My grandad served in The Manchester Pals regiment in WW1 and lost his leg at the Battle of the Somme. He hated the Germans with a vengeance until the day he died.
My dad served in the Desert Rats in WW2 and apart from a couple of minor injuries returned home unscathed to divorce my mum who’d had a kiddie by an American GI. 
I have medals and other stuff that both grandad and my dad brought back to England
My maternal grandfather was too young to fight in the Winter War, but my paternal grandfather fought there. Both my grandfathers fought in the Continuation War; one drove a tank and the other…never talked about it, really, but he went through life with most of a hand grenade in small bits lodged all over his body and suffered from nightmares from which he would wake up screaming.
My paternal grandmother was a member of Lotta Svärd, a voluntary women’s organization which worked on and behind the lines to free men up for soldiering; she was in air control, scouting for Russian bombers, and worked in an animal hospital treating injured horses (horses were still very commonly used during WWII in Finland for transportation in hard-to-reach areas). She’s in the bottom picture onthis page: the girl sitting in the bottom row with another girl’s hands over her shoulders.
My dad was a canadian who ran away from “home” (his parents had died, probably in 1918 of he flu) when he was around ten (his 100th birthday would be coming up soon, if he were still alive). By the time WWII came around, he was in his mid-thirties and an American citizen (though I’ve never been able to turn up a SS # for him) and he joined the Army, served in France (he told me stories, which I’ve told before on the SD, about his infantry unit marching through France, probably in late 1944) and then served as an MP in Okinawa, possibly after the war had ended. He hated to talk about the war, had a load of service medals in his nighttable, but would drop hints now and again, which I wasn’t interested in hearing much of, until he died when I was a teenager, and now I wish I had asked him a lot of questions and pressed him for answers.
I am 43 and have the same sort of family history. All of my grandparents were long dead, when I was born in 1965. My mothers father was born in 1875 and his wife, my Grandma, was born in 1891. My Paternal grandparents weren’t much younger. That is why my own father was old enough for WWII.
I’ve told their stories before, but in brief:
My paternal grandfather was a fighter pilot. He flew a Hawker Tempest Mk. V. Attacking a German train, he was shot down and crash-landed his plane because he was too low to bail out. He joined up with the Dutch Resistance and served with them until just before the end of the war, when he was captured by the SS and sentenced to death as a spy. (A fair sentence; he was an Allied solider pretending to be a civilian.) Before they got around to hanging him, elements of the British 49th division (which at that point were actually attached to the 1st Canadian Army), showed up, and suggested under flag of truce that maybe if the Germans gave him back they wouldn’t all get killed. They agreed and my grandfather was allowed to go.
My maternal grandfather was a pilot and bombardier with the 427th Bomber Squadron, based in Leeming, and flew 35 combat missions over occupied Europe. He bombed Kiel, Hamburg, Mainz, and other places. He and his crew had their plane shot up a little but not one of them was ever so much as scratched, an amazing stroke of luck in a service where the casualty rate as astronomical. However, any other crew who ever flew a plane they had previously flown in was lost, hence their nickname “The Jinx Crew.” When he died in 2005, the other six guys in his crew were all still alive. 427 was a tremendously decorated bomber squadron, feted by MGM movie stars and presented with a lion cub mascot by Winston Churchill himself.
Here they are, my grandfather in the back left;
http://www.rcaf.com/6group/427crewpics/pages/427SQDNcrew44.htm
My paternal grandfather was a steelworker in Lorain, Ohio (30 or so miles west of Cleveland) during WW2. The only action he saw was when the neighborhood air raid warden appeared on his doorstep and insisted that the my grandparent’s house needed to have blackout curtains installed. My grandpa refused, saying that he figured that any German bombers would be able to see the steel factories from 50 miles away, what with the glow given off by all the fire and exhaust from the steel factories’ blast furnaces, so what difference could it possibly make if his house’s windows were covered or not. He never heard from that air raid warden again.
My paternal grandfather was an engineer in WW1. He died before I was born. My dad said he never talked about the war.
My maternal grandfather was a telegrapher in WW1. He died when I was young, so I never heard much about his service.
