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As far as I know none of my ancestors ever flew planes, or did anything invloved in them. My Great-Great Uncle was the commander of an AA battery, does that count?  My grandad did do cool cold war stuff, he worked for the Army Security Agency decoding Chinese and North Korean signals stuff, or so I assume. After he retired in about 1980, he worked for the NSA, as the head of curriculum development.
Beardless fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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My grandfather was an enlisted man at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.  He was originally slated to be an infantryman when he did really, really well on a math aptitude test and became a computer.
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Jan 15, 2014 05:45
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You say "he became a computer" and I know that that means he crunched numbers, but I keep thinking that that means he became some sort of vacuum tube powered cyborg monstrosity 
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Jan 15, 2014 05:47
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Glad you mentioned TAMI-21, the few of those guys that are still left in RPAs are probably the bitterest motherfuckers in the community. Phanatic posted:My grandfather didn't go to flight school, but ended up in a 8th AAF maintenance unit with a license to steal every goddamned thing he could get his hands on: This owns so much.
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Jan 15, 2014 05:58
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Smiling Jack posted:I remember reading some WW2 memoir where a friend of the author was a civilian air racer, barnstormer and all around crack pilot. My jewish grandpa worked the radio on a B-17 in North Africa. I don't know how he ended up in AAF, but that story makes me wonder if it wasn't something similar. Of course he ended up a physicist so maybe they were right about the numbers thing.
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Jan 15, 2014 06:13
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iyaayas01 posted:This owns so much. It really does. I can almost hear him saying, "Sure, I might be able to lay hands on one of those, it just depends on how badly you need it, friend..."
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Jan 15, 2014 10:04
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My paternal grandpa was on the Nevada during Pearl Harbor. My dad still has a piece of shrapnel from one of the bombs dropped. He got sent to the Aleutians. My maternal grandpa was in the Pacific with the Army. Only story I really know is how he was driving a jeep that had broken down, was surrounded, and cursed up a storm enough that they didn't approach right away (thinking it was more than 1 person), which gave someone else time to come pick him up. Apparently he was in Japan after the end. Only thing I know of that was brought back were a couple swords. My dad was a P3 pilot in the 80s (before becoming a trainer pilot in Pensacola after my brother was born). Apparently the Gulf of Sidra incident back in 81 was prompted in part by his squadrons P3s running reconnaissance runs out of Sicily. Libya would send up the Fitters, and by then the P3s were gone. He also got a visit from a Mig 23, although I'm not sure if this was in the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic. As far as the trainer days go, only story I know about was him having to stay in Pensacola during Hurricane Elaina flying airplanes to an airport further inland while my mom drove my brother and I drove to Tallahasee to wait the storm out. NecessaryEvil fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 13:45
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My dad was drafted for a branch of FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt, the Swedish equivalent of the NSA) back in the 60's. Back then there were conscripts everywhere, even in SIGINT. His unit's job wasn't really listening to the Soviets though, but rather their task was to try to find and triangulate spy transmitters behind their own lines. Since those didn't really exist in peace though they ended up listening to the Soviets anyway; he's told me that while they naturally couldn't understand encrypted transmissions, it was easy to distinguish different stations from each other and especially during exercises in the Baltic Sea it could be very exciting to just try to figure out who was who and triangulating their positions for practice. There were also various numbers stations to keep an ear to, particularly one located in Poland with a stupidly big power output.
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Jan 15, 2014 13:54
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NecessaryEvil posted:He also got a visit from a Mig 23, although I'm not sure if this was in the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic. No real chance of this happening outside Cuba or Angola so that kinda narrows the options down!
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Jan 15, 2014 14:16
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PhotoKirk posted:My grandfather went to flight school, but ended up driving a forklift at Pearl Harbor during the war due to a ruptured eardrum*. My Paternal grandfather was trained to be a pilot in World War 2, but a few days before his unit was going to Europe he got into a car accident and damaged his vision just enough that he couldn't be sent overseas. Spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. For some reason my grandpa didn't like to talk about this, so I have no idea what he flew. Also, because he was a Newfoundlander (and thus at the time a British subject) I don't even know if he served in the RAF or RCAF. Your story makes me curious, though, if this was just a family story.
