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Thread: WW2

  1. #1
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    WW2

    I don't have any agenda with this thread. I pulled a random history book quote out of somewhere about WW2 and after a while I started to think about the stories going away....and I like stories, so if you have a WW2 story, tell it.

    I have a few. Some of them may be questionable, we'll leave that to the future,

    One thing that is true is that my father enlisted on his 18th birthday, March 18, 1943. And that after training at Fort Benning Georgia he was shipped to Europe as a Combat Infantryman, and put in charge of a .50 cal BAR which he carried across France and to the Rhine, as he chopped up Germans as they chopped up his unit.

    Not to get all Woody on you, sorry. But he did that, he killed Germans with a machine gun. Many of them. He certainly wasn't proud of it and never spoke of it. But it's true.

    There are stories that guys here might know, that id they're not told now they may be forgotten forever. At least if yuo tell a story now Google can find it later. It's not dead. Tell the story. Don't worry about boring us. If we're bored we'll just go the next story.

  2. #2
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    Or we can just return to the regular programming. Sorry if it's awkward but I was thinking about this a lot today for whatever reason and it seemed like a reasonable thread.

    If we could get these stories typed out, that means they'll live forever in this digital age. It goes from ephemeral to permanent just like that. It becomes part of the record.

    So tell us your stories.

  3. #3
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    Stories going away...you don't have to go back to WW2.

    Ask a millenial what the Cold War was.

    Most say it was Coke vs. Pepsi.

    Unfortunately, while we have the entirety of human knowledge in our phones, most are using them to find funny cat memes.

    Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
    Quote Originally Posted by XXX-er View Post
    the situation strikes me as WAY too much drama at this point

  4. #4
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    ...or not. I get fired up about shit for a few minutes at a time, feel free to ignore this.

  5. #5
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    And also, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
    Quote Originally Posted by XXX-er View Post
    the situation strikes me as WAY too much drama at this point

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by reckless toboggan View Post
    Stories going away...you don't have to go back to WW2.

    Ask a millenial what the Cold War was.

    Most say it was Coke vs. Pepsi.

    Unfortunately, while we have the entirety of human knowledge in our phones, most are using them to find funny cat memes.

    Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
    You're on the right track, to me. Just tell the story. What did your grandpa tell you about it? What happened? I want to hear it. More imprtant, history wants to hear it. Tell us a story.

  7. #7
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    It requires a committment to typing that at this stage of drunkeness I can not fulfill. Somebody take this fucking baton.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by flowing alpy View Post
    Not to get all Karl on you but i think you're thinking Wooley.
    A little fuzzy here but yes.

  9. #9
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    My father was born in 1941, Wesel. He has a scar across his chest from a pot of boiling water falling from the stove during a bombing raid. He and a few of his classmates were whipped by the schoolmaster for playing soccer with a human skull. When the Americans came into town, he and a buddy were tossed a duffle by a GI to carry; my father and his buddy looked at one another and took off with the duffle. When they opened it up, it was full of American cigarettes. There was cream and sugar on the table for several weeks after that score. Coal was so scarce that there was only enough for cooking and none for heat during the winter. Lots of lost relatives over the course of the two wars; they had nothing twice over and re-built. I hear the stories but I can't imagine living through it.

  10. #10
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    Grandparents were taken to "camp" by the Germans after most of their families (doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers) were murdered by Russians. Somehow they lived. Became refugees. Ate boiled shoe leather to survive. We're saved by a relative in Canada who sponsored them.

    Grandparents on the other side lost everything in bombings and had to rebuild from nothing. Scrounging for anything they could find, and didn't eat for days. A tin of spam was like Thanksgiving dinner.

    My whole life I've been mesmerized by their stories. Gave me perspective on life, the universe, and everything.

    Both my parents came to Canada as child refugees, and I'm a first gen Canadian. If it was now, as a parallel, I'd be a first gen Canadian born to Syrian refugees.

    War is hell.
    Quote Originally Posted by XXX-er View Post
    the situation strikes me as WAY too much drama at this point

  11. #11
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    My grandfather, an Irish Immigrant who came to this country in 1905, enlisted in te US Army in WWI and ended up as the youngest sergeant-Major in the US Army.