My father served in WW2. One of his proudest possessions was a copy of the Los Angeles Times the day after Pearl Harbor. On the front page was a photo of men standing in line in front of the army recruiting station. You can see my father very clearly.
Dad flew B-24s in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed in India, and flew missions over Burma, Siam, and the Malay Peninsula. He said he got his DFCs for the number of hours he flew. He flew 50 missions, and never lost a man. He said enlisted men asked to be assigned to his aircrew, because he was considered lucky.
Once he and another pilot had a close call. The next day, Tokyo rose reported two B-24s shot down over Rangoon, and described the mission he had flown the previous night.
Dad had a lot of war stories, although few of them were about actual combat. But he had a lot of tales of incidents in training, or on the transit overseas, or in the barracks, or on leave.
An uncle always walked with a limp. He never discussed it, and it was not until his funeral that I learned that he was in the navy, and was wounded at Iwo Jima.
Another uncle was in the hospital with influenza, when his unit was sent to Corregidor. If not for the flu, he would have been in the Bataan Death March.
Various stories from the World Wars:
I am named (slightly indirectly) after a USN Commodore who received the Navy Cross in WWI, and, in WWII, served variously as a oiler commander (as such, he played a role in Doolittle’s Raid), and as a staff officer.
Both my grandfather served with the Army Air Corps in the European Theater of WWII. My maternal grandfather (who I never really knew) was ineligible for combat services, and spent the war in England serving as a mechanic. My paternal grandfather (alive, but he isn’t one who cares to talk about his experiences much) was a turret gunner (reaching the rank of First Lieutenant), received the Air Medal, and, among other exploits, ended up having to cut across Belgium after being shot down. (This would not be his last military experience, as he served as an Air Force navigator during the Korean conflict).
An uncle in the family served in WWI as a corporal in the trenches (where he survived being gassed), WWII as a Lieutenant Colonel in military intelligence, and, according to his obituary, he spent time in the mid-1950s in Europe participating in studies in “psychological warfare”.
I have a relative who ended up dying violently in WWI a few days after the official end of combat, but I haven’t mastered that story.
I know I’m forgetting both some relatives and some stories of the already mentioned relatives, but this is a start.
My dad lived in PA, joined the Navy and was in Florida for just a few months before they gave him a medical discharge for some sort of fever–scarlet or rheumatic or something. I guess it was pretty serious if they couldn’t just treat it and let him stay in.
Thank you for sharing your stories - they’re really interesting. I think I must be the only person on the SDMB who has no connection to the military. The closest link I’ve ever found is that my grandmother once mentioned that a couple of her uncles served in WWI. In WWII, my maternal grandfather worked for the Union Pacific, which I understand was a necessary job, so he was never drafter (he also had two children by this time, too). My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and my dad clearly hated his guts and never talks about him, so although I know he didn’t serve, I have no idea why.
My great-grandfather served in the Army during World War 1. He died when I was very young so I have no idea what exactly he did. I do know he served in France as part of the AEF.
My grandfather served in the Army Air Force during World War 2. He was stationed for part of the war in the Philippines as communications specialist. Unfortunately my grandfather didn’t talk much about the war. My father has all of Grandpa’s military papers and I haven’t gotten the chance to look at them.
There is one story my aunt told me. In 1944 Grandpa’s wife went to Hawaii to visit him. He gets a letter a few weeks later telling him he’s going to be a father. When the time is right Grandpa asks for leave to go home and see the birth of his child. He gets it, secures transportation to California and is stranded. He can’t get a train or bus ticket so he thumbs it from California to Illinois, hopping freights and getting rides from strangers. He made it home a day before his first son, my dad, was born. That story has always stuck with me because it shows a passion within him that I never saw. Unfortunately 5 years later Grandpa’s wife died and that passion died with her.
Maternal grandfather: Grandpa lived in Nebraska when the war started. He joined the air corps, and was apparently a pretty talented pilot, because he became an instructor. He spent the whole war in the US, teaching fighters to fly, until the last few weeks of the war. He was told he was being sent to the Pacific, but V-J Day intervened.
