The WWII Relatives thread (3 Viewers)

[johnnyd]

My Dad's dad was a machinist on a splash boat in the South Pacific. It was basically a converted PT boat that was used to recover downed pilots. I always wondered if it was my Grandfather's boat that rescued GHWB when he got shot down. I asked my Grandfather about it and he said he wouldn't have known. They rescued a lot of pilots including Japanese. One japanese pilot went nuts in the water and started firing at them with a pistol before they could get to him. They shot and killed him in the water. My Dad was born 2 weeks before my grandfather Shipped out and didn't get to see him for 3 years. I still have my Grandfathers uniform from his Navy training school in Michigan. He only wore it 2 weeks before he went to the Pacific so it looks brand new.

My Mom's dad worked for Grumman Aircraft when the war started and built Hellcats and Bearcats during the War in Long Island, NY.

 

[jimrip]

My uncle was a side gunner on a B-17. I think between all the members here we may have enough relatives to fully crew a B-17! He got hit with some shrapnel on one bombing run and got sent home with a Purple Heart. There are some just as fascinating stories right here at home during the war also. My mom was a teen during the war and used to tell us about the ration books and going on "junk" runs to gather up metal and rubber for the war effort.

 

[Devildog]

My Dad's dad was a machinist on a splash boat in the South Pacific. It was basically a converted PT boat that was used to recover downed pilots. I always wondered if it was my Grandfather's boat that rescued GHWB when he got shot down. I asked my Grandfather about it and he said he wouldn't have known. They rescued a lot of pilots including Japanese. One japanese pilot went nuts in the water and started firing at them with a pistol before they could get to him. They shot and killed him in the water. My Dad was born 2 weeks before my grandfather Shipped out and didn't get to see him for 3 years. I still have my Grandfathers uniform from his Navy training school in Michigan. He only wore it 2 weeks before he went to the Pacific so it looks brand new.

My Mom's dad worked for Grumman Aircraft when the war started and built Hellcats and Bearcats during the War in Long Island, NY.

Cool story, man. GHWB was picked up by a submarine off the island of ChiChi Jima. That must've been one hell of a job.

 

[Goatman Saint]

My grand mother was a telephone operator in London during World War II. She was the one that patched through the call that Rudolf Hess was captured. She will talk about how they had to stay at the switchboard until they head the explosions, then run out the door into the trenched dug outside. When the bombing was done they ran back in to help coordinate responses. About 20 years ago we were sitting in my parents house when there was an airshow. All of a sudden she gets this look of horror in her eyes and runs downstairs. A German WWII bomber was in the airshow and before she even realized it she was downstairs taking cover.

My grampa never served in WWII for medical reasons, but all three of his brothers did. Lester was in Italy, Swede was in the army doing cleanup work (ha ha) behind the marines in the Pacific. He never was right afterwards. Their other brother never talked about it to anyone. I don't even remember where he was. I believe he was also in the Pacific theater, but I believe he was a Marine.

 

[joshlaw1976]

My granddad fought in D day, Battle of the Bulge, and was around when Aushwitz was liberated.

Another granddad fought in Germany and knocked up a lady while he was there.

 

[purvis_guy]

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I posted this pic on another thread, these are my parents. My father joined the Army after Pearl Harbor and island-hopped around the Pacific, the Marines took the islands and for he most part the Army cleared and held them. He had a framed picture of Gen. Douglas MacArthur above his bed until the day he died. I have 3 photo albums full of pictures of his time in the war, they are full of some of the most horrible pictures of dead Japanese soldiers(the had to count the casualties for record keeping purposes), and there are also some great pictures of him and his men posing with topless island women.

 

[stunpals]

I don't typically join threads 3 pages long already but I feel I must for 'pops' (my grandfather)

He took part in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. He was a fantastic story teller. He would start talking about his time in WWII with Germans all around him but would always break out in what we all beleived to be German. We were pretty sure he was cursing in German. Who knows.

 

[pipeman]

my grand father and his best who grew up with up since they were kids i mean around 3 or 4 went and signed up together and basic,and then to italy all together then my grandfathers friend lost his life i week over there while standing next to grandfather.

 

[Blue]

My father just turned 90 and he was born in Norway. He was in Oslo when the Germans invaded in April 1940. He joined the militia, fighting the Germans for a few weeks in southern Norway. They were quickly neutralized and he escaped on a fishing boat and joined the Norwegian Navy at a liasson office in Iceland. He ended up serving in the exiled Norwegian Navy out of Plymouth, England till D-day when his ship was sunk by a German E-boat's torpedo. He remained in the Navy until 1946. He was also in London for the first V1 rocket attacks.

 

[helofixer]

Grandfather I never knew worked at the Consolidated Vultee aircraft factory on that was on Lakeshore Drive near the University of New Orleans. They produced the amphibian version of the PBY patrol bomber there. To this day there is a gap in the seawall steps across from the plant site where there used to be a concrete seaplane ramp that led to the lake. They would produce the aircraft and roll them down into Lake Ponchatrain for flight testing.

Didnt fight on the front lines, but fought on the home front.

 

[SaintsFan11]

Grandfather I never knew worked at the Consolidated Vultee aircraft factory on that was on Lakeshore Drive near the University of New Orleans. They produced the amphibian version of the PBY patrol bomber there. To this day there is a gap in the seawall steps across from the plant site where there used to be a concrete seaplane ramp that led to the lake. They would produce the aircraft and roll them down into Lake Ponchatrain for flight testing.

Didnt fight on the front lines, but fought on the home front.

My grandfather worked for Consolidated Vultee as well. He an architect and served as a draftsman. I know he talks about that PBY. I don't know if that was what he did for Higgins or if that was different. Later in the war he joined the Navy and his superior thought he was crazy and chided him for enlisting: "So you want to go play sailor boy!"

 

[cdogg]

One grandfather was at Pearl Harbor when it got attacked.

The other bombed bridges for the Army in the East.

 

[PayOrPlay]

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.