Hey how bout this family history

[Compassion]

My grandfather was a Civillian employee of the navy at Pearl Harbor at the outbreak of America's involvement. He recieved a citation from the War Department for staying at his post until the abandon... er... machine shop order was given.

Later he taught hand to hand combat to some submariners and fliers who were afraid of washing up onshore and having Japanese soldiers karate chopping them (wasa Judo a n Jujisu SHodan, the meaning of which I'm not sure of... did not keep up with the family business.. but you can see more of it here http://www.danzan.com/HTML/PEOPLE/j_cahill.html if you want). My father told me about him. He wasn't sure if the service men he taught were taking classes on their own or if it was some kind of extended training.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. I learned that becasue I asked my dad about the war since he gre up in Hawaii. He said that he hung out and watched the asttak on Saturday morning as an 8 year old and thoguht it was a great show. it was a good week for an 8 year old since they cancelled school.

[This message has been edited by Compassion (edited 01-20-2000).]

[sage]

My grandpa drove a Higgins boat (landing craft). I believe he was at the landings at Leyte, Saipan, Guam and Okinawa. His ship was present at Coral Sea; at Leyte they were rammed by a suicide boat. It blew a big hole in the soldier's barracks. The soldier's tried to run out as the water came in, but the lights in the section were out, and the deck had buckeled and opened, so that they ended up falling back into the flooding compartment. I believe most of the soldiers in (60 or 80) were killed.

A friend of the familily, since dead, was some kind of special forces liason in the Philipines. He was delivered there via submarine in (I believe) early 1942. He, and everyone with him, was immediately officially listed as MIA for the remainder of the war. He spent the next three years organizing philipino guerillas and providing intelligence. I believe he was dropped with six or eight men, and he was the only survivor. He was captured by the Japanese at least once, but escaped after being badly beaten (which led to later health issues and brain damage). I never had a chance to speak with him about this, as he had severe memory and motor cooridination problems, probably resulting at least in part from having someone hit him in the head with a rifle butt.

[MarkEzra]

My Uncle Dick Rosenstrauch was a medic in the 45th Inf Div. Uncle Dick has a disposition and personality of pure sunshine.He saw action in Western Europe and Germany. He never talks of the mangaled boys he cared for but only tells funny stories. His wife tells me he still awakens in the night screaming out names of now long dead comrades. God bless him.

My Father, Everette Ezra built "a ship a day" at the Kaiser shipyards of San Francisco. Towards the end of the war he was hired as a wilder for a small metal specialty shop. After getting a securty clearance he was assigned to work on a project. Building a fairly large, oval casement. One a many project the company did. A few years later When the Atomic Bomb secrets were stolen and the country was in the gripe of the "Red Scare", The FBI came to our door. Not more than 5-6 year old at the time I actually have a vivid recollection of the two men, both with slouch hats and long overcoats, intervwing my father. The questioned Dad about that Oval casement he had helped build...the "Fat Man" Atomic Bomb.

[Speedy]

Great thread.

As to what I know of my family. My paternal grandfather was a mechanic in the RAAF stationed at Darwin. Thats all I know of him as he died before I was born.

My maternal grandfather served in the RAN in the pacific both on surface ships and subs. He only talks about the war when he is drunk (being an ex-sailor he knows how to go on a bender, 1 to 2 weeks straight on the piss ). What he has told me includes his hating subs ( understandable as he is 6ft 3in tall and was a farmer before joining up). Also has stories of sewing up mates with lead so they would sink when buried at sea, as well as watching mates being eaten by sharks. The only thing he has to say about the Japanese is that he hated Kamikazes ( he was wounded shrapnel in the knee, from what I have heard this was from a kamikaze attack and that a couple of his mates were killed in it).

My maternal grandmother was a radio operator in the WAAAFs stationed at Townsville.

The only other relation that I have info on is my Uncle Jimmy (Great-Uncle) he served in the 9th Div 2AIF, one of the 'Rats of Tobruk'.

