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gradenko_2000 posted:My paternal grandfather survived the Bataan Death March. Then it was just the Bataan March to him. 
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Dec 22, 2014 12:20
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Some of you fuckers being here to make posts in this thread seems to have been an alarmingly close-run thing.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:00
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Disinterested posted:Some of you fuckers being here to make posts in this thread seems to have been an alarmingly close-run thing. Last year I posted an exert from my Granddad's battalion war diary (10th Royal Berkshires). They invaded Sicily and got shot up a fair bit there, then took part in the landings in Italy and repeatedly get shot up and reinforced there. Then their brigade gets broken up due to casualties and they get posted as an independent battalion to the Anzio beachhead just in time to get hit in the face by a whole Panzergrenadier regiment. In one day they take 90% casualties and are reduced to two platoons, plus a mortar squad, the HQ security squad, and every chef, runner and driver they can find and thrust a rifle into the hands of. My Granddad never talked about the war much (to his incredibly naive and in retrospect insensitive grandchildren) but he was forever incredibly bitter about how the Anzio campaign was completely blotched and the result was him having to see the people he'd spent four years living with and caring for thrown into a pointless meatgrinder.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:38
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Disinterested posted:Some of you fuckers being here to make posts in this thread seems to have been an alarmingly close-run thing. For a different friend of mine, his great-granddad managed to bed, and impregnate, a poor Dorset farmgirl with the help of his shiny Parachutist Badge in 1944, maybe just shy of June 6. On D-day itself, his C-47 ate a flak shell and crashed, killing 17 paratroopers and an unwitting baby daddy. The girl didn't get a widow's pension, unfortunately. So my friend owes his existence to a single sleazy encounter between two people who, at most, knew each other for a week or two. Nothing to do with war, but before I was born the doctors realized that I'd twisted my umbilical cord into several knots and had to do a quick C-section to save me. If I ever feel too sentimental about history I think about how I would surely have been food for stray dogs if I'd been born earlier.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:49
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Disinterested posted:Some of you fuckers being here to make posts in this thread seems to have been an alarmingly close-run thing. Don't look up the Toba bottleneck theory. e: Also unrelated to war, my father decided one wintry day in Connecticut to paint his old beater car in a closed garage with a kerosene heater running in the corner. Chances are he was smoking a cigarette as well but he doesn't recall whether or not he was smoking - probably stepped away from the car to smoke so as not to get ash in the wet paint. Had that poo poo gone up, I wouldn't have been born. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 13:52
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My great-grandfather was a Major in the Red Army, his battalion was the one to take the Reichstag. My grandfather on that side of the family was boring, as he only fixed airplanes, but the grandfather on the other side was quite a bit more fascinating. He served in the Red Navy between wars as a commander of something not very important, fought in the Winter War, invented a fighter pilot training device (as a result of which it turned out most of his airmen couldn't lead a target worth a drat). That's when the brass realised he was a bit more important than some peasant conscript, so they kept him in the rear during the Great Patriotic War. His wife was trained as a spy, but then someone figured out that dropping a Jewish spy into Germany wasn't the smartest idea, so she stayed to teach at the spy school.
