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Moon Slayer posted:I'm going away for a couple days, so this'll be the last update until Monday afternoon. In the meantime, please share your own stories of grandparents at war! These are great, thank you for sharing them. I'm struck by both the recognizable similarities and vast differences between what his wartime experiences were and my own WoT quasi-wartime, serving in the Navy but with the Marines as a greenside corpsman. Both my grandfathers served during World War II, although one only technically and neither in combat, but I think they're both interesting stories in terms of showing different aspects of the war from the ones that history tends to spotlight. My mother's father joined the Navy for what I suspect were similar reasons to your grandad. As a Central Texas farmboy who grew up during the Great Depression he wanted to do something as different as possible for what he saw as his inevitable term of service, so he joined the Navy rather than wait for the Army to draft him. (As a side note, I'm given to understand that this was actually a bit discouraged by the War Department bureaucracy because enlistment was unpredictable. By drafting people they could figure statistically that they'd have so many thousands of troops get through training and be ready by this date in this service, but if more people than expected enlisted ahead of schedule they'd have to make a small effort to find the next guys on the list and rework their plans. Apparently more than a few people after the whole machine got spun up were told by their local enlistment office to wait for their letter.) Anyway Grandpa A joined the Navy and seems to have tested as meeting a certain level of mathematical ability, so he was shunted into an aviation navigation training program. He did so well in that course that he was retained as an instructor and spent his war in Wichita, Kansas training navigators to not get lost in a PB4Y-2 Privateer (the Navy's patrol bomber version of a B-24 Liberator, distinguished by a single vertical stabilizer). Which you'd think would be a very safe posting, but he did in fact get injured when he was struck by a jeep being driven by a drunk sailor one night and broke a leg. It didn't really interfere with his duties and he healed up fine so they kept him in service until the war ended. After the war he used the GI Bill to go to college in Indiana, where he met my grandmother and got a history degree. He taught middle school and became a principal until he retired. I'll post my other grandfather's story later this evening.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 17:18 |
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