Sorry had another great uncle (can't remember his name, was my grandfathers older brother). He was in the 6th Div 2AIF however he was killed in a car accident while on embarkation leave in May? 1940.

[Guest ChrisC1009]

Both my uncles fought for the Germans in WWII. One was a scout (aufklarer) initially in the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, and then after recovering from wounds and actually being one of the few evacuated from Stalingrad was reassigned to the I want to say 198th Panzer Grenadier Regt. He fought against the US. in Italy, and then on the western front. He was in the Bulge, and ended the war by abandoning his achtrad )8 wheel armored car) at war's end. My other uncle was in the 26th Infantry (Dom) Division, also on the Eastern Front. He was captured by the Russians in winter of 1943 and was released in 1948. My mother's family didn't even know he was alive until 1946. Both are still living and are tough yet peaceful men. I imagine they were somewhat surprised when their sister (my mom) married an American Army officer (my dad). Their father, by the way, was in the German cavlary in WWI and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front. In WWII he was recalled for the French campaign as a Colonel of Veterinary Medicine to help care fro the large number of horses still in use by the German Army. I wish the guys would write a book.

Chris Carnes

Major, Cavalry

U.S. Army

[maxm2]

My father was in combat as a GI in Germany, coming in right after the Bulge had been contained. One evening his unit came to the banks of the Ruhr, a deep and swiftly moving river. It was Winter and very cold with snow on the ground. Some engineers brought in boats which they prepared and I believe were supposed to operate, but then they fled when Germans on the opposite bank started firing. My father and some others decided they had a better chance crossing than staying on the bank and getting shot up, so they got into the boats and started across. By this time it was dark, with tracers zipping overhead. Half way across the boat capsized.

My father was wearing ammo for the machine gun--eight bandoliers He had draped them across his shoulders, first left then right shoulder, which added about 30 pounds or so to his weight. When the boat capsized he went down like a shot. Instead of panicking, he realized that he had to get rid of the bandoliers, and took each one off, counting as he went to make sure he had taken off all of them. He ditched his pack and headed for the surface.

Unfortunately, he couldn't swim, and could only thrash around and call for help, which made the tracers start heading his way. Just when he was sure he was going down and dying, a hand grabbed him. It turned out to be an engineer in a small boat who hauled him across the front of the boat, got him back to the Allied side of the river, dumped him on the shore, and said: "You're on your own, white boy." (The engineer, obviously, was black!)

Second part of story: when my father returned to see my grandfather after the war, after greeting each other my grandfather said: "Wait a minute, I have something to show you." He went and got a slip of paper and gave it to my father. The paper had a date (in winter) and time (around midnight) on it. "At that date and time" my grandfather said, "I woke up because I heard you call for help." When my father figured out the date, it was the same time and date he was drowning in the Ruhr.

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Max Molinaro

[Simon Fox]

I was interested to read this thread and see all the different backgrounds. I didn't get a lot of chance to talk to my grandfathers about their WW2 experiences since they were in the UK and I was in Aussie and I had never visited there since my interest changed from ancient to modern military history.

My maternal grandfather was in the RAF as groundcrew (maintenance) in a big bomber base somewhere in the UK. He hated the war and didn't talk about it much. I think he felt that all those guys who lost their lives bombing German cities were an unnecessary waste. When people discuss 'Bomber' Harris and the German civilian victims of his policies they tend to forget that the very large number of RAF aircrew lost were also victims of his idiocy.

My paternal grandfather is more interesting. He was in the 79th armoured division (Hobarts' Funnies) and landed on D+1 or 2 I think. Though he was in the div HQ unit he drove the div Intelligence officer around in a jeep. They went all over the place (since the 79th supplied supporting armour to many operations) and though generally reluctant to talk had some hair raising stories of being behind enemy lines especially in the fluid situation following the Normandy breakout. He got pretty good at turning that jeep around fast. I find it a little hard to recall all the details but he had a couple of stories about being caught in traffic jams, in German convoys! He also told the tale of being directly behind the leading troop of Shermans on a side road when the first 3 (of 4) were knocked out by one fairly close range shot from a Tiger. He said himself and the 4th tank made record speed in reverse that day.

