Some years ago, I put up the video of a song that speaks to me on Veterans/Remembrance Day, and invited you all to add the one or ones that do the same for you.
When I hear this and the other pieces in this grim playlist, of course), I think of my grandfather, who served from 1914-1918, mostly on the Western Front, mostly as a battery commander in the Royal Horse Artillery. I think of my dad, whose discharge papers my sister just excavated, documenting his four year journey from Japanese language school to Tokyo Bay. I think of my uncle, who fought a towed-gun across northern Europe in 1944 and ’45, and ended his combat service in the Malayan Emergency, which was the only battlefield on which he ever saw a particular opposing soldier aiming a gun personally at him. And of lots more, people I’ve known, and those I’ll never meet.
So here’s that tune again; respond as you will.
Memory is a defense against those for whom war is a prop.
Over to y’all.
Mayken
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI
Schlemazel
My grandfather had only been in the US a few years when he returned to fight in WWI. I was told as a kid to never ask him about his experience in the war. When we were packing up their belongings for their move to a nursing home he showed me his address book. Every name was Germanic, Adolf, Max, Henrich. I asked him if it was odd to return to fight his birth country & what made him join. He said
“Two three of us boys were on the corner & this guy came up to us and asked where we thought we would be living after the war”. The message was clear.
2liberal
since you big-footed the open thread i hope you don’t mind if I have an off topic question – How do I edit the default pie filter so it has option zero and just blanks out posts instead filling in the text with pie-related text? am i making sense? does anyone know what i am talking about?
Pogonip
I have lots of vet family, friends, and acquaintances. Thanks, Tom!
JanieM
Adam’s post yesterday mentioned the Battle of Belleau Wood, which I don’t recall ever having heard of. It made me get out my grandfather’s dischange papers from WWI, which say that he was in the battles of Chateau-Thierry, the Argonne Forest, and Seven Hills. The former two are familiar names; I remember my grandma mentioning them when I was a child, along with the information that my grandfather had been in the Rainbow Division, a fact that she always repeated with pride.
But I can’t find a word anywhere about the Battle of Seven Hills — the only thing Google offers me is Civil War-related stuff. Does anyone around here know what that might refer to?
My grandfather died in 1926, at least in part from the ill health that had plagued him since the war. He had been gassed twice and I believe was also wounded. Yet his letters home were invariably cheerful, and he repeatedly assured the family that “we’ve got them bosch on the run.”
I wish I had known him.
Schlemazel
I posted about Victory Memorial Parkway here yesterday. They had a memorial today. It was 20 degrees with a bitter wind which kept the crowd down I am sure. There were maybe 1000 people. The speeches were mostly awful but thankfully very short. The ones that were good came from a pair of histories, one told details of the lives of a 11 men & a woman who died in service the other told of the history of African American servicemen. But the best by far was some young kid from the parks department. He put the war into a modern perspective with a focus on the evils of nationalism. There was a great local gospel singer, a VFW 21 gun salute, Taps and a fly-over. It all felt so inadequate compared to the events that necessitated it.
Another Scott
@2liberal: You need to talk to Major Major Major Major, or Cleek, depending on whose pie filter you’re using. The text substitution isn’t editable by mere mortals.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
martha
@JanieM: my husband’s grandfather served at Chateau Thierry and the Meuse Argonne. We took a private tour of the places he served this past May. So interesting, haunting, even a century later. And fittingly, it was a cold, rainy day.
bg
@Mayken: Wow
schrodingers_cat
Is the walking national embarrassment back?
Another Scott
@JanieM: I’m no expert, but Wikipedia might offer some clues. Meuse-Argonne Offensive – 3rd Phase:
(Emphasis added.)
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Sgt MacKenzie
PhoenixRising
I learned last winter, from my mother who has since died, that her uncle was a bombardier in WWII. He was in the unit George McGovern piloted B-24s in. Uncle Bill dropped bombs on refineries, railways, factories and airfields across Italy, Germany, Poland and France. He was 19 when he joined the Army & 20 when he went on his first bombing run. He came home to Cleveland with gifts from Germany for his little nieces, went to college, began teaching 6th grade English & never went more than 12 miles from his sister’s (my grandmother’s) family again, teaching 3 of her 5 children. Uncle Bill died 2 years ago, and I never knew he served until my mom was sitting across a cafe table from me in Morocco, where his unit formed up in 1943. Something about being there cued my mom to tell me about his life. Respect to all the Uncle Bills who never spoke of it again; they went to do what they had to.
bg
Oddly, the song I associate most with war is Love Is Blue by Paul Mauriat
https://youtu.be/-PGhnBeqthY
When my husband’s best friend came back from Viet Nam, he would cry whenever that song came on the radio.