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Jan 15, 2014 14:58
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PhotoKirk posted:I like to think he was the inspiration for Milo Minderbender. Pretty sure mine was the inspiration for Crap Game in Kelly's Heroes.
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Jan 15, 2014 15:05
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Nebakenezzer posted:My Paternal grandfather was trained to be a pilot in World War 2, but a few days before his unit was going to Europe he got into a car accident and damaged his vision just enough that he couldn't be sent overseas. Spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. I have a suspicion as to why your grandfather maybe didn't like talking about his air experience. My maternal grandfather was a B-17 bombardier instructor for pretty much the whole war, never seeing combat. However, between training accidents (such as getting bumped from a flight that ended up crashing on takeoff and killing all aboard) and seeing so many of his students, including those that became his friends, die over Europe, he never talked about it with us grandkids. The only way I knew anything about his experiences is from what my mother told me, and even then she always framed it with how depressed and sad he looked when he talked about it and, when she went through his photo albums from his time in service, nearly all of the airmen in the pictures would get commentary from grandpa like "died over Berlin", "lost in Italy" and so forth. While not viscerally traumatic, like infantry men had to deal with, it had to have been wearying to see so many young men through training and to constantly hear where and when they were lost.
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Jan 15, 2014 15:32
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My paternal grandfather flew B-24s, spent some time in North Africa, and flew out of England during and around the D-Day invasion. I need to go back and make some higher resolution scans of these images, because these were taken ~10 years ago, with a scanner that was pretty old at the time.                  My maternal grandfather was in the Corps of Engineers, made it to both Europe and Japan, and ended up sending himself home several crates of Japanese guns during the occupation. Of course, most of them were given to friends, and his Type 2 paratrooper rifle was stolen, so the only thing that is still around is a Nambu in pretty good condition with matching holster. My uncle has it, and says he'll pass it on to me at some point.
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Jan 15, 2014 15:46
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My maternal grandfather worked as a lawyer for Uncle Sam and I don't think he ever served in the military. My paternal grandfather missed WWII due to a motorcycle accident but was with the Army as a surgeon in occupied Japan and Korea. My great-uncle was killed during the Battle of the Bulge - we still have a few photos of him and unit badges, but they seem to be from much earlier so I never made much headway learning more than that about him.
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Jan 15, 2014 16:13
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My paternal grandfather was a bomber mechanic (B-17 or B-29, I forget which). While he was in basic training, his unit was asked for one man to volunteer for chemical warfare training. Obviously you never, ever volunteer for anything in the Army, so someone got voluntold, and my grandfather ended up being selected. While he was off in chemical warfare training, the rest of his unit was sent to North Africa, and got slaughtered almost down to the last man. At least that's (as several other people have said) the family story. My maternal grandfather didn't directly go the military route, but he did get his master's in electrical engineering from Arizona State, then went to work for IBM, where he helped design the guidance systems for the Mercury and Gemini programs. I've asked him for stories about that before, but he doesn't really have any; apparently designing electrical systems is not the stuff of epic poetry, no matter how grand the application ends up being. I still can't imagine the feeling of watching a rocket go up and thinking "Yeah, I helped put that thing together," followed immediately by "I hope I did it right."
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Jan 15, 2014 22:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:My Paternal grandfather was trained to be a pilot in World War 2, but a few days before his unit was going to Europe he got into a car accident and damaged his vision just enough that he couldn't be sent overseas. Spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. This is really similar to my granddad, I am not sure why he didn't get sent over but he never talked about his time as a pilot instructor either. It was for the RCAF and he taught on Harvards, I believe. Once the war was over he was an accountant for 35 years or so, and didn't keep his pilot's license.