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Dec 22, 2014 14:59
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My paternal grandfather was too young to serve in WW2. My maternal grandfather was a first generation Japanese-American (his parents were immigrants) living in California so you can imagine what happened to his family (Manzanar). My maternal grandmother was interned as well. Grandpa Jamwad ended up volunteering for the army and served in Europe. He didn't like to talk about it very much so I don't really have any great stories beyond the fact that he chose to serve at all. I always thought it was pretty nuts that he volunteered to fight the Nazis after his family lost everything and were put in camps back home, I can't say that I would do the same.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:12
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Ensign Expendable posted:His wife was trained as a spy, but then someone figured out that dropping a Jewish spy into Germany wasn't the smartest idea, so she stayed to teach at the spy school. Would it have made a difference? It's not like Nazi science could have told them, and death is the sentence for spies - Jews or no. I guess the emotional effect for the spy might be the greatest consideration.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:15
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Well if the worst happened to her, we wouldn't have the man himself giving us the low down on Russian and Soviet mil tech. And we can all agree that would kind of suck.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:29
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My direct line of grand and great-grand parents all fell into the wrong age brackets to fight in any of the big wars, but I had great-uncles and great-great uncles that were involved in the fighting. One was in the Red Army in Stalingrad, another was with the US in North Africa and into Sicily and Italy. Beyond that I unfortunately don't know all that much as while the one great uncle that was with the US Army said his service was pretty uneventful, we don't know what happened to the other one in the Red Army due to how things happened with my great-grandparents, though supposedly he survive to the end of the war.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:40
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We should gather up the service arms everyone served in and work out which grognard poster is the luckiest to be born. I think least fortunate award is maybe going to the two guys whose grandfathers were on a pleasure cruise in Brazil for the US Navy. Anyone with a u-boating grandfather?
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Dec 22, 2014 15:48
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Disinterested posted:We should gather up the service arms everyone served in and work out which grognard poster is the luckiest to be born. The closest either of my grandparents came to the actual dangerous part of war was one Japanese dude who didn't know the war was over. Otherwise it was USO and desk duty back in the states without much danger because of age and disability.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:55
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Speaking of this stuff, would I be able to obtain service records of my grandfathers? Or do they only accept requests from living next of kin (I.e. my parents?) One (Maternal) was in the AF but was too young to have flown in WWII, and died in '71. Grandmother says he was a test pilot but I have my doubts since she makes poo poo up all the time. Death was unrelated to service but I think Korean war service might line up if a little on the early side. The other (Paternal) is the PFC in Europe from '43-'46.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:01
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xthetenth posted:The closest either of my grandparents came to the actual dangerous part of war was one Japanese dude who didn't know the war was over. Otherwise it was USO and desk duty back in the states without much danger because of age and disability. I think we'd have to disqualify desk-workers and people who peaced out with disability. Unless there is some hilarious story about them almost meeting a violent end through incompetence or something else.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:08
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One grandpa got his degree in electrical engineering and took a commission pre-war in the signal corps to work on prototype radars. He got sent over to England on a TOP SECRET MISSION right after the war kicked off as a sort of tech liaison (read: to steal British radar tech) so he was there throughout the phony war/Battle of France/Battle of Britain/Blitz. He was got promoted to full colonel pretty soon after the US entered the and was sent to India where he was the deputy SEAC signals chief for a couple of years. He was also a pretty proficient pianist and (allegedly) Lord Mountbatten was very fond of hearing him play which my grandpa quite detested. The other grandpa flew B-24s as a part of "the hump" missions, which must have sucked so much rear end. He flew a couple of missions with Gene Autry as his copilot and they got along quite swimmingly as they were both from Oklahoma.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:28
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FAUXTON posted:Speaking of this stuff, would I be able to obtain service records of my grandfathers? Or do they only accept requests from living next of kin (I.e. my parents?) WWII archives are largely open, so unless they were involved in some internal investigations or something, the records should be public.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:43
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Disinterested posted:Anyone with a u-boating grandfather? I have a distant relative whose uboat never came back, but I cannot remember my relation, or what boat. A great-great-uncle, IIRC. My maternal grandfather served aboard USS Kearsarge during the Korean War, as part of the deck department. (Not flight deck.) My paternal grandfather was a USAAF Combat Glider pilot, but finished Assault Glider school too late for Europe. He had orders for the pacific when the war ended, but never left the mainland. My father served in The 12th Engineer Battalion (Airborne,) 8th Infantry Division. He was a combat medic, but ended up as the CO's driver, most of the time. He spent his entire enlistment after jump school in and about Dexheim, West Germany, 1967-1971. I have an Uncle who also served on a carrier, but I don't know which one, and a cousin who was in the 82nd Airborne during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I stayed out. 