A Ghost To Most
?BillinGlendaleCA
@schrodingers_cat:
Trump? He doesn’t walk, he uses a golf cart.
JanieM
@Another Scott: Thanks!!
SiubhanDuinne
I am a total sucker for The Last Post. And while I’m in no way an observant religious person, I find it particularly moving (and tear-jerking) when that lovely bugle call is part of a medley with a Christian hymn.
Here it is with “Abide with me.”
https://youtu.be/_vNRYbIC5dU
And here it is with “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.”
https://youtu.be/wEgHSPUVosI
(Sorry for the naked links, but recently I crash my phone every time I try to embed.)
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: The 42nd Infantry Division, the Rainbow Division, fought in four major operations on the Western Front during WW I. The Champagne-Marne, the Aisne-Marne (which included the Battle of Belleau Wood), the Battle of Saint Mihiel, and Muese-Argon Offensive. It is entirely possible, and I’d say highly likely, that your father and other members of his unit and the immediate higher echelons referred to a specific set of battles as the Battle of Seven Hills even though that isn’t the official name of the operation assigned by the Division planners. Most likely this occurred at the Muese-Argon as there were some hills in that area.
It is not uncommon to have multiple references to the same named operation even though only one is recorded. Especially if members of a subordinate unit refer to their specific portion of the operation in a specific manner. The reason the Battle of Belleau Wood is famous is because of the importance of that one engagement within the larger Aisne-Marne campaign, how horrific it was, and that it basically becomes the foundational battle for the modern Marine Corps.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
At my father’s visitation, I was approached by several of his fellow deacons and asked about the flag on his casket. He had never told any of them that he had served in WW2. I gave them his story, and they gave me their stories.
I have long wished that recording devices had been as ubiquitous then as they are now.
A Ghost To Most
NotMax
@JanieM
Seven Hills brought to mind Italy, so possibly here?
If in France, perhaps the Hill 60 battle.
Bruuuuce
And the other Eric Bogle song (besides the OP title) for today. With a reference to The Last Post for SiubhanDuinne, even.
NotMax
Trivia time.
10 First World War slang words we still use today
West of the Cascades
The Farm – “All Together Now” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-DxHWCOCq0
dnfree
My name is Francis Tolliver. In Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War One I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same
— John McCutcheon “Christmas in the trenches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJi41RWaTCs
NotMax
OT, FYI.
Turkey has shared recordings linked to the murder last month of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with Riyadh, Washington and other capitals, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday.
“We gave the recordings, we gave them to Saudi Arabia, we gave them to Washington, to the Germans, to the French, to the English,” he said in a televised speech. Source
Ed Martin
@Bruuuuce: My favorite.
JanieM
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks, Adam. (It was my grandfather, not my dad.)
Given the day that it is, I’ll also mention my dad, who served in the Navy in WWII on the submarine tender The Proteus. Also his brother in the army who was awarded a Silver Star; his other brother who was killed in Korea, and a couple of other brothers who also served in WWII or Korea. None of them talked about the details, but neither did they avoid the subject in general. As a child in the fifties I experienced the older generations’ memories of the two wars as part of the fabric of life. A picture of my uncle who died in Korea stood on one piece of furniture or another in every living room (and it was a big family). I remember fearfully trying to calculate the gap of years between the starting dates of the wars, or the ending dates, or the end of the first and the start of the second, trying to figure out when disaster would strike again. … With the added complication of a sort of dead fear in the belly of the atomic bombs that would kill us all the next time around.
Mary G
My grandfather the illegal immigrant from Sweden enlisted in WWI to get citizenship. My grandmother had a picture of herself in a little leather folder that she said he carried all through the war. I imagined him crawling through mud and barbed wire with it until my mom informed me that he spent the whole war in Omaha, Nebraska!