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Jan 15, 2014 22:38
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My Grandpa (Dad's side) was a member of the Greek Resistance, but he died when I was little so I never heard cool stories. My Grandpa (Mom's side) was in the Navy. The only story I know of his was the one where he apparently shot the tow-cable for the target in tail gunnery practice.
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Jan 15, 2014 23:23
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My maternal grandfather served in the Navy in Alaska as a weatherman. Later he served aboard a troopship as a weatherman ferrying men back and forth from Japan and locations throughout the Pacific. At one point shortly after the surrender his ship called at Guam, where one of my great-uncles (his brother) was serving with the Marines. He'd been there from the beginning of the battle and at the time his unit was mopping up the last resistance. My grandfather came ashore to see him; his brother declined because he'd have to miss lunch. He (the brother, not my grandfather) never spoke about the war. Another great uncle of mine flew C-47s for the US Army Air Forces in the Burma-India-China Theater. He flew supplies over the Himalayas in support of American and Nationalist Chinese forces. After the war he became mildly famous for creating the Empire Today jingle. His likeness is still used in their commercials. e: I guess Wikipedia says he was on ground convoys but my mother has always said he flew planes and it's wikipedia. Who knows. Mortabis fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 23:43
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Growing up in the 70s and 80s you'd be surrounded by older guys who had served in WWII, and sometimes WWI, with lots of cool stories that didn't necessarily involve battlefield heroics or cool airplanes. I went to the same barbershop from 1979-2007 and the barbers were two old guys named Hawk and Mac. Mostly they told stories about fishing and hunting and whatnot, but when I was in high school and got interested in history, I asked them about their service days. Mac worked on an oil tanker in WWII, which sounds boring except that they were particularly lucrative targets and a lot of ships got sunk. Hawk was slightly younger and was drafted during the Korean conflict, and spent those years working as an encryptor for the Army stationed in Germany. I'd read a bit about the subject at the time and brought up the Enigma machine with its eight rotors. "We had something similar,' he said, "except that by then there were versions with ten or twelve wheels, including a small one for field use." They had a primitive fax machine (the technology had been around since the 20s) that they used to fax Playboy centerfolds to remote bases. One of my great-great uncles was a Navy cook in WWII, and brought all of his recipes home. The man hated using any measuring device smaller than a gallon jug, and loved freezing/canning/donating vast quantities of food.
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Jan 16, 2014 00:27
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My maternal grandfather response to Pearl Harbor was to grab his friends, drive to the National Guard Armory here on Oahu to grab mattresses to bring for the wounded only to get turned away from the gates of Pearl because he was Japanese. He tried several times to join the 442nd RCT but kept getting rejected since as a farmer, growing food for Hawaii was more important then providing another warm body to the front lines. On the plus side though, our family was pretty much exempt from rationing due to the above reason and given the 442nd's horrific casualty rate, I'm not certain that I would be here if he managed to sign up.
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Jan 16, 2014 00:29
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Waldstein Sonata posted:I have a suspicion as to why your grandfather maybe didn't like talking about his air experience. My maternal grandfather was a B-17 bombardier instructor for pretty much the whole war, never seeing combat. However, between training accidents (such as getting bumped from a flight that ended up crashing on takeoff and killing all aboard) and seeing so many of his students, including those that became his friends, die over Europe, he never talked about it with us grandkids. The only way I knew anything about his experiences is from what my mother told me, and even then she always framed it with how depressed and sad he looked when he talked about it and, when she went through his photo albums from his time in service, nearly all of the airmen in the pictures would get commentary from grandpa like "died over Berlin", "lost in Italy" and so forth. While not viscerally traumatic, like infantry men had to deal with, it had to have been wearying to see so many young men through training and to constantly hear where and when they were lost. Lost 3 of my former students so far between OEF and OIF and another 2 coworkers, poo poo sucks even when it's genuinely unavoidable. It's not just the feeling of failure, but there's a lot of survivors guilt. "Could have been me/should have been me" type thinking ensues even when you just train piddly stuff. It's a hell of a motivator to keep training realistic when it's no longer a matter of IF it happens again, but when.