Maternal grandmother: Grandma was also a Nebraska native. She spent her late teens and early twenties in a munitions plant in southern NE that was camouflaged as a grassy hill. (Those factories are still visible from the highway.) She told us about measuring various dangerous powders into huge shells that were destined to be fired from battle ships. Her most vivid memory, however, was of the hair nets all the women were made to wear.
Paternal grandfather: A German Jew, Opa’s family escaped to America early enough to be able to take much of their property along with them. The Army offered Opa his citizenship if he would serve the country. It seemed like a pretty good deal to him, so he signed up. They promptly put him in Intelligence, and sent his German-speaking ass right back to Germany. I always imagined him doing James Bond-style undercover work, but I recently grilled him on this, and he told me that it was all prisoner interrogation. Which actually, is pretty freaking cool as well.
Paternal grandmother: Oma’s German Jewish family was not a prescient as Opa’s. They considered themselves Germans first and Jews second, and thus believed that none of this antisemitism would really reach them. They opted to stay in Germany. When the signs became impossible to ignore, they sent Oma (15) and her sister (13-or-so) for an extended vacation in England. Their brother, Rolf (my great-uncle), was too young to be without his parents, they decided, so he stayed in Frankfurt.
Rolf came home from school one afternoon to find the door to the family home ajar. He went directly to a Christian neighbor’s house. She had seen his family dragged off, and sympathized. She took him in and hid him for over a year. When the patrols eventually became too frequent, and she became too scared, she put Rolf in the trunk of her car, and drove him all the way to Switzerland, where he survived the war, and went on to live a long and happy life in Geneva.
Meanwhile, Oma and sister in England were put in an orphanage. As soon as Oma turned 16 (I think it’s 16), she volunteered for the British army as a truck driver. She drove supply trucks (lorries?) for the rest of the war. After the war, she applied for UK citizenship, but was turned down as an enemy alien. Her family had been friendly with Opa’s family before the war, so Opa’s family sponsored her to come to the US.
My maternal Grandfather ran a textile mill, and was exempted from the WWII draft (the phrase my Mom uses is something like “vital industrial commodity”).
My paternal Grandfather was a surgeon, but had heart problems even in his 30s. He was given a medical deferment - or whatever they called it in WWII. But he wanted to fight Hitler (we’re Jewish), so the story in my family is that he found a med student whose EKG was similar enough to his own to be believed, but would pass the Army’s requirements. Grandpa submitted this EKG as his own (don’t ask me how - but everyone wanted to sign up in those days), and Bingo! Grandpa’s an Army doctor. He enlisted in New Jersey and was assigned to … drum roll please … Georgia. (Or was it Alabama? I’ll have to ask my Dad.) Anyway, he was assigned to an Army hospital down there, but housing was so tight that the closest place my Grandmother could find to live was in Alabama (or Georgia - whichever state her husband was not in). She was trying to set up housekeeping with her two young kids while her husband was hundreds of miles away. After a while people in the town came to the conclusion that my Grandmother was the “other” wife, and her “hubby” had a first family elsewhere.
A few months after his enlistment, the Army caught up with Grandpa’s fake EKG, and discharged him. He went to the town where Grandma, Dad and my Uncle were staying to get ready to move back to NJ. According to my Grandmother, he got in on a Friday evening. “Boy I’m beat,” he says, “I just want to get out my uniform and go to sleep.” “Oh no you won’t!” she said. “You are putting that uniform back on and we are going to temple tonight!” They went to temple and my Grandmother introduced her HUSBAND to everyone.
My paternal Grandmother had five brothers and one sister. Her sister’s the only one of that generation still alive. She didn’t serve, and my Grandmother only served to the extent that she made Alageorgia less safe for German cockroaches. I believe all five of my Great Uncles served in WWII. I have my own story about two of her brothers’ service.
Most of my Grandmother’s family moved to California when the kids of my grandmother’s generation were young. I was in CA for a conference in 1989 and I had dinner with my Great-Aunt, my eldest Great Uncle and his wife, and my youngest Great Uncle. Oldest Great Uncle was an accountant in his 30s when WWII broke out, and he became an Army accountant. I thought that crap like the $600 toilet seat was new - nope. OGU helped audit an arms plant in Buffalo. There was only $1 million missing. One. Million. 1945. Dollars. Missing. It makes the baby Harry Truman cry. There were more such stories at dinner from OGU.