[JoshK]

My Dad's Uncle was a B-29 navigator in the PTO. Later he was the squadron (or wing) photographer. Immediately after the war, he told stories of BDA photos over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

A cousin of my Dad's (and my great Uncle's other nephew) was a PhD student at the University of Chicago at the outbreak the war. His on-campus job was to help out with his professor, Enrico Fermi, on a government project that was utilizing space in an unused squash court. He never talked about what he did, but he died of cancer at age 28 (no coincidence here), long before I was born.

Kind of ironic.

[Los]

My physics teacher told a story once of when he was growing up in New Jersey,his dad,also a physics professor (I think at Rutgers) who also worked on the Manhatten project.

IIRC They would all go down to the bus stop at times to drop off my teacher for school. My teacher said one day "Hey dad who's that strange man with the funny hair." His dad bent down to shush him and told him that strange man was a very smart scientist named Enrico Fermi.

Los

[Guest Bobb]

My father did the war as a defense industry worker. A petrolium chemist he helped see to the quality of aviation gasloine, toluene (as in TNT), and other products and had a hand in the recognition of some contaminant in gasoline that made it jell, napthinic acid as I recall.

Anyway out side of a brother, who went into the Aircorps in '44 and kept being jockyed around as personnel needs slowed towards the end the war so that he never was sent overseas in the confusion in the rear, I had numerous cousins and an uncle involved in varying degrees. The two who saw the most were Navy and Marine, one on a destroyer in 9 major Pacific battles and the other who saw action on Guadalcanal and another island or two. Another was on an Aircraft Carrier. Others served from the merchant marine to aircraft mechanic in the Army Air Corps. None suffered any scratches, to their hides. Can't say the same for their minds. One cousin required a rest cure and another, who served in Alaska, never did recover, spending the rest of his life under some degree of medical care by the VA. My father-in-law was with the 2nd Inf. Div. He crossed Omaha beach on D+2 and stayed with the division through to the end in Pilsen except for a period of recovery from pneumonia acquired on the Elsenborn Ridge. He was a radio operator and among those who dug in along side the cooks, supply clerks etc. for a possible last stand.

He was a non-talker mainly. I did get out of him one story about being assigned to drive the Division General about in a jeep and acting as his radio operator. They traveled along a tree-lined lane until they came out onto another road running at right angles. Down one arm of it sat a German Panzer. They did not stay around long enough to get a positive ID on it. I suppose my family was fairly representative of the overall use of personnel in the war from the gal riveting aircraft together in the factory to ship building to front line duties. The Marine was a cook, if I understand correctly, but on island invasions where was the front line? The difference could be rather small at times.

[Greg Deych]

It's kind of interesting, because I've just came back from a vacation where I hung out with my grandfather quite a bit. And what stories he told me...

Grandfather was an member of the underground Communist party in the independent Latvia in the 30s. So, when Germans invaded he, being an ideologicaly aware individual, headed for the nearest recruiting center and joined the army. He was commanding a section of anti-tank rifles for the first few months of the war in the 201st Latvian rifle division. The stories he tells of those few first months are hair-raising. In the winter of 41 they were in the 2nd echelon of the offensive, and were separated from supply for near 2 weeks: no food, no bullets, nothing...just advancing over this burnt out and cratered landscape. Then there was the time when he was present as the battalion commander ordered attack on a hill without any recon...which turned out to be held by our own guys. A bunch of whom got killed by artillery and machine gun fire.

The same winter, in the same offensive he and two other guys got separated from their platoon. They lay down to sleep and when they woke up they found Germans were only about a hundred yards off and their own lines about the same in the other direction. To get to their own lines, they had to cross a clearing, and they decided to do it in a dead run. My grandfather was the fastest, and made it clean. The second fastest guy was wounded by a machine gun bullet, and the third guy got killed.

