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I remember like yesterday. My dad and I would watch Victory at Sea. He passed many years ago as a young man but I remember oh so well the stories seen through the eyes of a 17 year old sailor in combat. He was just a freakin' kid! I'm 69 now, but it's like yesterday.
Father in law was in Life magazine in 1945 after the end of hostilities in the ETO. Amazing-daring story about retrieving/rescuing family members of a German scientist, in occupied east Germany (Russian controlled).
Grandfather was a Merchant marine Captain... sunk 2x's
So many stories.
Very cool Dave. I'm going to see if my dad wants to watch that movie. I don't remember watching it back in the day.
I remember in history class the text books went up to and including WWII. But for some reason we never got to that last chapter at the end of the school year. The teachers assumed we knew that stuff. They had been around for it but we hadn't been born yet.
Father was a sergeant in charge of the mess kitchen. Landed Normandy +4 days to feed the troops their first real meals. Marched across France, Germany and after the Battle of the Bulge was feeding the survivors of the concentration camps. Stayed in touch with a few war buddies but no involvement in VFW or American Legion. It was history to him not to be relived.
My Dad fought in the Battle of Luzon in the Philippines in WWII. Refused to talk about it. He won the Bronze Star which I have. He also caught malaria and had reoccurring problems with it until he died in 2000. He did tell me one experience that I cannot repeat on here.
Seems to me that most who were actually in battle had no desire to talk about their experiences.
About the same here.
I think my Father was a destroyerman in WWII, Father as in my priest, and the only thing he spoke of, in a sermon, was the man who had to make sure the gyros kept.........at my Dad's funeral service, that was a blast with my Priest wearing his military ribbons on his tunic.
The priest who confirmed me was an Aussie cargo pilot and he did relate a story about going down a rain soaked, troublesome runway and being timid about it in take off. The senior pilot next him pushed the throttles forward and said, "Full Power".....to which he related in his sermon about how to approach life.
Anyhow, Dad wasn't in WWII but right after. He didn't talk much about battle......his tanks squishing pregnant roller skates, yes, but not battle.
I wish I would have talked to my dad more about his WWII experiences. He never said much and I foolishly never asked.
He was born in 1926, and was in the Navy, all in the Pacific. He was a young kid in WWII, but he also stayed in the reserves until around 1980 when health issues forced him to resign from that.
I did know that he served in an Underwater Demolition Team in WWII, UDT-17. A year or two ago I started looking into genealogy, and as part of my search for information I ran across WWII records that helped me learn more about my father’s experience.
I found a handwritten history of UDT-17 that described the teams experiences, where they went and what they did. I wish I could have shown him that and talked to him about it. His name is there on the team roster.
I do remember him saying that they were practicing and getting ready to invade Okinawa, but then the atom bomb drops happened and that was called off. I think to myself that those bomb drops probably saved my dads life.
I also vaguely knew that he took part in the atom bomb tests in the pacific after WWII, Operation Crossroads. I overheard one day my brother-in-law asking him if he thought he got cancer from those tests. I remembered this when I was doing the genealogy work and on the Ancestry web site I was able to find military records showing him on boats going from California to Pearl Harbor and then out to sea for the tests now as part of UDT Team Easy.
Ancestry has many “roll call” (muster) documents from ships. I can see him on a ship with the roll call taken the day after each of the 2 Bikini Island tests. I guess they had to make sure everyone was still there after a test.
I also found an Operation Crossroads report that detailed each ship that participated, and where they were during the tests. His ship was about 20 miles away from the blast.
My father and I always watched war movies and documentaries (The Twentieth Century). He sanitized anything he told me, and I did ask. "We gave the dog to a nice farmer." He was a replacement troop a week after D-Day and I think was in the Battle of the Bulge. He had a Luger that he took from a dead German but my mother pawned it after he pawned her wedding ring when she was in the shower.
(The dog being a dog that he told me about that followed them in France.)
WW2 was the most important thing he, as a Jew, ever did.
Very cool Dave. I'm going to see if my dad wants to watch that movie. I don't remember watching it back in the day.
Victory at Sea is a black and white documentary series. For a while in the 80’s I was working a 4 to midnight shift, and I couldn’t just go to sleep when I got home after work. Victory at Sea was on late at night back then, one of the few things to watch late at night before cable tv.
My Dad was in the Navy during the end of WWII and never talked about it. I heard a few stories from my brothers time in Viet Nam. That was usually after nightmares when he returned home for a few months. I should ask him if he knows anything more about Dad’s time in the Navy. They may have talked more about it.
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I hope my dad and I can watch a few episodes together.
