Both my parents were involved in WWII, my dad as a Seabee in the South Pacific, and my mom as a plane spotter and calculator for the V2 rocket. They met in Germany when my dad was in the Air Force and stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. So, without WWII, they would never have met and my sisters and I would not exist.
There are some more profound things as well. We grew up hearing stories from our mom of bombings, deaths, being strafed by a plane, our beloved Opa (grandfather) being a POW, near starvation, near-rape by soldiers and released POWs at the end of the war, buying and selling things on the black market. She was marked by it and I think I grew up with a sense of the world being dangerous because of it.
The second world war was humanity’s real last chance to free itself from the current controllers or as other call it " The Evil " that currently runs this planet or part of this planet at the very least.
Well having been born in 1939, yes I was around in the 2nd world war. I even remember a few bits and pieces about it then. Especially growing up on the
California coast. My father served in the US Navy as a corpsman in Hawaii. My grandmother said it ruined him, but I think he was ruined before then.
My husband’s family were displaced persons, fleeing the wrath of both the Communists and the Nazis. Eventually after the war ended the emigrated to the U.S. Had there been no war, my husband would have grown up in Ukraine and we’d never have met.
Grandmother used to tell the grand kids about how she was falling in love with a member of the Japanese diplomatic mission in the Central American old country back in 1940.
If the war had not taken place and the ambassadors had not been recalled then. Then it is likely I would not be here to tell you this.
Thanks. My oldest aunt was born in 1948 and youngest in 1964. I wasn’t trying to give the date range of baby boomers, but the date range of my aunts and uncles.
I doubt that. It will just be some small note on an inside page, if even that.
There was BIG hoopla for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, in 1995. Lots of big news stories, lots of full-page retrospectives, lots of commemorative events. Re-enactments of the landings. One of the remaining original “victory ships”, long time docked in San Francisco and open as a museum, steamed through the Panama Canal to be there.
I predicted at the time that this would be the final really big World War II event, and with this, the world would pretty much put WWII to bed – even to the point that I predicted the up-coming 50th anniversaries of VE-Day and VJ-Day would be little more than a footnote.
Turned out, I was pretty much right. The VE-Day and VJ-Day 50th anniversaries had none of the big hoopla, and World War II took a large step into the mists of time with the D-Day anniversary.
I was born in late 1942, so was only two and a half when the war ended. Fortunately my father (born in 1900) was too old to be in the military, and no other relatives served or were affected by the war, as far as I know.
I can recall seeing some of the detritus of war around Los Angeles in the late forties; my parents’ ration books still lying around the house, camouflage netting still visible at the Douglas Aircraft plant next to the Santa Monica Airport, piles of amphibious landing craft awaiting sale or scrapping in San Pedro, war surplus searchlights used at all special events.
In kindergarten, 1947, my teacher was excited about buying a new car, and explained to us kids that new cars had not been available for a few years because of the war.
One other thing: the so-called “Battle of Los Angeles”, the basis for the film “1941”, was generally accepted as being real by many people. My parents recalled it and said a Japanese plane had crashed near 185th Street and Vermont Avenue, out near the harbor.
My paternal grandfather had 8 daughters and worked as a postmaster. He went to fight in WWII, came home a Colonel with honours from King George VI and got his old job back. My father was born in '46. Relations in their family post-service - to this day - were/are ‘difficult’.
Although I was born at the end of the 1940s, World War II in fact had little immediately-personal effect on my life – as distinct from the general ways in which the conflict and what followed from it, have affected everyone.
I’m British, and have always lived in the UK. My parents’ respective families lived only a few miles from each other, and my father and mother had known each other from childhood. While it seems that the war acted as a catalyst for their pairing-off (they married shortly after its end), it would seem quite possible that they might at some time have got together in that way, even absent any WWII. No-one in either father’s, or mother’s, family, who was of an age to take immediate part in the war, was killed or indeed injured. This could have to do with the fact that for various reasons, only a small minority of them were required to go into to-the-max “harm’s way”; those who were, came through physically – and mostly mentally – unscathed.
I grew up mostly aware of WWII, in a fairly “abstract” way – as a source of many gripping and exciting stories, largely via the media (especially, for me, kids’ comics); and as, in general terms, what had been a necessary struggle against something highly evil. My parents did not talk a lot about the war – at any rate, not in my hearing. From what people report, this last would seem true of many WWII-generation parents.
The deeper one digs into all aspects of WWII, especially now, when so many veterans who have remained silent most of their lives have come forward with their stories you begin to realize what a vast thing it was . . . that there aren’t millions of stories, there are hundreds of mi;ions of stories, each a gripping one in its own right. The Holocaust is one of those. Six million stories, many , many of them untold. Millions of families wiped off the face of the earth, to a man, woman and child. How many Einsteins, Rachmaninovs, Rubinsteins perished . . . the fact is, now we will never know.
The ghastly things that the Nazis and the Japanese perpetrated are too horrible to think about – men shooting and killing men on the battlefield are horrible enough, but the millions upon millions of casual brutalities inflicted on the world by these scum really make me want to not like or trust their sons and daughters, quite frankly, even though I’m married to one.
But don’t get me started. And please don’t start the “Allies perpetrated atrocities too” crap. Maybe so, but a fraction of a fraction of those by the Axis.
It can’t have been that big a deal if they forgot D-Day happened in 1944.
I wouldn’t exist without World War II; my parents met because their fathers were both the RCAF. My fiancée probably wouldn’t exist; her grandmother came to Canada in part because she was a Holocaust survivor and her family, or what was left of it, wanted out of Europe. So on and so forth. The war was so big an event that I suspect many, if not the MAJORITY, of people can attribute their existences as the people they are to the war’s events.
My MIL never knew her father, my wife’s grandfather. He was shot and killed by a German sniper in April 1945. She was born in May.
The Navy put my father through college (in a big hurry; he was in college for all of 28 months en route to his B.S. in chemical engineering) during WWII.
My father started college before the war, and finished after the war. If not for the war, he might have graduated before my mother started college, and they probably never would have met.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more and realized there are some things I can count.
For example, my stepfather’s (Hindu) family was forced out of Multan during Partition, which as AK84 notes was partly a result of WWII. He was about 14 at the time and marched hundreds of miles through fields of dead bodies, helping his family carry what they could of their possessions. It turned him off religion for life, and while I was essentially an atheist already when I met him (at 13) his stories reinforced my views.
I did some of my growing up in Birmingham, which was among the most heavily bombed cities in the war. So I spent a lot more time around featureless concrete buildings than any human being should have to.
No, more likely that I goofed that post. 1944 it was. BIG commemorative hoopla in 1994 for D-Day. Fast forward a year, and there was very noticeably less hoopla for VE-Day and VJ-Day, as I had predicted. There is something magical about 50th anniversaries like that. Interesting that D-Day was the BIG thing to celebrate, rather than the days the war ended in Europe and Japan.