Sometime in January, he got wounded by a shell fragment and was sent to a hospital. From there, he was selected to go to artillery school and commanded a mortar platoon and later mortar company, got wounded two more times. He went the whole war, from 41 to 45, began a rifleman and ended a Captain.

[Schrullenhaft]

My maternal grandfather was a grunt in the 2nd Marine Division (IIRC, can't recall the other unit specifics). He did some time in Iceland and then headed off to Guadalcanal (don't know 'D + what' as to when he got there). He ended up contracting some form of meningitis and got shipped to New Zealand for recovery. There he met my grandmother, a dental assistant in the New Zealand Air Force. They came back to the US sometime in '43 and settled in Northern California.

As a young kid I would always ask him questions about his experiences in the war, but I couldn't really get him to talk much about it. He preferred fishing.

[Herr Oberst]

Wow.

Only active service in my family was grandfather, who was in the Inf in WWI. He never talked much about it, just along the lines of "When they told you to go over the top, well, you just did it." He never confirmed any kills, and was reluctant to talk about it, prefering to state simply that he did his duty. I still have his standard issue rifle, and (scarily) some original WWI ammo for this bolt action rifle.

An uncle served in Vietnam, and upon his return, camped out in the hills of Pennsylvania for 2 months "just to clear his head". Enuf said.

[John Hough]

No Warriors in my family... Though I did have a grandfather, one Paul Hough, work on the Bomb. The story goes that the day before the first test, the only instrument that was to get any data (the others were too close to the explosion) broke. My grandfather, supposedly, quickly jury-rigged the device to get it working again.

-John Hough

[Fionn]

Hmm, only one side of my family went to war.. The Irish side was nice and safe in Ireland but the Belgian side had a rough ride.

My maternal grandfather (Belgian side of the family) was a corporal in the Belgian Reserves and was called up to defend one of the river lines.

He described his experience of the use of German armour and arty to me once in a way that left no doubt in my mind how crushing it was for those Belgian and Dutch soldiers to see tanks they couldn't stop coming for them....

I remember him telling me how they tried to destroy the tanks with rifle bullets (aiming for driver's slit etc) but the bullets just bounced off and then the tanks would machinegun the platoon survivors from close range until they broke.

He also tells a story of how a German artillery barrage burried an entire Dutch infantry platoon holding on his left flank one day and how he and his platoon tried to dig them out but were too late. All the recovered were twentysomething bodies.

Eventually his platoon was reduced to about a half-squad (principally the casualties were caused by one attack in which what seemed to be Pz Is simply MGed them all as they ran from the trenches they were occupying since they couldn't stop the German tanks) at about the time that Belgium surrendered.

He was always annoyed at the betrayal of Belgium by the King of the time and I got the distinct impression that not only did this disgust him for the rest of his life but that he wanted to fight on.

In any case after a short spell in a German POW camp he went back to Belgium, met my grandmother and married her on D-DAY.. He recounted coming out of church after the wedding to hear church bells ringing and being told that the invasion of Europe had begun.

He was active in the resistance also throughout this time and once, as he was trying to enter a factory in the middle of a group of men who really DID work there so he could do a little plastic explosive redecoration , his group was stopped and searched.

He didn't have the proper papers with him and was taken for interrogation. He wouldn't say what happened to him but it involved the Gestapo and can't have been good...

He was sent to a death camp full of jews, political malcontents and suspected resistance fighters. I still can't figure why he wasn't just shot but he claimed consistently that the reason he wasn't shot in Belgium was that he NEVER admitted he was a resistance worker (once he realised he was going to be searched he dumped his sabotage tools) and they could only "think" he was in the resistance but couldn't prove anything.. He was very clear that the 1st camp he was in (when Belgium first surrendered) was a concentration camp for POWS but this was a death camp. He described how he and the others in his barracks were left to suffer through the winter with no heating, how bodies were removed from the barracks as the owners died from the cold or starvation during the night and most of all describes how the guards began shooting prisoners as the Americans neared.

