Today....Dec 7th

Oldmanb777

Line Up and Wait
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Dec 9, 2020
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Oldmanb777
Did you ever have the privilege of interacting with people who lived through that period in history? The guy who soloed me was a B-17 driver in the 8th AF. My neighbor, and one of my first jobs at his tire shop was Jug pilot. He got strafed after "hitting the silk" and had a metal plate in his head from that experience. I once was traveling and saw a man in uniform with stripes that seemed to go all the way up his jacket. I saw the dolphins on his uniform. Submariner!!!!!! I introduced myself. I was about 13 yrs old and started asking questions. He was very accommodating . He introduced me to the officer he was traveling with. It was Admiral Beach and Admiral Richard Okane. A few weeks later my Dad came home from work with an autographed copy of Admiral Beach's book. Col Charles McGee's son gave me several check rides. I had dinner with him a few times. I met one of the Tang survivors. Amazing person. I still get totally choked up with what he told me about the (undocumented) POW camp he was in with Dick Okane. Papy Boyington was there too. Too many to mention. there is a reason they were called "The greatest generation" From WW1 and the Spanish Flew, to the depression and WW2, Korea, Cold war, Even Viet Nam.
So who did you get to interact with. Mentors, maybe role models. Share some of the memories.
 
I didn't know any military people from there, but I've been to the Arizona memorial and to the Pacific Air Museum's restoration hangar that still has bullet holes in it from the attack. I did have the opportunity to take a WWII/Korea P-51 pilot who hadn't flown in anything in years up for a ride in my Navion though.
 
The pilot friends I had from ww2 have all passed. They where a pretty quite bunch ,about there years of service.
 
My dad was to join the Army Air Corps but the war ended two months before he was to report. His hearing was always poor because, as a teenager, his job was to climb into Grumman Hellcats on Long Island and hold a riveting bar while a rivet gun pounded away.
 
My Dad was in high school in 1941; he enlisted in the Navy as soon as he graduated in 1944, serving on the destroyer USS Mayrant. He wanted to join the Air Force but as he was only 17 his parents had to sign a consent form; they didn't want him to fly as his older cousin was a B-17 pilot who was shot down on the Ploesti raid, and another cousin was shot down in the Pacific.

He believed the thyroid cancer that killed him years later was caused by radiation exposure in the Sea of Japan at the end of the war, but he was always proud of his Navy service.
 
My father was a ball turret gunner in a B-17 and flew 36 missions over Europe (and yes he got in later in the war when the magic mission number had been increased from the original 25). He later went on to serve two tours in Vietnam.
 
My Mother was from Hawaii. They could hear the bombs go off. But due to distance, did not realize what was happening.

My Dad served in the Navy during the later part of WW2. He got out, then came back in and severed as an officer for 33 years.
 
My dad graduated from high school in 1943 and talked to the Navy recruiter. The recruiter told him that if he went to the Merchant Marine Academy and graduated, the Navy would take him as an officer, as long as he enlisted right now. So he did, then graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy a year later. When he went to the recruiting office, the officer there told him that the previous recruiter used to tell folks that to get his enlistment count higher.

So my dad went into the Navy and spent the remaining part of WWII training for the invasion of Japan. Fortunately for me, that never happened.

There was an elderly gentleman that used to hang out at the airport. He was a B-17 A/C commander, then a B-29 A/C commander. In the B-17, he was on his way to England when that part of the war ended, so he turned around to take a B-29 to the war in Japan. After they got to their assigned base, that part of the war ended. Later he was based at Roswell. He said the hangar the crashed ''UFO'' was in was unlocked and unguarded and anyone could go in and look at it.

My mom grew up in Los Cruces, NM. A week earlier everyone was warned to stay indoors and keep the windows closed and blinds down on 16July1945. She remembers something woke her up that morning, like the bed lightly shaking. Her dad told her it was a train, but she didn't believe him.

I remember several men I had met in my life that were WWII veterans. My dad would tell me about them, like a friends dad. He was a B-17 crew member that was shot down and spent 2 years as a POW. He did not think ''Hogan's Heroes'' was a funny Tv show.

Another guy at our church always walked on the toes of his right foot. My dad told me he was in the Bataan death march. The story was his friend fell to the ground, so he bent over to pick him up. A Japanese soldier shot at his friend but instead hitting the heel of the man picking him up. He was a pilot after the war and I remember riding with him in his twin engine airplane. (6 place twin, I don't remember what it was)

My uncle joined the marines in 1939 for 2 years. He claimed to be the first US soldier to kill a Japanese soldier. As I understand the story, he was somewhere in the south pacific working as security to a construction battalion crew, before they were officially called seabees. He was bored and asked the person in charge if they had anything for him to do. They had him running the marker as they were surveying the area to build a landing strip. He went out to put in a marker. As he raised his machete to cut the marker tape, he heard a bullet go between his hand and his ear. That messed up his aim and he hit his finger with the machete. He dropped to the ground and rolled out of the area to circle back to observe the area he was at when he heard the bullet.

He saw a Jap soldier looking at the ground, presumably looking at the blood on the ground. As I understand the story, my uncle dropped him and went back to work. When the officer in charge found out, he told them to forget this ever happened, since the US was not at war with the Japanese at that time. There are no records of this so there is no way I can verify if this story is true or not.

My uncle got out of the Marines in 1941, only a few months before Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the Army thinking it would not be as bad as the Marines. He ended up D-Day +3 as a replacement squad leader. Later he was wounded in the part of his body that goes over the fence last. And to my aunts horror, he had no problem showing folks where he was wounded...

Another uncle was in Italy. Of the three brothers, he saw the most combat. He was in the 3rd Infantry Division, same as Audie Murphy but not the same company. At one time his company lost communications during a battle. My uncle volunteered to run a new phone line across open land under fire to connect back up. He did not get the bronze star for that. Reportedly he got the bronze star for running across open land to return.

I remember him as a quiet, yet tense man. He smoked a lot, and apparently drank more than his share. He brought home war souvenirs, including a German Luger, but my cousin stole them and traded them for drugs.

All these men are gone now. I wish I had realized their significance to the war effort while they were still alive.
 
I had a cousin who was an Army radar technician in the South Pacific during WW2, and a couple of cousins who flew in the war. One of them flew a B-25 in the Burma Bridge-Busters, and had to walk out of the jungle after bailing out due to an engine failure. He flew for United for many years after the war.
 
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