World War I and II - tell me about your relatives

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

It’s a bit weird after reading all those tales of derring-do on the Allied side, but here goes - might add that I’m a Dane (although I live in California):

My paternal grandfather was German, but apprenticed as a goldsmith in Denmark, where he met my grandmother. They married and settled in Prague some time before WWII, which turned out to be a really bad plan. When Czechoslovakia was overrun by the nazis, being a German (or being married to one) was not a good thing. As the war turned sour for the nazis, my grandfather - then in his forties and a father of two - was drafted. Refusing was not really an option, but due to his mountaineering skills, he somehow managed to get himself assigned to an alpine regiment and was shipped off to Greece.

He promptly surrendered to the British first chance he got and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Italy. His only friend from WWII - Richard - was a British soldier. (They’d exchange Christmas cards and goodies - plumcakes etc. from from Richard, Weihnachtsstollen and the like from my grandfather’s family - until the gentlemen passed away.)

My grandmother was left in Prague with two young children and an unsure future. She managed to get travel permission to Denmark to show her parents their grandson (my father) - and she rescued some valuables at the same time. With the Russian army approaching, she struck out, kids in tow, to try to make it as far west as possible. She made it to British occupied territory, heaven knows how. Through one of those weird coincidences in war, she actually ran into my grandfather by accident. Luckily, they were allowed to settle in Denmark, where they lived for rest of their lives.

My maternal grandfather was a bit younger and was mortified that Denmark surrendered as easily as was the case. He managed to get involved in resistance work - he’d be part of a group that received clandestine weapons drops from British aircraft. They’d listen for coded messages in the BBC newscasts (listening to the BBC was in itself a criminal offense), then break curfew to go out to a remote clearing where - hopefully - a bomber would show up to drop containers of weapons and explosives. Then race against time to retrieve the containers, bury the parachutes (Pure silk - and in wartime!) and get the weapons to an arranged drop-off point where someone else (whose face or name you didn’t - couldn’t - know) would take over. Pretty dangerous stuff, not to say difficult. Gasoline was heavily rationed, trucks couldn’t just drive wherever without papers, and simple mistakes (like smelling of weapons grease) could give you away.

Neither of my grandfathers spoke of the war. My maternal grandfather was, however, proud fit to burst when I joined the armed forces, something he’d never had the option to do.

42

My great-grandparents left the Netherlands for the US in the late 1930’s. My great-grandfather came over first, got a job in a factory, and then managed to get my great-grandmother over in (if I am recalling correctly) 1939. At the time, the only English she knew was the name of her destination. My other set of paternal great-grandparents came over from the Netherlands at about the same time as well. I’m sure they must have had some interesting stories about what it was like there in the build-up to the war, hearing from relatives during it, and their feelings on the general subject, but they had all died or were unable to answer such questions by the time I was old enough to grasp that they might have something to say on the subject.

My grandfather was too old, and my father too young for the draft for Vietnam. I’m fairly certain no-one from my family went to Korea. We don’t know anyone past my grandparents on my mom’s side, and my grandpa was certainly not in the military.

43

An uncle by marriage of mine, a short, mild mannered little man, served in a tank unit in Europe. He was on the Normandy beach less than 48 hours after the invasion began. When the war ended I think he was in the Netherlands.

Another uncle by marriage died in Europe in the Battle of the Bulge. He’d been kept in the US because his wife was dying of Hodgkins disease. She died about two months after giving birth to my cousin. So, no sick wife, sent overseas and killed. My cousin was an orphan less than a year after birth.

44

my grandparents got to the states before ww1, both sets were too old to draft.

maternal side, grandpa was about 60 in 1919 as was starting on family 2 after family 1 passed away in the old country.

when ww2 happened my mum’s brother joined the army and was in europe. i don’t know what he did there or where he was. he wouldn’t say.

mum worked 3rd shift in a ball bearing factory and had quite a few pen pals that she would write to. she was seeing a fellow in the early '50s that was killed in korea. then met my dad in '57.

dad’s side was in nebraska and he and his 2 land locked brothers went into the navy on air craft carriers. all gunner’s mates, and in the pacific. one uncle became deaf when he did not wear ear protection by the guns. he got an early discharge. the other uncle left the navy after the war.

dad had huge amounts of cousins his age on his mum’s side, unfortunatly i don’t know what they did during ww2.

dad stayed in the navy through korea. and left about a year after marrying mum.

i have photos of my dad, his parents and brothers after the war. the 3 of them in their uniforms. that was the last time the 3 of them were together. dad was the oldest and would see the other 2. one lived in ne, the other in ma. as far as i know the younger 2 havn’t had any communication since those pictures. i always thought it odd.