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Jan 16, 2014 00:51
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My paternal grandfather was in the Coast Guard doing convoy escort in the Atlantic. My maternal grandfather was a naval aircraft mechanic whose carrier was sunk in the Pacific. Had a neat knife he had made out of a bayonet blade and pieces of aircraft canopy he had stacked and shaped into a hilt which my uncle still has. Actually just about every family member I can think of off-hand joined the Navy or Navy-ish service, allegedly because they had better food. Well, except for my maternal greatuncle, who ended up carrying a flamethrower with the Marines on Guadalcanal and points beyond. I never met the man but apparently the stories he shared were mainly about amusing things, not so much about burning Japanese soldiers to death in bunkers.
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Jan 16, 2014 01:18
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My maternal grandfather continued a time-honored Wop tradition of avoiding any combat by dodging the WW2 draft, and spending the war being greasy in NYC. I'm told I have a great-uncle or two who stood up to the Americans at Anzio or thereabouts. And by "stood up" I mean threw down their rifles the moment the Americans landed, most likely while exclaiming, "Mama Mia!"
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Jan 16, 2014 01:36
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Oxford Comma posted:My maternal grandfather continued a time-honored Wop tradition of avoiding any combat by dodging the WW2 draft, and spending the war being greasy in NYC. I'm told I have a great-uncle or two who stood up to the Americans at Anzio or thereabouts. And by "stood up" I mean threw down their rifles the moment the Americans landed, most likely while exclaiming, "Mama Mia!" Family legend has it when the US entered World War I, my great-greatuncles joined the Army, were shipped to Europe, promptly deserted and spent the war hanging out in their old stomping grounds in Naples. After the war was over they put their uniforms back on, presented themselves to the Army, and claimed they had been captured. Best vacation ever.
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Jan 16, 2014 01:42
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My paternal grandfather did ROTC through med school, but when WWII kicked off they needed infantry officers worse than docs, so he ended up doing a bunch of weird poo poo in North Africa lots of good stories there, mostly hunting boar in the Atlas mountains with his service rifle, and using gunpowder from shells sent back for testing at the depot to blow up the mosquito wigglers in the nearby lagoon next to the depot he was stationed at (which once resulted in an explosion that cut power to all of Marrakech). Ended up as a liason officer with a British Commando unit that dropped in to Messina a few weeks ahead of Operation Husky. He didn't talk about that, apparently his unit took serious casualties, and he had battle dreams till he died. Paternal grandmother worked a munitions factory in Cleveland. Maternal grandfather was a photographer with a Catalina unit doing mapping work in South America and Greenland. Most of his stories were about fishing. He was also a plankholder on the Midway, and had a bunch of cool immediately postwar kodachromes that I show off here from time to time. Maternal grandmother was a WAVE.
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Jan 16, 2014 01:49
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My maternal grandfather was an engineer in WWII in the Pacific. There are supposed to be photo-albums floating around the family. My father in law was with the British/Polish Army at Monte Cassino, and my father was in the National Guard in the 60's and 70's. His claim to fame was beating hippies in the Democratic Riots in Chicago.
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Jan 16, 2014 01:56
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Wow, the posters in this thread are older than I thought. My maternal grandfather was in Vietnam (enlisted in the late 50's) as a flight engineer, and I evidently had a great-great uncle in The Devil's Brigade.
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Jan 16, 2014 02:22
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My paternal grandfather joined the Army in 1940, during the pre-war buildup, as a way of getting some extra cash and to have a steady paycheck to send back to my grandmother. He served in the Kentucky National Guard in the 2nd Bn of the 138th Field Artillery and was en-route from San Francisco to the Philippines when Pearl Harbor happened. They were turned around and returned to the US. Later on he participated in the re-taking of the Philippines and saw some really loving heavy combat. He never talked about it much, but my uncles have some stories about him mentioning a few times how he used his carbine almost as much as he used his cannon. Later on he was in the 198th Field Artillery when they were sent to Okinawa. He saw some really hosed up things between those two campaigns and after the war fully supported all of his three sons' efforts to stay the gently caress out of Vietnam. My maternal grandfather served on the USS Callaway, a coast guard troop transport. His ship supported landings all over the Pacific and took a kamakazie off Luzon that killed a poo poo ton of people. He probably should have died there, but a buddy of his took his watch so he could play in a game of cards, and the friend died instead. After the war he used the money he made playing poker in the Coast Guard to open a gas station, which promptly went out of business because he kept giving gas away to his friends. He's the person I inherited that German Knight's Cross I have from - our best guess is he won it playing poker with other vets after the war. He died of cancer when my mom was 9 and the medal was in a box with a bunch of "old army poo poo" my grandmother sent me when I was a little kid starting to get interested in history.