“Fortunate Son” and “Born in the USA” have been the songs I associate most with war, because having money means you got out of going. My ex was an exception – he came from a wealthy family and enlisted out of patriotism and always regretted it.
JanieM
@NotMax: That’s an interesting idea, although I’m pretty sure he never got as far as Italy.
I’m learning a lot here!
MomSense
Just a brief interruption to say Forever FLOTUS is on ABCs 20/20 for the full hour.
geg6
@MomSense:
I was just about to post the same thing. I love her so much.
Hungry Joe
My father was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corp. He didn’t mind talking about WWII because he spent most of it in Belem, Brazil, as a radio operator, sending/receiving code 10 hours a day, six days a week. He said some guys got so bored they volunteered for combat in the China/Burma/India Theater. “I was bored, too,” he told me, “but I wasn’t THAT bored.” His worst experiences in the Army involved being taunted/tormented by some other G.I.s because he was Jewish; he mostly hung out with other Jewish soldiers, to minimize the chances of being caught alone — though he said it wasn’t all that bad, and he was never abused physically. Later he was transferred to Memphis to teach in an Army communications school. People would stop him on the street and demand to know why he wasn’t overseas, fighting. He’d shrug and say, “I go where they send me.”
Forty years later he could still rattle off Morse Code, out loud, almost as fast as I could talk. It was simultaneous translation; I’d be talking, and he’d be saying “ditdahdahdahditditditdahditditdditdahdahdit.”
My uncle, on the other hand, was a doctor, fresh out of med school in 1942, and spent a good part of the war near the front lines in Italy/southern Europe. He never said one word about the war. Not. One. Word. His kids — my cousins — knew he’d been in the Army … and that was all they knew.
Mornington Crescent
Here’s a letter written by Canadian soldier in WWI just before he died in battle:
Dear Mother
Just a wee note. I am “going over the parapet”, and the chances of a “sub” getting back alive are abut nix. If I do get back, why you can give me the horse laugh. If not this’ll let you know that I kicked out with my boots on.
So, cheer up, old dear, and don’t let the newspapers use you as material for a Saturday magazine feature. You know the kind: where the “sweet-faced, grey-haired, little mother, clutching the last letter from her boy to her breast, sobbed, “’He was such a fine lad,’ as she furtively brushed the glistening tears from her eyes with a dish rag, etc. etc.”
I’m going to tell you this in case my company commander forgets. Your son is a soldier, and a dog-gone good one, too, if he does say it himself as shouldn’t. And if he gets pipped it’ll be doing his blooming job.
In a way it’s darned funny. All the gang are writing post mortem letters and kind of half ashamed of themselves for doing it. As one of our officers said: “If I mail it and come through the show, I’ll be a joke. If I tear it up and get killed I’ll be sorry I didn’t send it.” S’there y’are…
Bess
Battle of Saint Mihiel
Battle of Seven Hills
Excuse me while I kiss this guy….
Emma
@Mayken: That song makes me cry every time.
Ian G.
@Bruuuuce:
That’s my favorite. I have a hard time listening to it without crying. I played it at a annual gathering of my wife’s large Irish family a month ago and my voice cracked a few times because I thought I was gonna cry (the chords are not difficult to learn, the challenge is memorizing all the damn lyrics!).
The end of the first verse always gets me, because I had a great-great uncle who died fighting for Austria-Hungary, and I have no idea of the circumstances. So I hope it was “quick and clean” (an Italian shell he never saw coming) rather than “slow and obscene” (dying of disease in a Russian POW camp).
Millard Filmore
Many pardons if this music video is not what you are looking for …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMQGptpUlPQ
Ken Thorne – The Legion’s Last Patrol
divF
For me, today is always about my father, and his father. My Italian immigrant grandfather served in the US Army in WW I and thereby acquired US citizenship. My father was a career NCO in the Army, served in combat in Korea and Vietnam. He enlisted in the Army before the end of the “WW II era”, so all three wars appear on his tombstone in Arlington. November 11 is also his birthday, all the more reason I think of him on this day.
Because of my family history, military service is bound up in my mind with the immigrant experience. Dad was born in Italy, but he was a US citizen by reason of birthright, and went to the trouble of documenting this. He had the greatest respect for the immigrants who came after him. He saw in them his own experience of people working hard to make it in a new country.