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Dec 22, 2014 16:43
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Disinterested posted:I think we'd have to disqualify desk-workers and people who peaced out with disability. Unless there is some hilarious story about them almost meeting a violent end through incompetence or something else. Yeah. My paternal grandfather got in a bus wreck in the 20s or 30s, and by the time he was out of traction one of his legs was an inch or two shorter and he couldn't run. For a while he was working as a draftsman in the Empire State Building and somehow managed to get up to his job when the bomber crash knocked out the elevators, but neither grandfather was likely to get close to combat, so it's not like they lucked out in a big way, unlike the dudes getting sent to Brazil.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:52
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Disinterested posted:Anyone with a u-boating grandfather? One of my best friends growing up had a grandpa who was a sailor on a u-boat. It made it an especially  type moment when I saw u-boat crew casualty statistics for the first time.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:18
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Disinterested posted:Assuming such a person wasn't KIA, what would have been the outcome for a person like that in Denmark after the war? As luck would have it, there was an article about the Free Corps in todays paper! They interviewed a dude who actually went fighting with them, and he was incarcerated for 1½ year for serving as an Ostfront volunteer. He was (understandably, I'll grant) pissed about this, because the Danish government of the time explicitly allowed civilians (and officers of the Royal Danish Army!) to sign up with the SS in a special law, so they thought they were home free. Changing the rules was a bit of a kick in the rear end for him, as he'd just survived seeing all his friendy get blown to poo poo by the soviet advance.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:37
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xthetenth posted:The closest either of my grandparents came to the actual dangerous part of war was one Japanese dude who didn't know the war was over. Otherwise it was USO and desk duty back in the states without much danger because of age and disability. Wait, what? One of your grandparents was a Japanese holdout? Or am I misunderstanding something? Do you have any stories from him?
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Dec 22, 2014 17:44
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Man, this is really interesting stuff to read. Also, my thanks to the goons who answered my question.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:47
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There could be a whole thread about researching old war records and family history, if there isn't already. It is interesting enough, and people find it quite difficult. I could probably run errands for a few people down at the National Archives in Kew, if a few people wanted (I'm vaguely used to handling this sort of material - although I've spent more time there reading foreign office letters between the US and the UK. These mostly consist of us asking for our black subjects back who have been stolen by slavers, and thanks being passed on for captains who have saved drowning sailors).
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Dec 22, 2014 17:49
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I have a grandfather who was supposed to land on D-Day, but his regiment got reshuffled and he landed a week later. He was on payroll! . Also have a great-grandfather who was drafted into the tsar's army during WW1, also fought the Bolsheviks during the revolution. Eventually managed to escape to Canada.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:12
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Are there any good theoretical works discussing why people join resistance movements, specifically the WW2 ones?
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Dec 22, 2014 18:34
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Tomn posted:Wait, what? One of your grandparents was a Japanese holdout? Or am I misunderstanding something? Do you have any stories from him? Nahh, he was the one with the messed up leg, and he joined the USO to entertain the troops. He got shot at by a holdout who didn't know the war was done. I think he met my grandmother there, she apparently won a lot of bets shooting and a lot of card games and had to drag all the guys into one last card game so she could lose it back.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:36
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Ensign Expendable posted:WWII archives are largely open, so unless they were involved in some internal investigations or something, the records should be public. For all I know there could have been. How likely is an enlistee to be at PFC after about 3 years of service? Anyway, I'll take a look into requesting their dossiers or portfolios or whatever the term is. I assume it would include stuff like bases where they trained, deployment orders, any kind of reports from superiors, etc? In other news only mildly military related, my girlfriend is visiting family and found this old NASA tour booklet from the late 60's/70's (when the tours were operated by TWA) and I assume it's full of that unique blend of "SCIENCE IS AWESOME/AMERICA gently caress YEAH" that kind of characterized the space race on this side of the curtain. Considering asking her to bring it home to scan but it was her (dead) grandfather's so she may prefer to leave it with her (full of piss and vinegar and still very much alive) grandmother.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:51
