I’m not sure if it would be retroactive to a WWII soldier, but I paid no income taxes on my Army pay when I was deployed to an overseas combat zone.
good point !
I was stationed at NAS Moffett Field CA 1966-1967 .
Our Squadron ( VR-8) would allow any sailor wanting to re-enlist to become a C-130 crew member for 1 flight to Vietnam.
While on the ground unloading in Vietnam, the re-enlistment oath was given and thus the entire re-enlistment bonus was tax free due to combat zone.
Reminds me of the real life story of Hungarian soldier András Toma. After being captured by the Red Army in 1945, he ended up in a Soviet mental hospital where, due to bungled record-keeping, no one knew that he was Hungarian and assumed that he was an insane person chattering in an invented language. Over 50 years later, a visiting doctor finally recognized his language, and he was eventually identified and repatriated to Hungary, where he was retroactively promoted to sergeant-major and given his back pay. I also found a source that claimed he was given a pension on top of that, but I’m not sure. He only survived a few more years, cared for by his younger half-sister.
I assume he must have had some genuine mental problems if he made no attempt to learn Russian in 50 years.
Supposedly the Russians originally sent him there because he was suspected of suffering from schizophrenia. That said, how easy would it be for an adult to learn a foreign language if no one ever makes an effort to teach him or even talk to him at any great length?
In 50 years? Pretty easy to learn enough to tell them “I’m a freakin’ Hungarian, you bunch of goulash-heads!”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that a Soviet mental hospital in 1948 would not have been a customer-friendly experience. Times were hard on the outside. I wonder how often they fed their customers?
I also would not be surprised to learn that poor Toma may not have been crazy when captured, but 5 or 10 years later he’d be in pretty poor physical and mental condition. The next 40 years are all downhill from there.
Something similar happens in Jack Campbell’s “The Lost Fleet” series, with suspended animation instead of time travel, with the twist that the Captain (Jack Geary) had become a legendary hero while he was asleep.
He doesn’t need to speak it with any proficiency, just learn some basics. Any reasonably intelligent person should be able to pick some up within a matter of months just from figuring out the context in which words are used. That is, if they don’t have mental problems.