45

I had an uncle (actually my father’s first cousin) who was a paratrooper at Normandy on D-Day (or actually a day before) but, in spite of repeated requests, wouldn’t talk about the war beyond a cursory answer. I never knew if he was scarred by it or just (like a lot of my father’s relatives) just not a particularly good storyteller.

46

My paternal grandparents were still small children in Ireland when WWI broke out, but Grandpa did serve in the Army during WWII as a supply clerk. His biggest claim to fame was somehow managing to boost a box of never fired Colt .45’s, none of which survive today except for one my uncle is reputed to have. It runs in the family. :slight_smile:

My maternal grandfather was stationed all over the place, including Alaska according to this picture I have of him after doing some salmon fishing. Sorry for the poor quality, it’s a cell phone pic of the pic that stays on my nightstand. My whole life we were told that he was a mechanic, but when my first brother joined the service he ID’d the stuff on his uniform that my grandma still had as being an EOD tech. I do know from patchy stories that he once had to shoot a child apparently in China during the closing days of the war, and the experiance left him prematurely dead of severe stomach ulcers and other assorted nervous disorders only 20 years after leaving the service.

He also managed to bring home a Peshawar Special model of a .38 Smith Police Special that’s currently in my dad’s possession. It’s a near perfect copy except that it has a Colt action (the cylinder rotates the wrong way for a Smith). He was so afraid to have a gun around his kids that it was completely dissasembled and hidden in parts around the house. It took my dad almost a week to find all of it, and that’s why he still has it despite my parents divorce.

47

My grandfather passed away 4 years ago. During WWII I believe he was stationed in Iran. Looking through his stuff after he died, he had this coin that he got off a dead German soldier (according to family lore). I can’t remember the exact phrase it had on it, but it depicted a nude woman with her hands behind her back, tied to a giant erect penis. On the back was a very racist image of a black soldier. According to my research, after WWI, when France occupied the Rhineland, they stationed colonial troops from their N. African colonies there. Apparently there was sentiment among the Germans that these black colonial soldiers were having their way with the German women. Considering the status of black people in those days, if the German men were powerless to stop their depredations, this would be a grave insult to their national pride. It seems these coins were issued to German soldiers before the invasion of France as a reminder of the humiliation they suffered.

ETA: I’m American, by the way.

48

Dad was the fourth kid of eight and the second son out of five. Except for the youngest one or two, they all signed up before the war to get food and clothes and to have money to send home.

Uncle Elmer, the oldest, was a Marine, was at Pearl Harbor and may have shot down a Zero (He was assigned to an AA bunker and was shooting at the plane when it went down.) I can’t remember which islands he fought on (Tinian? Guadacanal?), but I’m pretty sure that he was kept active for the duration.

Aunt Cleone’s first husband was a tanker and died in the Battle of the Bulge when someone dropped a grenade into the tank.

Dad missed the train when his Company shipped out from Texas. In his defense, he was a kid and his best friend had just been killed in the Bataan Death March. Word eventually came to the family that he wouldn’t go to jail if he met the train in San Diego. He ended up as a supply seargent, and I think that the only Japanese soldier he saw during the war was a guy who crawled a little too far out of the forest to get a better look when they were showing movies outdoors.*

Raymond and Donald were in the Army and Navy respectively. Dad learned how to fly, and somehow he managed to get permission use Cessnas (“Maytag Messerschmidts”) to visit his brothers on nearby islands.

Clifford wanted to prove that he was as tough as his big brothers, and at 17 he got his parents’ permission to join the Marines. I think that Iwo Jima was his first big battle, and he had barely turned eighteen. He eventually re-upped for Korea, was stationed in Japan during Vietnam and finally retired into some sort of a contractor/consultant job.
Speaking of memorabilia, Dad once told me that he got his two Samurai swords from a couple of Japanese officers who surrendered to him and a buddy while they were walking in the forest after VJ Day, but I was young at the time and was probably an easy mark. Mom still has the charm bracelets that Dad gave her that were made out of ID tags from Betty Bombers, and we had the police dispose of the Japanese hand grenade that we discovered under a pile of old car parts after he had died. It’s easy to forget that they were all kids at the time until you see all the junk that they collected as souveneirs.

49

My paternal grandfather was drafted by the Hungarian Army in WWII, quickly taken prison by the Russians and never seen again. My father was only ten.

My maternal grandfather was sent to various forced-labor camps by the Nazis. Meanwhile my maternal grandmother and her four children (including my mother) were sent to various concentration camps. Miraculously they met up with my grandfather at Bergen-Belsen just before the end of the war.

