WWII Story my Dad use to Tell

[Drm50]

My old man was in the task force that went up in Aleutians in Bearing Sea.
He would tell about the ice they had to break off and the special issue stuff they got for the operation. Extra heavy duty clothes, wool hip socks and a hammer with lanyard for belt. When he told the story he would detail all this stuff except the hammer. Well somebody would ask about the hammer every time. The old man said it was so cold up there when you peed over the side it froze in midair and the hammer was to bust you loose. He was on a Sub Chaser which was very small ship, had to be miserable in any rough water, let alone up in them parts.

 

[Truckman]

He also told me he knew some of the Sihk(knife) fighters...He said they even scared him...and he wasn't afraid of much!..

I've made the acquaintance of more than one Sikh...They are people you will always want on your side of any fight......Ben

 

[Old_Cop]

Reception center at Ft. Jackson 1968 sitting on the ground in GP mediums, "who here has a license?" Hands shot up, the lucky few got to push mowers around the buildings, the rest of us just sat and waited.

First day at the rifle range at Ft. Gordon sitting in the bleachers, "All college boys stand up." "These people will shoot you by accident because they are too smart to follow directions." College boy in my platoon lost his college ring when it wore through his top pocket in his fatigue jacket while low crawling in the pit.

 

[crazyphil]

Basic training at Lackland in 1952, at formation in the morning the DI
asked if anyone had a college education. Several raised their hands.
He picked 3 and told them to report to the motor pool to ride the garbage
truck that day.

In 1950 I was 15, shining shoes in a downtown shoe shop. When North
Korea invaded South Korea they called up the Idaho National Guard.
A young man who worked with me told us that he enjoyed the summer
camps and didn't mind the monthly meetings, but he didn't sign up to
go to war. One day, shortly thereafter, a jeep pulled up in front of the
shop. 2 MPs came in and took him away. We never knew what happened
to him.

 

[GypsmJim]

Dad served in the Pacific during WWII. Three brand new ships were commissioned together and left at the same time for passage thru the Panama Canal. A green crew, first time on a ship. They pulled the lines and didn't retrieve it quick enough, and it wrapped around the propeller shaft. It took divers a long time to free it, causing them to be late and miss the fleet. His sister ships were sunk in battle. Dad's was the only one to survive.

After being damaged by as Kamikaze, they were laid over in Pearl Harbor for repairs. Dad's captain was a reserve officer and had been a wealthy businessman before being activated. Instead of staying in barracks, Dad's entire crew was put up at the Royal Hawaiian (pink hotel) on Waikiki beach.

Those were the only stories Dad ever told.

 

[Buford57]

My aunt finished her nurse's training in Detroit in 1941 and immediately shipped out for Britain with the Red Cross. Her ship was sunk by U-371 on June 24 after being separated from the convoy. Four lifeboats split ten nurses on board between them. She, along with three other nurses and ten crew members in her boat were picked up by the destroyer Charles F. Hughes (DD428) on July 5 and taken to Iceland. She had frostbite on both hands. When they returned to the US she went to the Navy recruiting office and told them she wanted to serve someplace warm. She spent the war in the South Pacific. Sweet lady, tough in a quiet way.

 

[oneeyedpete]

I've made the acquaintance of more than one Sikh...They are people you will always want on your side of any fight......Ben

Years ago I read an account of the Gurkhas serving in the 8th British Army in the WWII African campaign. Apparently, they would crawl over to the German lines and behead a couple of soldiers in their fox holes with their kukri knives to spread fear among them. I bet it worked well!

 

[Llew Taranau]

I have a neighbor who's German,but grew up in Odessa,Ukraine. He was about 12 when the tide turned.He,his dad and I'm not sure who else hid in coal cars for two days retreating to Germany when the Russians came back. They killed his mom.
Another friend and I were talking about family history (I was fooling with ancestry.com and building a tree throughout the pandemic.) Her family has been here since 1900 and she's Jewish.The town they came from in Poland,all the Jews were taken out,shot and buried in trenches,then all of the records of them were burned.

My grandfather and his sisters left what's now the Ukraine (then part of Russia) hiding in the bottom of a horse-drawn wagon. They managed to get to the US by 1920, all of them in their teens by then.


By 1943 not one of their relatives was left alive back in the old country. SS took care of that, mostly by lining them up along ditches and shooting them.

 

[swsig]

During WW 2 Dad was a civilian electronics technician for the Army Signal Corps. The Army required him to pass courses in calculus and physics at the University of Chicago before he was sent to the Philco Company in Philadelphia to learn to repair radar and other electronic equipment. After six months there, he was then sent to San Diego to work at a large Army electronics maintenance facility at Lindbergh Field. As soon as he got to San Diego, he was sent on a temporary assignment to a Signal Corps facility in San Bernardino, 100 miles away, to learn to service airborne IFF (Identification of Friend or Foe) transmitters. When he and a dozen other technicians from other west coast maintenance facilities showed up for training, they found out that no one at the San Bernardino facility knew they were coming, and furthermore that no one at San Bernardino knew anything about IFF transmitters. However, that did not matter, because they were also told that they would not be permitted to return to their bases until they learned to service IFF transmitters!

Eventually, someone discovered some manuals, but there was still no instructor available. So working from the manuals, the technicians began to instruct each other. The Army had also created written proficiency tests covering the transmitters, and each technician would be permitted to leave after he passed all of them. Dad was motivated to get out of there asap because Mom had accompanied him to San Diego, and was living alone in a city where she knew no one. After a month of non-stop IFF transmitter study, Dad was able to pass the tests and return home.

The war lasted another two years after that, and Dad never once saw an IFF transmitter.

