|
Post by roman on May 22, 2009 14:06:43 GMT -5
He was real close! Which side was he on?
|
|
|
Post by xGIxJOKERx on May 23, 2009 6:05:16 GMT -5
My grandfather on my mom's side was a Sea Bee (Navy Construction) in the Pacific. I don't know may of the details aside from that he got Malaria and was awarded the Purple Heart for it but he did not feel he disserved it and threw it out. He didn't talk about it much and he died when I was young but the one story I do know was that he started a fist fight with some Commonwealth troops by insulting the Queen while on a train out of boredom, pretty much figguring that he wasn't going to come back alive anyhow. Also of note was that he was a big Jewish guy from New York so he probably had some pretty strong opinions on the European theater, particularly sense his parents immigrated to the States from Germany. Here is an article from Cracked.com that has a buch of soldiers that were extra bad ass, many of whom served in WWII. The guy with the Claymore is on the list. www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-girl thingy.html edit: you will have to change the 'girl thingy' part to the coarser term for it to work. However Rambo looking like a girl thingy may be even more funny.
|
|
|
Post by pikinyin on May 23, 2009 6:13:55 GMT -5
He was real close! Which side was he on? He fought on the Republican side the whole war
|
|
|
Post by roman on May 23, 2009 15:27:54 GMT -5
My great uncle was an airplane mechanic in the Pacific theatre also, he doesn't have many stories about the war itself, just gear head talk. My family's dog trainer back in South Carolina was some kind of OSS agent, he mentioned breaking out of POW camps a few times, I remember him, tiny guy, tough though. The dogs listened to him when he spoke!
Who else? I'd like to read more!
|
|
|
Post by gregdorf on May 23, 2009 16:39:35 GMT -5
Well my great grandfather served for Germany during WWI. He was part of some kind of calvary unit, not sure the exact details but from what I understand the war came to an end before he saw too much action. My grandfather was a tail gunner in a liberator during WWII and served in pacific, I was told that there was a strong family link to Europe so they would not let him serve in any other theater. From what he told me, most of his missions was over China and almost every flight that they took there was Japanese infantry firing small arms at them. If it was towards the end of the mission then they would return fire with the guns on the airplane. I am sure that his service was towards the end of the war because he said the entire time he was there he only saw a small number of enemy airplanes. My other grandfather served as a navy gunner and he never talked about his service. About the only thing that I can say for sure happened with him was he lost his hearing because of the constant fire from the big naval guns. There is also another Egdorf that I know of that served for the Germans during WWII, I am not sure how this person is related to me, but the guy was an AA gunner and received an award for service to the state.
|
|
|
Post by skorzeny on Jun 8, 2009 1:51:22 GMT -5
My uncle was in the 3rd Army under Patton and was in the Battle of the Bulge. I don't know too much about his career, sadly.
My grand-uncle was also in the 3rd Army under Patton and was at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a lieutenant and the worst thing he did during the war was to kill one of his own men. They were hiding alongside the road while a German column came rolling by and this soldier freaked out in a major way, threatening to give away their position. My grand-uncle had to kill him to save the rest of the platoon. He didn't go into details, just saying he stabbed the guy and that it was something he himself had to do because it wasn't the kind of thing he felt could be delegated to another soldier. He also had an ugly experience when he found a dead German with a gold belt buckle. Suspicious, he checked the body and found a wire fixed to the belt buckle. He went a good distance from the body, tugged the wire and sure enough found the corpse had been booby trapped.
He later was one of the lucky guys who was pulled from the ETO to the PTO after the German surrender. I forget what base he was at stateside before being reassigned, but he was bitten by a coral snake and hospitalized. Which turned out to be a good thing as the rest of his company suffered hideous casualties at Okinawa. He made it to the Pacific in time for the build up for Operation Downfall and would have been in the first wave of army units to hit the beaches of Japan.
He served under both Patton and MacArthur in his time and would always compare the two. He despised MacArthur as a glory-hungry megalomaniac who was utterly indifferent to his soldiers and their welfare. He said of Patton that he was the biggest son-of-a-bitch he ever met, and also someone he and the men under him would have gladly followed straight into hell. The difference between the two, he said, was that Patton never asked anyone to do anything he was afraid to do himself. Patton didn't sit in the back reading dispatches and reports, but went to the front himself to see what was going on. That makes a huge difference to the soldiers in the line.
My grand-uncle would later go partially deaf as an artillery commander in Korea.
My grandfather on my mother's side was a civilian contractor who left the Aleutians only a few months before the Japanese invasion. He spent the rest of the war, as far as I know, serving with the Merchant Marine in the North Atlantic. The ironic thing is, at that age he was a spitting image of Hitler!
|
|
|
Post by grujav on Jun 8, 2009 2:42:18 GMT -5
My paternal grandfather was a navigator on a B-17 and was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. He was upset because the Japanese shot up his Cadillac that he had won in a card game. He went on to serve in PTO until he went back to the states for training in this new fangled radar technology and then was assigned in North Africa and then to fight over Germany where he got shot down. He was the only one in his plane to survive for two reasons according to him; 1) the rest of the crew was rookies and he was the only one wearing a parachute and 2) the plane ripped in half right underneath him.