Eventually they either ran out of bullets or decided to save some in case the Americans showed up and began using pitchforks... He described how huts were emptied and the men from those huts pitchforked to death and thrown in large piles outside their huts.

Anyways, eventually the Germans fled just a short time before US soldiers finally showed up. The Germans hadn't had time to completely cleanse the camp and so my grandfather survived and was helped make his way home by the Allies to his wife who hadn't been given any info about him and had thought him dead.

One thing he was always certain to say was that he always found German civilians and Wehrmacht soldiers friendly and good people. He recalls how he was well treated by the Wehrmacht both when he and his men surrendered and when he was in the POW camp and tells of getting cigarettes, chocolate and food from Wehrmacht soldiers and civilians for whom the POWS toiled in the fields.

The Gestapo and Deathcamp guards on the other hand should all have rotted in hell according to him. I think that his time in interrogation and in the deathcamp were pretty horrible. He didn't go into specifics about them but from the day he got released till the day he died he had nightmares and mental trauma because of what he'd seen/had done to him.

One of the worst things to happen to him was that all his brothers, sisters, parents etc had been killed in Allied air attacks from 1942 to 1944... He didn't lose a single member of his family to the Germans but lost them all to Allied terror-bombing.

That's probably one reason I don't particularly like the "strategic bombing" campaign in Europe and continue to call it terrorbombing.

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Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Private Ryan]

My grandfather was a medic in the PT. I was told he served with Merril's Marauder's in Burma. He was promoted to Sergeant Major, but never accepted, rather staying with his old outfit. I now have all of his medals, bayonet, and 45. bullets. One other thing I have I think as rather haunting. He brought home a Japanese flag. It had names written around the Rising Sun, and blood splotches everywhere. The Japanese troops must've performed a Banzai charge, writing their names on this flag before they died.

Pvt. Ryan

[PanzerLeader]

My great uncle on the father's side, Kenneth White, was a quartermaster in the US Army in the Pacific. He didn't see any combat but could have been part of the landing on Japan if the Atomic Bomb hadn't been used.

My grandfather on my mother's side, Mikael Valitalo, served in the Finnish Army during the Winter War. He was severely injured by a Russian grenade and died from his wounds...30 years later! I believe he was somewhere in the Mannerheim line.

Finally a friend of my family was in the Wiking SS division in Russia. He wrote a war diary. It is hidden somewhere in his house and his family has been searching it for decades! He participated in the fighting in the Caucasus in 42, and then was involved in Kursk. He had ran away from home to join the Finnish Army but wasn't accepted because he was too young(16)! So he joined the Germans...The poor fellow now has Alzheimer(sp?) and has been slowly dying in a hospital for 5 years. He cannot remember anything and is horribly suffering. I still believe it is a punishment from God 'cos he fought so fanatically for the Nazis...

[Kevin Christensen]