 

[Aggie1906]

FIL was in a draft exempt trucking job, but saw how things were going. Signed up for AAC flight school. Washed out of single engine, like almost everybody. Wound up in multi engines. New types kept coming in, and he kept being retrained. Said there were 17 different phases of basic training, and he had them all. Can't have guys sitting around. When Harry dropped the bombs he was awaiting overseas orders as a "fully trained" (his parentheses, not mine) B-29 flight engineer. His six brothers were all overseas. He never left, and they always called him The Boy Scout. Wife told about him nervous and puking before they had to go do bail out live training. Most training, I recall, was in Texas.

 

[fiasconva]

I used to love hearing all those WWII vets get together and talk about their experiences whenever I could. If the alcohol was flowing and they got a little more relaxed, some of those stories would curl your hair. Those old country boys were some tough characters!

 

[fordson]

My father didn't talk much, if at all, about his experience. He had a number of friends, and they'd all sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee or a beer and tell their war stories. He'd just listen , nod and smile but didn't really add anything. We knew he was in North Africa and Italy, was a POW for a bit (not sure how long). Didn't even know he was wounded till after he passed in 2004 and we found some documents to that effect. He was a good man, a quiet man, a dignified man. Think of him often, miss him still.

 

[Greyman50]

Many times those who went through true bad combat situations rarely or never talked. Was a member of a group of serious Military historians and collectors back in 80's-2000's that got paid by US Military to display parts of our collections and inform public at various air shows, museums and Veterans events. The WWII Veterans we met opened up to us and we talked for hours, the stories we heard! We also participated in MTA(Military Through the Ages) at Jamestown Festival park in Va. ( First lasting European Colony in the New World) We still hear about our displays back then, the stories we can tell! Strangely I was the only Veteran in the group. Good times educating the public. Few pics of 2 MTA events. Live 3" anti tank gun firing blank of 1 pound of cannon black powder. One of our WWI displays, had a dugout and trench, yes, the 1917 is live.

 

[Beemerguy53]

My best friend's father was a BAR man in the Army in the ETO. He landed a few days after D-Day, was wounded slightly in Normandy, recovered, and rejoined his unit.

Months later, during the Battle of the Bulge, he was shot and critically wounded, and was not expected to live. He recovered, came home to Baltimore after the war, became a mailman, married the love of his life, and raised five happy, successful kids in a three-bedroom rowhouse.

George never, ever, talked about his combat experiences...he took those to the grave with him. When pressed, the only two things he would say were (with a sigh) that a lot of good men on both sides died over there...and (with a grin) that after carrying that BAR around for a couple of years, his arms were three inches longer.

 

[arjay]

Most of the people I knew who were in it rarely talked about it and I knew better than to ask. My mother is 90 and Scottish. I've heard a number of her memories in the last few years and it's still raw. She was 7 when Poland fell.

 

[LVSteve]

My grandad was RAF Bomber Command ground crew. Some of his stories of cleaning up the inside of a Lancaster that had crossed paths with flak or a night fighter were pretty gory. Some of the things that happened were funny in a dark way. A couple that stuck in my mind.

One day a Polish officer got careless around some running aircraft at a dispersal area on the edge of the base and was thoroughly decapitated. After the mission had departed the ground mob were assembled and ordered to search the neighboring field for the missing head. Grandad got lucky...somebody else found it.

One night a Lancaster aborted before leaving its dispersal for a bombing mission. It was decided that they would look at it in the morning due to the ops tempo. So, next day grandad is out there and a new guy had climbed into the plane and shortly afterwards the bomb doors opened. Well, seems somebody had forget to get the armorers over to remove the two 4000 lb "Cookies" and whatever else was in there before the maintenance guys got there. "Blimey!! Hey, Billy, don't touch anything else in there, she's still bombed up". Billy looked a bit ashen and appeared to make a quick move to exit the cockpit. At this point nobody is certain what happened, but it seems likely that in his haste Billy caught the pilot's emergency dump lever. Two Cookies went "clunk" onto the concrete. Grandad said there was a split second of staring at the bombs by all outside the aircraft, then they all started running. After a couple of seconds Grandad says he stopped, because if those Cookies decided to go, then to continue running was futile. I understand Billy was banned from entering inside parked aircraft for the duration.

 

[kaaskop49]

Dad became ill during the North African invasion and was taken to an army hospital. His ship left without him. He got passage on another US Shipping Lines vessel which docked in Baltimore. He picked up $1200 cash/pay, no checks back then, and took the train to NYC. He was afraid to fall asleep, that his $ might be lifted. He entered the payroll office at the dock in Brooklyn and picked up another $1000 cash. As he left that office, the muzzle of a revolver was poked into his midsection. Fortunately, it was only a security guard making a cash delivery.

When he would get drunk, he would fall asleep on the subway and ride all night between the Bronx and Coney Island. A man in uniform, nobody would bother him. Different times.

Kaaskop49
Shield #5103

 

[Justin T]

That grandfather I mentioned up there never talked about anything but good memories. That trip out to Tinian. The trip home in a taxi cab, surprising his wife in full flight gear in August in west Texas.

Dementia took the rest.

My wife's grandad did sort of the same thing. He put a few more details (watered down a bit) down in an anthology that he contributed to. He was fond of saying, "we saw and did terrible things. And that's all you'll ever get out of me". But he also made sure people read that he was way more of a person than his service time alone.

 

[sheepdawg]

My dad was in the Wehrmacht, captured by the Americans near Metz, France, October 1944. You couldn't get much out of him though he would tell you he was treated well but when the Americans captured SS a 1911 was usually involved.

 

[Aggie1906]

A helluva fine man I knew went over with the 95th. He fought at Metz. House to house, through the walls. He never got any medal, but earned a battlefield commission. He was 18. He came home, graduated from UofM and became a GM plant manager. The hourly guys like him. Helluva man!