Then youngest Great Uncle spoke up. He was an aviator in Europe, and had been shot down and captured by the Germans. He told us a couple little stories about the war. He hated the humidity back East in basic training. He ran into a guy in the POW camp he knew from high school sports in California - but the other guy didn’t make it. He told about being force-marched from the POW camp to another camp when the Germans didn’t want the approaching Allied troops to re-capture them. It was in the winter of 1945, and it was very cold and he did not have a good coat. Just a couple of little stories. YGU went to the bathroom, and everyone else at the table was LOOKING at each other intently with odd expressions on their faces. I asked “What’s going on?” Well, it seems that these were the first words my Great Uncle had said to the family about his captivity. Ever. Forty-four years and he never said a peep about it. Amazing.
And YGU was not a taciturn guy. He picked me up at the convention center and we were talking and joking the whole long rush-hour drive from Anaheim to LA.
Mama Zappa’s Dad was in the Merchant Marine in WWII, in the North Atlantic. As I recall, he saw ships in his convoy sunk. She had other relatives serve also, but I’ll let her tell about that if she wants.
Then - as if this post wasn’t long enough - is the lady we named our daughter Moon Unit after. Not really a relative, but close enough. “Tante Lune” was born and raised in Paris, and became a doctor. She was also Jewish. She met and married close friend of my maternal Grandparents’ after the War and migrated to the US. Tante Lune hardly ever spoke about her war experiences. My Grandmother asked her what it was like in France during the War. “Oh it wasn’t so bad. On the weekends we’d bike out to the country for picnics.” My Dad knew some ex-OSS folks from work, who knew, or knew of, my “Tante Lune” and gave him the straight dope. She had been in the Resistance, and was reputed to be the best pistol shot in Paris. The French Resistance would grab downed Allied pilots and hide them during the week. Then on weekends a “bunch of young people” would bike out to the country “for a picnic”. Sometimes two or three to a bike - times were hard in those days. After dark, at a pre-arranged location, an Allied plane would pick up the pilots, and maybe drop supplies. Then the remaining Resistance people would bike back - fewer than the ones that left Paris.
Of course, if any Nazi soldier had suspected anything, they would all have been shot at once.
“Weekend picnic in the country” my ass!
When the Nazis took Paris she went underground - and I do mean underground. For a time she was hiding out in the sewers, never daring to sleep in the same place twice. All the while taking care of wounded Resistance fighters. Setting up operating rooms in the sewers of Paris. Amazing stuff. She never talked about it - we got it all third hand.
In 1987, she told me and Mama Zappa a couple of stories about her experiences. She said her dog had gone missing right after the Nazis occupied Paris. She and a friend drove all over Paris looking for it, and found it shot in a gutter. By the Nazis.
She told a better story of Liberation Day. As Paris was being liberated, she went to a hospital to help as an MD. In that hospital was her father! He had not been wounded during the war. He was putting up a banner to celebrate the liberation, and fell off the ladder! They hadn’t seen each other through the whole war, and they meet up because of a simple fall.
Tante Lune died at 106. She had dementia the last several years, that was sad. Prior to that she was sharp as a tack - always up on current events, always well read. She did not want people to make a fuss, so she had no funeral. She had outlived her peers, and most of the next generation as well. What I wanted to say at her funeral, and never got the chance to, was the stories above, all about the dear elderly lady who was my “Tante Lune”. Hitler turned Europe into a machine to kill her, and everyone like her - non-German, Jewish, free, or independent-minded - and she was all of those. She not only fought the war, and helped win it, and survived, but she really lived. She lived longer in quiet retirement after the War than she lived before the War. If living well is the best revenge, she had the finest revenge of all. And enjoyed every minute she could.
My father grew up in Hollywood. One of his brothers learned camera repair and became a motion-picture camera technician. During WWII, he joined the Field Photographic Branch of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, and worked under the great Hollywood director John Ford.
My uncle ended up marrying a Scottish girl, a marriage that did not last much longer than the war. But they were married just as security was being tightened for D-Day, and the only way they could travel was under military orders. Ford issued them himself: “… hereby ordered to go to Scotland, get married, and have a great time.”