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Both my grandfathers were in the US Navy during WWII. My maternal grandfather was an officer on the USS Bunker Hill. We have his diary from the war-- I should try to find it and scan it in or something, but the main thing I remember is that after this happened, he apparently spent days and days doing paperwork in the aftermath of the attack as the ship was slowly towed back to port. My paternal grandfather was an enlisted sailor and I think he was in the Atlantic, but I don't really know much about it. Going further back-- a few people on the maternal side of my family fought for the Union in the American Civil War. One guy was an army doctor, and we have some spoons that were purportedly made from him melting down some of his pay money as a keepsake, which is (apparently?) something they did back then then. Even more vaguely, apparently some of that side of the family was kicking around back in the Revolution, but I don't know who they were or what they were up to, or if they even existed and aren't just a figment of our imagination.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:57
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100 Years Ago Time for Enver Pasha and his ego to either put up or shut up, as the blokes start marching on Sarikamis. Artois & Champagne continue grinding to an undignified halt. The Austrian garrison at Przemysl tries to break out, but nothing doing. And the paper has another in a semi-regular series of reports on growing anti-Austrian sentiment in Italy.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:39
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Both my Grandfathers served in the war, but I really only know about my maternal grandfather who was a paratrooper in the 101st airborne. My paternal grandfather allegedly flew planes for the army and was part of the testing in New Mexico, but he was a poor excuse for a father and abandoned my dad and his mother so I can't say I've ever met the guy My maternal grandfather though has some crazy stories. He jumped out over Normandy before D-Day and ended up getting wounded in Bastogne. Below I've copied some of his comments about the battle and his experience if anyones interested. quote:I was wounded four times. Three of those wounds came in one day, Jan. 7, 1945, in Belgium and the fourth on March 24, 1945, in the air en route to Germany. These dates are easy to remember because Jan. 7 was my [my brother's] birthday and March 24 was [my other brother's] birthday.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:17
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Some people found that they need to talk about their experiences to exorcise them. The grandfather of a friend of mine was such a guy. Here's what I heard. He was on the eastern front (when? where?), they pulled back for a bit and his superiors realized that some equipment that was meant to be transported from the previous position got stuck on the way. Soon the Russians will close up. Somehow they didn't manage to destroy they stuff, or didn't have the means atm and Redbeard's granddad volunteers to go back with a motor tractor (what's the right word? Zugmaschine) to pick up the Pak and the stuff or blow it up. Don't know if it was just him, but I'd suppose he was an Unteroffizier of some kind and had some guys with him. They go back, and instead of disabling the Pak, they manage to unfuck the whole thing and tow it. He goes back with it, but unknown to him, they had switched the guys in the forward position and forgot to tell them that he was out there and inbound. They're close and MG42 says "Grüß Gott". He managed to take a dive into the roadside ditch, and wasn't injured. I don't know if anyone else got hurt, but the picket probably just fired a warning salvo. Anyway, he doesn't seem to have realized the danger in going back for the stuff from the way that he told the story, but his superiors were pretty impressed that they brought back some equipment and the Pak, while the Russians were most likely close. That's how he got his Iron Cross, which he felt that he didn't deserve. There's another story that I've heard, where he recounted that they disabled a T34. The Russians came back at night and towed it away. The next day, they disabled it again (supposedly, it had some kind of painting or marking on it that made it stick out), at night the same thing happened and it was towed away once more. On the next day, they managed to set it on fire, and that was it. It didn't appear again. Speaking of war stories, there's a channel on youtube, where German soldiers tell some of their stories. No subtitles though, it's in German. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PzR61I2xUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJOPN4tz18 This gentleman was in officer training, and he wanted to get some heroic action at the front. It didn't turn out as he expected and he was put in a bad spot behind a ridge, where the enemy was about to appear about 50m in front of the position as they had to cross that ridge to attack them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9jhkyd40Jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JUBcP9KtXk https://www.youtube.com/user/GDN1940bis1949/videos Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 21:33