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Jan 16, 2014 02:25
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My grandparents did jack squat seeing as Ireland was neutral in the Emergency.
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Jan 16, 2014 02:31
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TheNakedJimbo posted:I've asked him for stories about that before, but he doesn't really have any; apparently designing electrical systems is not the stuff of epic poetry, no matter how grand the application ends up being. I still can't imagine the feeling of watching a rocket go up and thinking "Yeah, I helped put that thing together," followed immediately by "I hope I did it right." It's still basically exactly like this. VV - More like 'I loving I hope they don't get the weird software bug that I couldn't track down that one time and caused everything to crash awesomely' or 'Oh the radar says that the ship that you were tracking had an altitude of -5000 feet, are you sure you weren't tracking a submarine '
Plinkey fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Jan 16, 2014 |
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Jan 16, 2014 02:39
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"Huh, I'm not sure if I tightened that bolt..."
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Jan 16, 2014 02:47
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Duckboat posted:Wow, the posters in this thread are older than I thought. My maternal grandfather was in Vietnam (enlisted in the late 50's) as a flight engineer, and I evidently had a great-great uncle in The Devil's Brigade. Hey! We're not that old. I was born in 1976, and got to spend time as a kid with my great-grandfathers that had served in WWI. In reference to my aforementioned barbershop story, I had a guy in the chair next to me one time that was 102 and had lied about his age to join the Army at 16. He wasn't bragging, his 60-year old granddaughter that drove him there was telling me his story. I had a great uncle in Air Force/intelligence roles that was stationed at Thule in Greenland and when he got bored, he'd patch through multiple relay stations and talk to himself on the phone with the delay. He also got a pack of sled dogs and would go for long runs on the weekend just to get away for a while.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:16
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Did I miss the discussion of this news story? Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact' Two weeks before Germany invaded Poland as well as being prior to the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. Pretty crazy poo poo 
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Jan 16, 2014 03:24
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Oh man, Grandpa talk, yes. My maternal grandfather was born in Switzerland and came to the US in the 20's. He landed on D-Day (or D-Day+1, not in the initial wave), and because he was fluent in German, apparently he assisted in interrogations with some POWs. My favorite story is how he was busted back down to PFC after decking a prisoner who said something disrespectful in German, not knowing my grandfather could understand him. My other grandfather was on the USS Denver in the Pacific, and survived a torpedo strike, which got the Denver towed back to San Diego and gave him a month off to hitch a ride back to Boston on random trains to see his family. Back in 2002, I was showing him how to use the internet, and we discovered the crew of the Denver did an annual reunion at different spots around the country. The 2003 reunion was in Albuquerque, so he and my dad made plans to go. He passed away before that, so I went in his place. Even though it was a small gathering, it was such an awesome experience being able to sit down with all these old vets who knew my grandfather. We even discovered that the 2002 reunion was held at the Hilton a quarter mile from my house. If only I had looked into it a month earlier 
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Jan 16, 2014 03:30
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My grandfather was a rifle instructor and my grandmother was a cook on the base he worked at.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:38
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Totally TWISTED posted:Did I miss the discussion of this news story? "Germany" didn't invade Poland. Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland in a coordinated offensive, splitting the country as had been agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That's one of the major reasons behind Poland capitulating before France and Britain could mobilize.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:39
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Warbadger posted:"Germany" didn't invade Poland. Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland in a coordinated offensive, splitting the country as had been agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That's one of the major reasons behind Poland capitulating before France and Britain could mobilize. Derp don't know why I wrote that. Still not really the point of my post, unless you actually think Poland could have held only Germany off long enough for France and Britain to actually be useful?