Ed

50

My father enlisted in the Coast Guard in WW II. He was shipped off to Alaska. He didn’t see any action, except for the drunks in the Coast Guard. Some of his stories include:

[ul]A captain so drunk that some enlisted guys had to drag him from a launch onto his ship. Somehow, the captain’s pants came off in the process.[/ul]

[ul]Three guys who ended up blind by drinking anti-freeze when they couldn’t get alcohol.[/ul]

[ul]Anti-semites raging in the same hut where my father lived (we’re Jewish).[/ul]

[ul]The captain asking if there were any musicians in the unit. After finding out who they were, he told them he needed them to move a piano.[/ul]

[ul]My favorite - my father decided to use some sort of machine to peel potatoes, instead of doing them by hand. They came out the size of marbles. After the CPO saw this, he was quick to take my father off peeling duty!
[/ul]

51

My dad asked for the Navy when conscripted because he didn’t want all that mud and blood stuff.

He got his wish but unfortunately was put in the Royal Marines(Which of course is navy).

I asked him as a young kid what war was like and he told me that he was in a landing craft with his mates and big guns were firing down on him when all of a sudden his boat was hit, he was in the water and all of his mates were dead.

My mum at first got a telegram from the War Office saying that he was missing believed K.I.A. and then another one saying that he’d been found badly wounded.
He was not expected to live.

He lost an eye and had shrapnel in his legs until the day he died,always had a limp.

He repeatedly suffered from nightmares and was a nasty piece of work,a violent nutcase.

I hated his guts.

52

Both my maternal uncles were in WWII.
Laurence was in the army, in the Pacific, and never talked about it. He was a tough old bird.

Dean was in the Navy, also in the Pacific. Once I got him to talk about it. He told me his ship, a destroyer escort, was sailing with another DE, and as he looked back at it, it was hit by something, and then was gone. Just gone. Fifty years later, he teared up when talking about it.

My father was just a tad too young to get drafted for WWII, but got tagged for Korea. He spent his time sleeping in a tent by the Yellow Sea and designing airfields. It gave him a lifelong dislike for camping.

53

My dad was in the South Saskatchewan Regiment. he wouldn’t talk about the war much, so all I know is that he was wounded in France and hospitalized in Belgium. My sister was named after one of his nurses, which makes me wonder if I have any Belgian half siblings! My mum was in the British Army, working in Codes and Cyphers at Bletchley Park. She never met them, but Ian Fleming and Alan Turing were also stationed there.

54

My paternal grandfather lied about his age to get into the military and later was among the infantry hitting the beach on Iwo Jima at age 18. After the war had ended, he was stationed in Tokyo.

He has told us very few stories (he is still alive, I need to talk to him more about it), but he did tell me a bit about living on a gigantic troop ship out in the Pacific. He described to me the fear that they all were living in that an attack by the Japanese could send them to a watery grave and there would be nothing he could do about it. Aside from that, he’s only talked about his time in Tokyo where he befriended a number of local families and tried to score them extra rations (especially candy for the children).

He has never talked about Iwo Jima to me but has mentioned it in passing to my mother. She said that he saw the original flag that was raised on Mt Suribachi and was one of the soldiers cheering it on. I believe she also found a blood-stained Japanese flag in the garage when she was a child, too.

He did say once, and it’s hard to picture him in this way, “You know…I never could get used to killing people.” :eek:

55

All of my grandparents and their generation are dead.

My grandfather on my mom’s side was a doctor in WWII, but was stationed in Alaska. He said there was nothing to do and they used to have the soldiers dig ditches and then fill them back in just to have something to keep them occupied. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he was a brilliant doctor and no doubt would have been very beneficial to have out where people were actually fighting. But on the other hand, he was safe and didn’t get killed/maimed/etc or see any horrors of war type of things. I don’t wish experiencing war on anyone.

My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a pilot in the military for WWI, but was still in training when the war ended, so he never deployed. He was working on inventing the blind rivet to help with airplane manufacturing when the depression hit and airplane manufacturing tanked financially, so he went back to doing work in the automotive industry. When WWII started, there was a big bottleneck in airplane manufacturing because attaching the wings to the fuselage and other stuff was very labor intensive–the problem the blind rivet was supposed to solve. So the military came to my great-grandfather and his blind rivet revolutionized the aerospace industry. (No, seriously, it did.)

56

My father, who turns 93 in January, went from Brooklyn to Georgia for basic training in 1944 and went to England and the Belgium in the fall. He was in an anti-aircraft battalion of the 10th Armored Division, where he was radio operator in a half track. Patton was his general for a while. One company of his battalion was in Bastogne, but not him. They wound up in Southern Germany / Austria where he was on occupation duty. Not bad duty - he ran a lunch counter before the war so he was in charge of an officer’s club. The best part of that was that he had some former SS types forced to work for him, a young Jewish guy. They were scheduled to go to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan, but never got anywhere close by VJ Day.

