Re: Talking about D-Day

Posted by wisbaker on June 06, 2017 at 20:55:16 from (173.30.119.179):

In Reply to: Talking about D-Day posted by farmall plowboy on June 06, 2017 at 14:28:25:

My Father in law was a bomber crew member, B-24s in the pacific. He enlisted with some college, he told me he knew it was coming and he figured that if he volunteered he might have a bit more say in what was going to happen to him. He enlisted and they asked him if he wanted to be a weather man, he looked at the course list and figured out more than half the courses on the list he needed for his engineering degree so he said yes. Spent the first half of the war in school but as Europe started to go our way they decided they weren't going to need as many weathermen as they thought. They pulled him out of school and sent him to radar school then onto McDill Field in Tampa to train him on B-17's, about the time they got him trained and formed up with a B-17 school they pulled him out and sent him to the pacific in a B-24. On the down side since he went into battle a little later he had to stick around and be part of the occupation army. When I got married I was a maintenance in the Air Force, my brother in laws commented about the only time their dad talked about WW II and what he did was when I or one of their Uncles who was a bomber pilot were around.

Another friend was at his induction physical when someone noticed he went to a Lutheran school, a NCO asked him to wait here, about 5 minutes later an officer comes in and starts talking to him in German, after about 5 minutes the officer reverts back to English and asked him if he would like to go to school instead of the infantry. He spent 4 years at the University of Illinois and when he finished they commissioned him and stuck him in Intel. He was one of the officers that did some of the integration of the prisoners at Nuremberg. They figured out the kids from the Lutheran Schools tended to have German language skills that they needed and were picking them out for assignments that needed those skills.

At the beginning of WW II my grandfather was not in service but was prior enlisted having done a hitch and then got out. They tried to draft him but the local draft board was informed he had a pretty important job. He drove a garbage truck, the man that he worked for said if they drafted Grandpa garbage trucks would not be going out, this was before packer bodies. The draft board said to hire women, the owner said if he could find women that could lift the 80 pound barrels on their shoulder and dump them in the truck he would and they could have Grandpa, they decided he was a "sanitation engineer" and left him be. I've been told most of this was because by that time Grandpa was doing most of the repairs and maintenance on the trucks and the owner didn't want to have to start doing it himself or find some one else. Eventually Grandpa ended up owning the garbage company

One of my Grandma's brothers went in and became a track mechanic, rode with Patton across France.

Another friend of the family (Tom) was the son of the store owner Grandpa and Grandpa bought groceries and fuel for the garbage trucks from. Tom was single and lived above the store with his Mom & Dad and an older brother that was retarded. Tom went into the service after Pearl Harbor and ended up crewing a P-51 in England, after the war he came home and moved back into the room he shared with his brother. Lived there above the store until he turned 65, that's when he got married. She wouldn't live above the store, so he bought a house, it was across the street from his store. I always thought is was interesting that Mr G built the store on 3 or 4 acres that was part of his father in law's farm. The house Tom bought 40 years later was on land that was part of his other Grandfather's farm so he had land in what was both of his grandfather's farms that had since been lost to suburbia.

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