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Jan 16, 2014 03:41
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Totally TWISTED posted:Derp don't know why I wrote that. Still not really the point of my post, unless you actually think Poland could have held only Germany off long enough for France and Britain to actually be useful? The USSR suddenly revealing itself to be a German ally (and completely enveloping the Polish armies) basically put the brakes on any immediate allied intervention in Poland while simultaneously forcing the Polish military units to surrender (most which were still more or less intact). It actually is pretty likely that without the USSR getting involved the war in Poland would been a much longer and bloodier affair for the Germans. Edit: The best part is that the Soviets had a non-aggression pact with the Polish at the time. And it's not like them cooperating with the Nazis was a new thing. They had already been assisting Nazi Germany in military matters for over a decade with poo poo like joint development, testing, and training of crews for tanks and building arms and ammunition covertly in violation of the Versailles treaty - in both cases by simply doing it inside of the USSR! Edit2: Also hilarious is the idea that the Soviets were totally *forced* to ally with the Germans and invade half of Europe because those mean and totally unreasonable Poles wouldn't permit Stalin to march a million man army into their country and park it there before any hostilities began. I mean after all, it wasn't like the USSR was run a megalomaniac and about to inva..HAHAHAHA Warbadger fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Jan 16, 2014 |
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Jan 16, 2014 03:49
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25753040 Further problems with the ballistic missile crowd in the USAF, I gather. That said, my dad's parent's survived the German occupation of the Netherlands. Several of their family members were not so lucky. Oma's family was quite active in the resistance and she lost at least one cousin to the old fake surrender trick that some German troops pulled during the latter days of the Second World War. Opa's family sheltered Jews who were trying to flee continental Europe, or at least stay out of the clutches of the Nazis. Opa and his siblings were always told that the people staying with them were relatives whose homes had been destroyed by bombing-- they never knew who they really were. About 20 years ago, the son of one of the couples that passed through Opa's home contacted him to say thank you and to hopefully let his parents (who were by that point long dead) know that they had survived, had a family and made a very nice life for themselves. There was at least one other couple, but I don't think anyone ever heard from them again. I hope that they made it away and lived a long and happy life together, but we just don't know. Mum's family were farmers in Atlantic Canada. They could have opted to largely remained on the farm as there was an exemption from the draft for farm labour but my great-grandfather was something of a tyrant and by the sounds of things everyone got out as soon as they could. A couple of my great uncles joined the army and saw heavy combat along the Rhine, another was an engineer in the navy, two of my aunts (both of whom were beyond brilliant) did code work for the RCN and the last that served joined the RCAF as a firefighter and did a lot of rescue and recovery work during the Blitz. He went overseas in 1939 not long after having gotten engaged and came back in 1946 to discover that his fiancee had married another man and had children... without bothering to tell him otherwise. He never recovered from the war or that and ended his life in the 60s, with the family spending the next fifty years in denial. We only found out what truly happened a couple of years ago. I had a maternal great grandfather fight at Vimy Ridge in 1917 too, but that's a story for another day.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:52
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My paternal great-grandfather got a Purple Heart for getting poisoned in Italy. This was a group event and I think someone doped the airbase water supply or something, not just a spoiled food thing. I'm not positive of the timeline because I'd thought he spent the whole war in the Pacific. Stayed in at least through Korea and ended up retiring as a Chief Master Sergeant. Maternal grandpa was drafted into the Tsar's Army but was never the martial type; headed west after the Revolution went sour, settled in France, ended up in hiding, got ratted out by Vichy sympathizers and broken in a Nazi work camp. He lived to see the end of the war, barely, which was far more than many of his sibs and children could say. Luckily he had a lot of kids.
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Jan 16, 2014 04:26
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