He spent the rest of the war in POW camps and had some amusing stories. Including his fear of being shipped by rail to different camps because he knew how much P-51 pilots loved to attack trains on the way back from attacks.
His brother served entirely in the Pacific theatre, also in a B-17 but as a bombardier and the U.S. Army made a war bonds movie about one of the missions he was on. Long story short his B-17 survived doing a mission pretty much solo but received over a million bullet holes from the Japanese fighters and AA. So the B-17 is awesome and you should buy war bonds. The guy they had play my great-uncle in the movie looks like Howdie Doody but James was a very striking Germanic looking fellow often pictured with an attractive nurse or two tending to him whether in full-body cast or not.
My step-grandfather flew for the navy as a sub hunter, I believe in the Pacific.
Maternal grandfather was a radio operator on a search plane in the Pacific.
|
|
cheif
Corporal
Posts: 115
|
Post by cheif on Jun 8, 2009 5:20:14 GMT -5
Great, now I've got the image of a Zero pilot strafing your granddads Caddy screaming "Inferior American motorcar! DIE!"KRAKAKAKAKAKAK!!! I was in a Cadillac my dad had gotten as a hire-car once, we didn't even leave the car park before we declared it undrivable and got something else!
|
|
|
Post by DthenB on Jun 9, 2009 0:42:07 GMT -5
my dad's father was in the army air corps during the end of the war, but never went overseas, he specialized in telecommunications in dc. his wife, my grandmother, worked in a bullet factory after taking the train to dc from idaho to volunteer where needed. they met in dc at a uso dance, then boom, 43 years later, me.
my mom's father was in the navy after college with a degree in electronic engineering and helped develop ship-borne radar systems. his brother was a physicist and helped with the early stages of the manhattan project when it was still located in oak ridge, tennessee. my other great uncle was in the army, but i haven't heard much specific about him.
not really much front-line combat in my family, but plenty of support work.
|
|
|
Post by Crazy Ivan on Jun 12, 2009 16:01:27 GMT -5
I find it interesting to read these stories. For me, the combat of WW2 is something that happens in history books and movies, as none of my grandparents were in the army during the War. The closest thing to the remains of combat I've seen in my family was a load of my grandfather's old books, altogether about a meter in width, with a bullet hole straight through the center. However, my grandparents all lived in German-occupied territory, so does that count?
My mother's mother was pregnant with my aunts during the Allies' advance into Belgium and the southern Netherlands in 1944. During much of the latter half of the year, there was a German artillery piece standing - literally - in their backyard, shooting ordnance towards the Allies. Kept them out of their sleep too, as the gun kept pounding during the night.
When the Allies were finally close to reaching their village, my grandmother was almost ready to go into labor and had to go to the hospital in the city (which was due south, on the other side of a canal, and in other words, directly in the way of the Allied advance). She was the last person the Germans allowed to leave town in a southern direction. My grandfather wasn't quite so lucky - he had to secretly swim across the canal during the night and managed to walk to the hospital, joining his wife there in time for the birth. In the end, my aunts were born November 5th - one day after the liberation of the village.
My father's father, having had polio as a child, was considered simple (even though he wasn't really, he was known as 'crazy Tony'), so the Germans didn't pay him and his sister (who pretended to be deaf) much attention. The resistance used him to warn them whenever the Germans were about to come along. This was a considerable risk, as one day (when he happened to be somewhere else) many of the resistance members were caught by the Germans and shot.
Strange thing is, he never knew he was helping the Resistance. They only told him decades after the War was over...
|
|
|
Post by malkcntent on Jun 13, 2009 3:42:06 GMT -5
Great thread. Especially cool to hear about non-US folks and their past relatives in the war.
My father's father was in the 11th Armored Division and saw major action during the Battle of the Bulge. Never spoke about it. One story he did tell was when they were told to destroy a German supply depot; the officer in charge let the soldiers loot it first before it was destroyed and my grandfather brought home a late-war Mauser. My brother has it to this day.
My mother's grandfather enlisted in the Navy and became the senior communications officer onboard the USS Intrepid in the Pacific. He talked about it all the time. He would send letters to my great-grandmother secretly telling her where they were in the Pacific using codes so she could track where he was. Talked about how the kamikazi pilots could have easily sunk the ship if they had come at them more than one at a time. Despite that, the ship was hit and lost all but a single plane. My great-grandfather told us that when the order came in to report to Pearl Harbor rather than San Francisco, the captain was bummed since going to the mainland meant the crew's families could meet them; since only the captain and my great-grandfather had seen the order, the captain told him 'orders say to go to San Francisco'. It was a real treat to go to New York a few years ago and check out the Intrepid, which is now a museum. He was there with me.
|
|
cheif
Corporal
Posts: 115
|
Post by cheif on Jun 13, 2009 12:57:08 GMT -5
Edited for added awesomeness
|
|
|
Post by malkcntent on Jun 13, 2009 14:30:04 GMT -5
Edited for added awesomeness LMAO Finding a place to park that thing is a bitch! Sure don't have any problems with the neighbors though.
|
|
|
Post by skorzeny on Jun 13, 2009 19:00:39 GMT -5
What kind of mileage do you get with that?
|
|
|
Post by malkcntent on Jun 13, 2009 19:23:17 GMT -5
What kind of mileage do you get with that? To quote the Simpsons: 0 City, 1 Highway
|
|