He received the same espionage training that covert operatives received, but he was stationed at Denham Studios in London, in charge of the photographic supplies and equipment. If you have ever seen a documentary that contains war footage, the camera that took it or the film that was in it was handled by him at some point.
He had no patience for Holocaust deniers, because he saw the concentration-camp photos himself as they were being processed.
He also set up equipment or high-speed photography of bomb tests and even flew behind enemy lines some to take reconnaissance photos.
I recall that some years ago, the History Channel interviewed him about his work, for a program dealing with this topic, but I never got to see it. He died this past July.
My paternal grandfather was quite open with me about his war experiences. He fought in both the Winter War and the Continuation War. He was wounded twice and to the day he died he had a piece of shrapnel in his arm that you could feel underneath his skin. His best story was quite amazing but i swear its true.
One night that my grandfather was on guard duty, he heard someone approach him in the dark. This was near the front so the possibility that it was an Russian soldier was big. He readied his rifle and charged at the stranger from his hiding place. The stranger lifted up his hand in panic and shouted in clear Finnish “Don’t shoot its only me!”. My grandfather didn’t know this man but because he spoke Finnish was convinced that he was a Finnish soldier and let him go.
Now this is something that probably happens often in war and often ends in tragic results. A soldier accidentally shoot a fellow soldier. My grandfather was a heartbeat away from shooting this stranger in the dark. Lucky for me he didn’t because decades after this incident, my parents got engaged and the two men were reunited and it turned out that the stranger my grandfather almost shot and killed that night was to be my maternal grandfather.
My uncle (dad’s bro) is a military man through and through, served in Korea and Vietnam, but I don’t know much more than that. We try to have little to do with him.
My grandpa serviced and ran the air raid sirens in Minneapolis during WWII. My mom remembers he would come home for a quick dinner after his full shift at Minneapolis Moline, then off he’d go. He’d come home for a shower, change of clothes, and breakfast before going to work. He was unable to enlist in the military, so he did what he could.
His son (my uncle) served in the Korean War. He never said much about his service, but he always had a very tattered US Flag hanging in his workshop that he said he brought back.
Hey, there are at least two of us then. No army here - and not much militarism since the Vikings, not at all.
My great-great uncle was a Navy code breaker, at one point stationed on Corregidor…and evacuated by submarine. I regret to say that I don’t remember all the details myself—my mom’s the family historian—but from a scant few details I’ve looked up just now, it looks like the boat was USS Sea Dragon.
Another great (great-great?) uncle—I’m ashamed, moreso, to say that I can’t even remember his exact name, at the moment—also in the Navy, was a fighter pilot, at one point transferring to a land base (Henderson Field?) after his carrier was sunk. Died in aerial combat—IIRC, his last words, over the radio, were “I’ve got two on my tail.”
My maternal grandfather was a diesel mechanic working in the motor pool at Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. I don’t know much more because I’ve never been close to that side of the family, but I do know that he contracted malaria later in the Pacific campaign and has struggled with lingering symptoms ever since.
My paternal grandfather was a railroad worker and so did not serve during the war.
My dad was a submachine gunner in a U.S. Army engineering unit in WWII. His unit’s job was to lay communication wire before “planned” engagements so that when the troops got there to fight they could connect their comms.
That sounded kind of dull to me until I was about 13 and the penny dropped. “Wait a sec,” I said to The Old Man, “Wouldn’t that put you guys behind enemy lines?”
“Pretty much every goddamned day for two years,” was his response. “Half the time those dumb SOBs in the infantry couldn’t manage to find us and kept ending up in the wrong spot, which made things at Elsenborn Ridge a little dicier than we would have liked.”
Since he went in just before sub gunners started getting the .45 Grease Gun, and the lightweight M1 Thompson guns were in short supply, he somehow ended up with an original 1927 model. I’d imagine lugging that 16.5 pound hunk of walnut and steel across France and Germany for two years, along with ammo, tools and misc. gear, was one of the reasons he was such an incredibly strong and tough SOB for the rest of his life, despite being thin as a rail.