Soon after the war he helped organize a newsletter for the battalion, and they had reunions up until 1990 when they all had gotten too old. Most of them were very well attended. I remember helping him do the duplicating for Track Tracings when I was a kid. It was put together by a vet who was the editor of a maintenance trade rag. There was clearly a big connection between those who went through the war together. A lot of the battalion came from New York, which helped the cohesion.

My father-in law was having trouble getting a job since everyone assumed he would be drafted soon. He had terrible eyesight so we went to the doctor and got a letter saying he should under no circumstances be drafted. This was on about December 5, 1941. I’m pretty sure the result would have changed if he had waited a week for his exam.

57

My dad was a naval bomb disposal officer in WWII. He went ashore at Normandy about a week after D-Day clear out German booby traps behind the advance of the allied forces.

Since he was an officer he got to ride up with the pilot of the landing craft instead of down in the belly with the regular GIs. My dad was pretty young, so to make himself look mature he’d taken up smoking a pipe. He felt pretty jaunty standing up there with the pilot, surveying the beach and puffing away.

The landing craft reached the beach, dropped its door and everyone started wading ashore. My father’s landing craft was right next to another one, and there was a line of troops moving between them from a third LC that had stopped behind them.

A big wave came in, lifted the two LC’s off the sand and slammed them together, killing all the soldiers unlucky enough to be between them. My father was so stunned he opened his mouth and dropped his pipe in the ocean.

He said by that point so many men had died on that beach that another half dozen was just routine. It hardly slowed their disembarcation at all.

To this day the only French my father knows is how to ask for “a pipe for the mouth”. One of his buddies taught him so he could buy a new one when he found a tobacconist.

58

My dad joined the Marine Corps before WWII and was involved in practice landings on Johnston Island when the war started.(I think it was Johnston Island. I got that information from my mother after Dad’s death.) He fought with the 1st Marine Division all through the Pacific, was wounded on Guadalcanal but later returned to his unit. He was an Infantry Scout and probably killed more men than I have shaken hands with.

The problem with relating his war stories is that he was a war story artist. If he sensed that you had heard that particular war story before (by the glazed look in your eye), he would make up a different ending to that story just for you.

59

I don’t know a lot of information, but my dad was in the Army at the end of WWII, and also again during the Koren war.

I know that he was all over Europe during WWII, and was stationed in Germany at some point. He used to tell us about all the countries he had been in, but really never talked much about anything else. My mom did find some love notes from a couple of his German girlfiends once. He had held on to them for years, and was hiding from them and some pictures from her. I wouldn’t doubt it one bit if I have some half brothers or sisters over there knowing my dad! He married my mother in 1954 and had six kids. He was 10 years older than my mother.

My dad died 2 years ago, after having a botched heart surgery at a VA hospital. He would have been 84 a few weeks ago.
He had very damaged hearing and some shrapnel wounds in his hands that he recieved a tiny check for each month. I think that happened in Korea.

That is really all I know. He really never talked about Korea, so we all figured he saw some horrible stuff there, and probably killed a few people. We just knew not to ask.

60

My family history was a little unique for someone my age (I’m 41 now). Most of my friends had parents who were young enough to be in Viet Nam. I am the yougest child of a youngest child whose grandfather married late.

My paternal grandfather was too old for WWI. He would be 124 if it were possible for him to be alive (lived to be 93).

My maternal grandfather would have been on the edge of being young enough for WWII (somewhere in his late 30s). He helped build warships.

My father convinced his father to allow him to sign up for the Marines. He was in Boot Camp when the war ended. Since he was tall and thin (looked good in a dress uniform) he was sent to Washington D.C. instead of occupation/hold out cleanup duty in the Pacific. He once had his salute returned by Truman.

One uncle was in coastal artillery, never left New Jersey. One uncle was on convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic (no idea how much action he saw).

One of my uncles had a very interesting military career. He ran away from home at a young age and went to Canada. He joined the RCAF but never left Canada. When the US entered the war he deserted and went south to join the Navy. He piloted landing craft in the Pacific. After the war he left the Navy and joined the Army. He was stationed in Japan when the Korean War started. He was in some very heavy fighting. Went up and down in rank a lot. He retired from the Army when it looked like they would send him to Viet Nam. Two wars were enough for him.

When I was looking into the military my father told me he didn’t think my personality would fit in with the Marines. He was probably right.