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Disinterested posted:That's not as boring as it could be at all. Why did he do it - he always wanted to move to America, or Italy was too much of a poo poo show? I have no idea what that means. When you finish eating bread, if there's any left, you're supposed to make the sign of the cross over it and put it in a small niche carved or built into the wall for that specific purpose. Mussolini was seen at least once by my grandfather not to do this; this was important, probably more important to him than the political murders, and I don't know why. Southern Italy had only a glancing relationship to the 20th century. Or, for that matter, the 19th. When my grandfather signed up the first thing the navy did was teach him Italian. As a second language. Classes and everything. Disinterested posted:We should gather up the service arms everyone served in and work out which grognard poster is the luckiest to be born. Grand Prize Winner posted:20 tragic bucks on Isonzo. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 23:13
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My own contribution to 'near misses': I know very distantly this guy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21890666 - he's good friends with friends of mine, and we went to the same university. His best friend from military academy was killed in another platoon. The next day he was assigned to take that job. The day after that, his replacement in his own unit was killed.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:01
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Here's a war story. Mr. Liebermann (not his real name) is way over his mid-90s and he's one of my dad's patients. He's also a Holocaust survivor, and he never talked about it until his oldest daughter overheard him muttering some things as he came out of anaesthesia after an operation a few years ago. His daughter talked to my father, and my father (because he knows I'm getting a PhD in history but he's not entirely sure what I do, specifically) talked to me. We decided I would interview him, because I am a massive naive idiot. Dad brought a bottle of wine because Mr. Liebermann is Hungarian and my father believes Hungarians respect the Italian ability to make wine. I have no idea if this is true, but for health reasons the old man doesn't drink. So I sat there with my tape recorder spinning and I asked him some things. He complimented my father on his smart young son--I wear pants and have short hair and Mr. Liebermann is very old. But he still knows Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, English, and probably also German, as well as what it takes to be a cantor. During the First World War, he was poor. His mother, who had married beneath her because she loved his father, sold butter and eggs to the soldiers to pick up a little cash. "They bought the food because they were Hungarian soldiers. The Germans...the Germans got everything." He sat outside the window of the religious school when classes were going on, since he couldn't afford to attend: he asked the teacher if he could attend for free and when the teacher said no, he recited the lessons from memory. He let him in. "The boys to my left, the boys to my right. All dead now." He remembers riots after the war. He cut off his sidelocks and joined in, just to see what they were like. When he grew up, he went to seminary in Budapest, where he met a lot--he stressed this part, a lot--of hookers. "The first time, she had to show me how to put it in." They liked him, because he was kind and good looking. I had noticed the picture of Mr. Liebermann as a young man on the table when I went in, and the good looking part is true. But a plain girl had fallen in love with him, whom his father told him to marry, not to waste time on nightlife since things were so uncertain. He did, and three days later he was picked up. The Holocaust, for Hungarian Jews, began to happen only after Hungary was occupied by their erstwhile allies in 1944, and then it happened very quickly. He said they had him digging "a bunker." (Slave labor? Weapons manufacturing?) He said it was cold, and that beatings hurt more when you're cold. I don't remember if he said he had been working too slowly, or if it was for no reason at all, but two guards set a dog on him. Mr. Liebermann threw out his arms, not caring if he lived or died. The dog paused, sat down next to him, and licked his hand. One of the guards raised his pistol, and the other one grabbed his arm. (Mr. Liebermann may be unclear about a whole bunch of things right now, but he remembers precisely what the man who tried to kill him and then saved his life looked like--short, fat, red hair.) "God saved him," he said. His wife, however, looked "pure Magyar." She was never picked up, and when Mr. Liebermann came home he saw a little girl, a toddler, run out the door to greet him. "I don't know whose she was," he said, ancient face wrinkling into a smile, "but she's mine now!" I got my brother in law to copy the tape to CDs, I gave one of them to Mr. Liebermann's daughter, and I kept the other myself. I've never listened to it and I don't think I ever will. And that was how I told some woman in New York or something that her father is actually either a Hungarian or connected to the German occupation government. I bet that year's Thanksgiving owned. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 01:36
