The WWII Relatives thread

My grandfather, a short, plump, 40-ish surgeon/GP from upstate New York, volunteered for the Army medical corps early in the War. During basic training he had the amusing experience of having to learn to ride a horse, and a near-fatal bout of pneumonia that left him unfit for overseas duty. So the family story goes (and it may even be true), the rest of the doctors in his battalion went over to Europe and were "all killed."

Meanwhile, in its wisdom, the Army put my grandfather in charge of setting up hospitals at various military installations all over the South--most notably a couple of years as head of the hospital at the Camp Clinton POW camp outside Jackson, MS, where the prisoners were put to work building a huge scale model of the entire Mississippi River Basin for the Corps of Engineers.

[See http://www.kilroywashere.org/004-Pages/JAN-Area/04-D-Jackson-POW.html and http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/11/26/mississippi-basin-model/ for some background on this little-known but important facility. I got to visit the Basin Model when I was a kid and it was still functioning; it was neat to hear the stories of my grandfather's indirect, but significant, contribution to its construction.]

Although he didn't see combat, it seems to have been the great adventure of my grandfather's life. My grandmother and my mother (who was only about 5 years old when the war started) always talked very fondly of their years in the South, and told me that my grandfather made many friends and had excellent job offers in Mississippi after the War, but his family loyalties dragged them all back to New York where he went back to his comparatively mundane general practice. Unfortunately, my grandfather's heart was permanently damaged by his service-related illness, and he had to retire quite young. He died in 1970, and my grandmother received a Lt. Colonel's pension from the Army until her death, just a couple of months ago, at the age of 99.