Origuy
My grandfather was in the 15th Balloon Company, US SIgnal Corps in WWI. The Balloon Companies were for observation. Only 37 of them made it to France before the end of the war and 15 made it to the front, out of 110 that were formed. The training took a while. I think his company made it to France, I’m not sure what they did. He died when I was 5. They must have been sitting ducks up there.
My father was in the Corps of Engineers during Korea. He did two tours, one in Okinawa and one in Korea. He’s talked about it a little. In Okinawa, they had to worry about mines and other UXO. They were also aware of Japanese holdouts, although I don’t think they found any on Okinawa.
Tom Hamill
@Mayken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1R7e5mq7AE&index=13&list=PLhMh8ZMbVFGpkuM0S6G1vW_Pv7B66szlJ&t=0s
MomSense
@geg6:
I do too. God I miss them in the White House.
Ian G.
@A Ghost To Most:
That’s the best track on “Brighter Than Creations Dark”. There’s also “Sands of Iwo Jima” on my personal favorite Truckers record, “The Dirty South”.
Edit: shoulda scrolled down further.
J R in WV
@PhoenixRising:
My maternal grandfather was in the Army in WW I. He was a blacksmith at a huge base near a port, and shoed mules before they were shipped over to France. My paternal grandfather lost his leg as a 13 y o in a farm accident, and was obviously not able to serve.
My dad enlisted for WW II in a program that allowed him to finish his year at university. After taking a long bus ride to the intake center, the doctors found him to have a heart murmur, and he was 4F — he worked in the family business the rest of the war, as most of the men working there were gone to the war.
My Uncle George became a Chief on a cruiser in the South Pacific. All I really know is that he came home with quite a bit of “loot” – no telling where he got Japanese sniper’s rifle, etc.
My Uncle John joined the American Friends Committee early on, and was an ambulance driver medic with the Free French Army in North Africa, Sicily and Sardenia until he came down with jaundice and was invalided back home.
My Uncle Bill was born and raised in a tiny coal town. To keep out of the mines, he ran moonshine into the nearby town until the war broke out when he enlisted.
He was ordered into the Army Air Corp after boot camp, and trained to be a turret gunner in heavy bombers. After training he was sent to the South Pacific, where he flew bombing missions for the whole war. I assume mostly against the Japanese islands.
He too never spoke of his time in the military, never. Long after he died, first of his generation to go, after my father died in 2004, in looking through my mother’s jewelry, I found his silver wings, with a bullet between the wings.
I gave them to my cousin, his son. He had given them to his little sister when he got home from the South Pacific. Having read a little bit about the ordeal of being a turret gunner during those raids, it is no wonder he never spoke of it. You drop into the turret ball, and you’re down there until your aircraft makes it back out of the area where fighters are likely to attack.
When you come back up, your crew members may have been shot to rags, or hit by flak, and their blood may have spilled all over the inside of the bomber.
War is Hell, General Sherman said, and he was so right!
Bruuuuce
@Ian G.: I understand. There are some songs I simply cannot sing without losing it at some point. In “No Man’s Land”, it’s “again and again and again and again”; another war-related song is Fred Small’s “Cranes Over Hiroshima”, where I’m liable to break down anywhere along the way.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Captain Driftwood?
raven
I sought pictures of my dad, his brother and brother-in-law for years. All of the sudden my cousin came up with a bunch of shots from an album he has. He didn’t scan them, just snapped a cell photo but at least I have something. They were all on the USS Crosby, APD 17 before the war started but, when it did, they pulled his brother off to work in the recruiting effort on Navy Pier and his BIL developed severe seasickness and never left the states. This shot also has his sister and I think it may have been a going away party for my dad. He stayed on the tin can the entire war as they fought their way up the Solomon’s and on to Corregidor and Okinawa. Thank god for the atomic bomb as someone said. My dad is second from the right.
J R in WV
@JanieM:
I served on a Submarine Tender, the Howard W Gilmore AS 16, which was laid down in 1942 and actually saw service in the South Pacific in the long ago.
When I was on the Gilmore, she was in Key West and supported the last diesel squadron of submarines in the US Navy. We went to Mobile Bay and Pascagoula MS for overhaul and refitting to support nuclear boats, and then I got out. It was a very scary time, I still remember nightmares I had during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bruuuuce:
Oh my.
“Are you forever nineteen?”