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HEY GAL posted:Here's a war story. Wow. Although if I have the timeline right, Mr. Liebermann could have been the woman's biological father, if they conceived a baby around the time of the wedding.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:52
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Chamale posted:Wow. Although if I have the timeline right, Mr. Liebermann could have been the woman's biological father, if they conceived a baby around the time of the wedding.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:56
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Keep track of the number of lives you've potentially ruined, then get a tattoo commemorating it once you hit 20, like a video game achievement.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:58
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Most people on my American father's side were too young or too old for WWII. Had a great uncle in the marines in the Pacific and another on a destroyer, but don't know many details. My German grandfather's side of the family was chock full of nazis, some of which died, but I don't know too many details. He volunteered to join a Luftwaffe unit in France once he hit conscription age, partly out of patriotism but mostly out of "dear god send me anywhere but east." He drove a truck and eventually got taken prisoner by an American soldier, the first black man he ever saw. I spoke with my German grandmother a few years ago and wrote up a fairly detailed story of her wartime experiences, but I've changed computers and the hard copy is in a box somewhere. The gist was something like this: Her family was dirt poor, thanks to an uncle who got drunk one night and decided to let everyone in the bar know how he really felt about the nazis. The family got out of that trouble by signing over the farm to a local official in exchange for one (1) goose. They were living within spitting distance of the French border, so when war came they were temporarily evacuated to a village in Austria. She vividly remembered that Christmas because it was a totally rad traditional Austrian celebration with Krampus and everything. My great grandfather ended up being sent to Italy, where he died at Monte Cassino. The family didn't find out the details until years later, thanks to chance meeting on a bus with a veteran from the same unit. It seems he was with the trucks which were being kept in an orchard to camouflage them. Not well enough, apparently, as an American fighter plane ended up strafing them and killing him. Meanwhile my teenage grandmother was dealing with the occasional bombing raid, and they were so close to the border they ended up using an old prewar bunker as a bomb shelter. Eventually the allies arrived and the town was occupied by French troops from Morocco. Fortunately for my grandmother, she had a French surname, so the French put a mark on the front door indicating that the house was off limits. The rest of the town suffered widespread looting and a few rapes. The one anecdote that really sticks in my mind is how one night she was out late on some errand when bombs started dropping. She immediately jumped into a ditch by the side of the road, only to find it was already occupied by a dead cow. She was too terrified to move until morning, and spent the whole night next to the rotting animal. That's what I think about when I think about war.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:23
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There's a game called "This War of Mine" that goes with the whole not-soldier take on war. You're just some schmoe caught in a war so you need to avoid getting shot while foraging for food and fuel and scrap so you don't starve/get mugged/freeze to death. Word has it it's bleak. Like "rob an old couple while they passively stand by unable to do more than plead with you not to take their food" bleak.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:35
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:After the war this manifested in a general reluctance to return to the place you were originally from. My own family left their old home near agricultural Fresno, CA to settle in Chicago. Part of this was the general pattern of post war migration in search of better paying jobs, but part of it was an inability to face their old lives and how much had changed. My grandmothers family had sold their home and stored their possessions in a neighbors barn for safekeeping. When the war was over they were told the barn had burned down and everything was gone. There's always been an amount of suspicion that it was all just sold off at some point, and how can you live there with those kind of feelings of mistrust and shame and anger swirling around? They moved, the whole experience was buried in the past and studiously ignored until I kept asking about it. that's pretty much what happened with my grandmother's family - they lived in Seattle, got sent to Minidoka Camp in Idaho, and moved to New York post-war. they never really talked about the camps until my sister did a highschool history paper on them (I did mine on the WW2 strategic bombing campaign against Germany because I was a huge flight sim nerd), and none of the sons were old enough to enlist so the entire family survived the war.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:40
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