My Dad joined the Army in January of 1941 basically because he was so eligiable for the draft that he couldn't get a job. He trained in a Heavy Weapons Infantry platoon, on water cooled .30 machine gun and 60 mm mortars, but eventually became company clerk because he could type 100 wpm with no mistakes. Since he got all the work done, he read army regulations to fill time, and ended up an OCS candidate. He went through OCS and came out a 2nd Lt. He married his high school sweetheart while on leave, and went off to Memphis, Tennesee to report for duty. He got there a week early, and since there was nothing to do, he reported in, and ended up being picked up by a Tank Destroyer Unit. He'd never heard of the TDs and when he went to a meeting wherein it was explained that the idea was to mount WWI French 75s in the back of half-tracks and drive around behind enemy lines shooting up panzers, he said that the hair rose on the back of his neck. He shipped out with the 813th TD battalion attached to the 34th Infantry division. He spent a lot of time in Tunisia driving half-tracks and jeeps, getting straffed and shelled, watching the ground for bouncing betty mines, and blowing up teller mines with 1/4 pound blocks of TNT. He commented that the closer the battalion got to the front, the more career military in their unit developed interesting ailments that got them shipped home. Most of the half tracks got an extra .50 cal mounted on the back door for AA defense. When I asked how they got these, he said that, "Whenever a jeep hit a mine, it turned out to have had a lot of extra equipment on board." Being the only officer in the battalion not down with the trots, he led the 813th to Hill 609. He said that because the Americans generally did so poorly in North Africa, that after the campaign, all of the U.S. troops had to participate in an exercise in which they had to follow a rolling artillary barrage. What they had to learn was to accept that they had to move among the shorts and accept the causualties from them to get any benefit from the artillary. He said that it was a kind of training that couldn't be done in the US, and caused casualties, but that it saved many lives later. After North Africa, the 813th was outfitted with M10s. Dad was transferred to headquarters company, and was in charge of the payroll. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day +14, attached to the 79th Infantry division. In the bocage, one of the M10 commanders was blown from the vehicle by a panzerfaust hit. The molten spray of the shaped charge hit the .45 and fused all of it's parts. But the officer survived. (When my Dad read this same story in the book A War to Win, that contains some 813th memoirs he said "Well, now you know it isn't all lies.") While he was never trained in the M10s, he did spend a couple of weeks guarding a cross roads with e platoon, temorarily replacing a causualty until a trained replacement showed up. The 813th was the first armour across the Seine. Later they were transferred from 3rd Army to 7th Army, and went through the Voges campaign and experienced the Nordwind Offensive. At Lunaville, he said that in the early morning, a company of Mk IVs had just moved from their positions while under the cover a morning mist, when all at once the mist lifted. "Our gunners had a field day. They just abandoned their vehicles." He told stories about Tigers and Panthers and King Tigers and Jadgtigers that left us all fascinated by armour, and frustrated that we could find so little in the histories available.

After Nordwind an officer asked him to put through a recommendation for the bronze stat, and he replied, "I can't think of anything you've done to deserve it." So he was transferred to recon company for the rest of the war, and drove an M20 armoured car down the autobahn, ending up at Berchtesgarten with the 101st airborn. With two platoons of armoured cars, they negotiated the surrended of a German Corps at the end of the war. Because of all the campaigns he'd been through, he had a lot of points, and was one of the first to get rotated home. For a few years, he used to go deer hunting to unload tension, and sometimes woke in the middle of the night and made candy.

Kevin Christensen

Lawrence, KS

[jgdpzr]

Great stories here folks! My tale pales in comparison, I'm afraid. My father was a navigator on a C-47 in the Pacific, so he didn't see much actual combat. In fact, I think he said he saw enemy aircraft only once while airborn. His biggest claim to fame was being the navigator on the first plane to touch down in Japan-proper at the end of hostilities.

My Dad's best friend (and my uncle for all-intents-and-purposes) was a B-17 pilot in Europe. He was shot down in early '45 (I think) and captured. He used to tell me stories about how well he was treated by his captors. He said it was simply because it was so late in the war and the Luftwaffe staff at the camp knew the war was all but over and they didn't want to further antagonize the soon-to-be victors. He said he actually became friends with one of the guards and kept in contact with him for years after the war. Kinda makes you think of Hogan's Heroes, eh? This contrasts with the story one of my friends has about his grandfather. Apparently, he was a P47 pilot and was shot down over Germany also near the end of the war. He, unfortunately, did not fare as well as my father's friend as he was reportedly beaten to within an inch of his life.

[Gespenster]

My Grandfather was in the 29th ID Company K, KIA June 15, 1944 near St. Lo ... My Wifes Grandfather (She is German, from Mannheim) Was a member of the German 6th Army and is still listed as MIA at Stalingrad. Kind of Sobering, her Great Grandfather won the Iron Cross in World War I, and then became a pilot near the end of the war ...

~G

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"It is well that War is so terrible, lest we grow to fond of it"

Robert E. Lee