve found several references to their existence, but evidently the definitive history has not been written.) Pete came back to Alabama, which was boring after seeing the country and seeing England and being “normal” by making his own money and having a regular job, so he did what his family had kept him from doing and joined the sideshow.

Well, that also got boring, plus even with lying about his size he wasn’t a superstar or highly paid draw (one reason being that people were expecting to see a gnome or at very least a perfectly proportioned LP like Verne Troyer instead of an oddly shaped arthritic little man with a huge head and hands and tiny body and increasingly useless legs, but it did pay better than most anything else he could do. He noticed that the real money makers were the rides, and they constantly needed maintenance, and with the money he saved he bought one and then another one and finally owned several, all of them bought cheap because they needed repairs. He and his brothers repaired them, performed regular maintenance on them, and then re-sold them or leased them to carnivals and fairs. He also bought some of the vending/restaurant vehicles as well- he wasn’t a rich man but he was comfortable.
He married a carnival worker, pretty much retired to manage his rides and do occasional mechanic work, but he began touring again to earn more money when his daughter was born with his condition. It’s still not curable or reversible (it’s genetic and congenital) but it is a lot more treatable (his daughter can walk, for example).
Anyway, I put out the appeal again here as I have other places: if anybody knows anything about the role of Little People in WW2 ordnance, please let me know. I’ve wanted to research these peopel but I haven’t found a lot by way of primary sources (and not a whole lot by way of secondary).