    Years later he was a meatcutter and had a stand in the Quincy Market in Boston. Next door was German sausage maker. As he used to say, "The US Governent paid me a dollar a day to kill the likes of you, Otto, but I would've done it for free.

    (he and Otto were buddies, don't read too much into it(, but hell yeah he woulda fought fro free, he was Irish.

  12. #12
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    No no. I read the slurring. Push through.

    Lean into it.



    My dad's dad was an anti-aircraft gunner on a cruiser in the Pacific. He was a very kind man that didn't like to talk much about the war and I was probably too young to understand it before Alzheimer's set in.

    My dad said he told him and his brothers that he saw his fire hit a Japanese plane and watched it fall into the ocean. He said that was the last story he told them and shied away from talking about it much ever again.

    I gotta figure out what ship he was on.
    I still call it The Jake.

  13. #13
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    Ha. My father came down with pneumonia in basic training during one of Massachusetts coldest winters evah, so, after he got well and was marchable, they shipped his now skinny ass over to New Guinea, where it was always 100 degrees and 110 percent humidity. His pictures always have a smile, though..

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    Wife's grandfather was a navigator on the bombers. Good enough at his math that he was credited with getting his crew home on some of the more difficult runs. He passed away a couple years ago, I have a coffee mug with his squadron's crest on it - a falcon on a flowering dogwood branch.

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    Grandfather was a medic in the British army. Ran Rommel out of the desert in North Africa then landed on Sword Beach on the 6th of June with the 1st Special Service Brigade. He spent time at the Buldge and crossed the Rhone. Have a box full of medal and photos, one where he smoking a pipe with Monty. Perhaps more impressive was his time as British Army heavyweight boxing champ. Interesting guy, war wasn't kind to him however.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by BmillsSkier View Post
    No no. I read the slurring. Push through.

    Lean into it.
    haha, I came out the other side, all good now but thanks for the encouragement.

    I was at a bit of a crux for a couple minutes there as you so acutely observed.

    My bad?

  17. #17
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    Grandmother's brother shot down jumping out of a plane. Ladyfriend's grandfather on the beach on D-Day. Didn't much like telling stories about it.

  18. #18
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    My buddy is getting divorced (this is a true story). He told me his wife can't stand his drinking any more. He goes, I been married 25 years, no DUI, no fights, never missed a day's work, and NOW it's a problem?

    But I'm UNDEFEATED, what's the problem?

    I love that undefeated line a lot.

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by iceman View Post
    My grandfather, an Irish Immigrant who came to this country in 1905, enlisted in te US Army in WWI and ended up as the youngest sergeant-Major in the US Army.

    Years later he was a meatcutter and had a stand in the Quincy Market in Boston. Next door was German sausage maker. As he used to say, "The US Governent paid me a dollar a day to kill the likes of you, Otto, but I would've done it for free.

    (he and Otto were buddies, don't read too much into it(, but hell yeah he woulda fought fro free, he was Irish.
    Reminds me of this essay:

    Teta-Jozefina, the woman who I considered my grandmother, once told me a story about her father, who had, one Bosnian winter during World War II, found himself on the way to having his throat slit by his neighbors. With his hands tied behind his back, he stood in line watching the people before him being slaughtered and thrown into the freezing river. When his turn came, he saved himself by leaping into the water before the killer could get to him. A few years later, after the war, my grandmother took lunch to his small store next to the local market. Outside the store, her father was drinking coffee with a man. In Bosnia, drinking coffee with someone is an act of friendship and intimacy, but she recognized her father’s coffee mate as one of the neighbors who had taken him to slaughter. “Do you know who this is?” my grandmother’s father asked her. “He was going to slit my throat.”

    At this point in the story, I was shocked by the casualness of the exchange, so I asked my grandmother: “So what did the man say?”

    She said: “Nothing. He just shrugged.”

    I’ve been imagining and trying to interpret that shrug for many years now.
    http://lithub.com/aleksandar-hemon-o...time-of-trump/ 

    I don't have many stories about WW2, my grandfather managed to miss both the European and Pacific theaters. He said they got assigned to new training, and before they finished his Commander came out and said "you sorry sons of bitches missed the whole war"

  20. #20
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    My grandfather finished college at NYU and was enlisted in the 8th infantry. He landed at Normandy and fought his way to northern Germany. They captured a bunch of towns and cities along the way, and liberated a large concentration camp near the end. He didn't talk about it much, but he showed me the Nazi flags he had taken, flying over the town hall of some French towns, and confetti with skulls on it that read "death waits for you if you cross the Rhine" with a skull on it. I guess the Nazis packed that confetti into some of the shells as the Allied forces approached Germany. He sent that stuff to the 8th's museum - that's when he dug it out of storage and showed it to me. I guess that's when it occurred to me that he'd probably killed a bunch of Nazis. Lung cancer got him in the end, and the cigarettes were a habit from the war. His French was as impeccable as it gets for a mick from NYC - because he got a lot of practice after he was out of college.

    My grandmother finished her BA in math at Fordham at 19 in the late '30s. She worked on fleet management and logistics during lend-lease, though without the job titles a man would've had. Her serious boyfriend before my grandpa was a fighter pilot. He got shot down over Italy. She died a month or so ago.

  21. #21
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    I don't have stories, my dad turned 18 in 1945, got drafted and was part of the occupation force in Germany. I think he missed the big stories. But some year ago I spent almost two months with a battalion of the 101st, attached to the commanding colonel. I was leading a cadre of wild land firefighters that trained them and worked with them on the line on fires in Montana. The 101st were bad ass, super bad ass. Those guys were steeped in history - they had the stories and the stories were an integral part of who they are currently. That assignment inspired me to read up and search out more stories, especially on the web.

    I'm not going to tell the stories I heard, they aren't mine to tell, but they were awesome. The series Band Of Brothers was pretty interesting after that time I spent with that battalion - 3/327th.

  22. #22
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    My grandfather on my mom's side flew bombers over Europe from Great Britain somewhere. He had a lot of stories, I'm sure, but never really said much about it to anybody. He dropped out of high school to enlist, along with most of his brothers. They actually had to sell their farm which was somewhere near Jackson Hole on the Idaho side, which would have been worth a fortune now. After the war he was a Sheriff for a small town in Idaho for a long time.

    He told me a story just offhand one day about how after every mission they'd have to patch the bullet holes in their plane. I think he flew something like 20-25 missions? I was really young when he told me, so I've lost a lot of details.

    Towards the end of his life, he had very bad dementia and thought my mom was actually her mom (my grandmother), and told her how guilty he felt about dropping bombs on munitions factories that they knew were right next to schools and churches.

    There is apparently tape of an interview he did with a historian from BYU who interviewed a bunch of Utah and Idaho vets, but it didn't make the dude's documentary because the guy found out my gramps wasn't Mormon. My mom and her brothers tried to get the guy to give them a copy of the tapes, but he just blew them off. Dick.

  23. #23
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    My grandfather like many of his friends "didn't talk about it". He served in the Pacific on a carrier which launched the Doolittle raid and was in the Battle of Midway, eventually the ship was bombed and he jumped and swam to a nearby ship. All he'd say about the war was that is was terrible, something about stacking the bodies of your friends 5x5 across like logs, then he'd change the subject. Proudly wore his CV-8 Hornet hat until he passed away about 5 years ago.

  24. #24
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    Paternal Grandfather was a corpman assigned to the medics behind the front lines. Came back home to the farm and never went further than 50 miles from home again. Never talked about it other than war is hell.

    Maternal Grandfather was in the army office, did paperwork. Described the army as a pain in the ass

    Paternal Grandfather-in-law was with the MP's driving supply trains. Hit many, many people and vehicles on the tracks and it effected him. When he came back he was part of the team that developed the modern railroad crossing to protect people.
    I've concluded that DJSapp was never DJSapp, and Not DJSapp is also not DJSapp, so that means he's telling the truth now and he was lying before.

  25. #25
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    My mother was in the WACs. She went over to Europe at the end of the war. She was in Austria as a mail clerk. She spoke yiddish so she was recruited in helping to connect holocaust survivors with their families. A cousin survived the holocaust He was a young boy. The nazis put a bunch of people from his town in a field and shot them. He buried himself in the snow until they were gone. He ended up in Mexico and became a successful business man.
    off your knees Louie

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