Jesus. That’s powerful.
raven
@J R in WV: V-12. My father-in-law was at VPI and entered the Architectural Engineering at, of all places, Illinois (where my dad and I both graduated). He became a SeeBee at the tail end of the war on Saipan.
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: My apologies for confusing your grandfather and father. I blame it on trying to type while fending off my dogs who were waiting on me to hit “post comment” so I could take them for a walk.
boatboy_srq
My grandmother’s people were all Royal Field Artillery going back generations. Three were at Bunker Hill: one was killed there, one went home and one moved to the US South. My grandfather’s poeple were US revolutionaries who fought in the Revolution. So I have ancestors who were at Bunker Hill shooting down from the top and more who were at the bottom shooting up. I can only be thankful that 18th century munitions were horribly inaccurate, and slow to reload.
My grandmother was UK Voluntary Aid Detachment and then US Red Cross 1914/18. She had many stories of the time For a while she dated a Chilean lieutenant in the UK there to meet the Faulknor-class destroyer building at Cowes which the RN ended up appropriating for the war emergency. She partied with Horace Hood and other up-and-coming officers, and knew their names when they fell at Heligoland and Jutland and Dogger Bank. She remembered the news report when U-9 sank Hogue, Cressy and Aboukir – and because the names were so unEnglish celebrated until she learned they were British. She met my grandfather there when he was deployed to the UK in preparation for shipping to France: he was MD with the medical corps.
My father was USN Pacific (service) and Korea (negotiations). His ship was kamikaze’d in ’45 but none of us knew until we dug through his papers.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
I’ve heard it said that the Reichwing does not understand that patriotism and the left are not strangers; but that the left merely distrusts nationalism in all its forms because the left remembers what nationalism does when left unchecked. We need more of that distrust now and less jingoistic “Support The Troops” mealymouthed crap.
raven
@Schlemazel: You know a gun from the Ward, the ship that fired the first shot of WW2 is in front of the state house there?
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: @JanieM: The 42nd Division was fought solely on the Western Front.
raven
@boatboy_srq: What craft?
boatboy_srq
@JanieM: I find references to the larger Meuse-Argonne battle and to Mons, but nothing specifically mentioning that.
The Civil War references are to Seven Pines.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: My buddy Andy was killed 50 years ago the 22nd, he was nineteen. Of course everyone is aware that Veterans Day is for the living?
Adam L Silverman
@Hungry Joe: Have you seen GI Jews?
Full documentary here:
https://www.pbs.org/show/gi-jews/
Here’s an excerpt:
boatboy_srq
@raven: Dad? Mugford (DD-389) and The Sullivans (DD-537).
I think my grandmother’s beau was supposed to take command of the destroyer that became HMS Tipperary instead.
JanieM
@J R in WV: The Proteus was also converted to support nuclear submarines. My dad took note over the years of what had happened to it.
He was on it for the shakedown cruise, and also in Tokyo Bay at the end of the war. Someone spoke of loot, above. In later life my dad wouldn’t have taken so much as a pencil from his workplace, but he did come home from the war with a couple of … items … including a pair of huge binoculars off some ship. I remember him setting them up on a tripod out in the yard so we could try to catch Sputnik going overhead in 1957; I was 7 years old. Imagine a time when there was only 1 human-made object flying around up there!
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s confused him with President Kennedy. You know: Kennedy, Kerry, Boston, they all look and sound alike…
It is amazing that Gutfield is so stupid he actually makes the two idiots on the morning show seem like brain surgeons.
NotMax
In line with the title, FYI.
boatboy_srq
@NotMax: Well, there’s two (maybe three) countries among that list who will want the truth told about that particular incident. The rest? Not so much.
boatboy_srq
@NotMax: Figures that – again – Germany leads the US.
Land of the Free my pale furry arse.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman:
Are those the boobs of the infamous “Blonde with two boobs”?
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That would be them.
Hungry Joe
@Adam L Silverman: Have not seen it .. but I will now. Thanks.
boatboy_srq
@PhoenixRising: That generation never talks/talked about much of anything. The Depression was rough; WW2 was ugly and dirty; 1945 came and went and most went home and got on with their lives. You learn about what they did and went through later from reading their writings and seeing their photographs.
Raoul Paste
It doesn’t get much more soulful than live Dire Straits. Just wow.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@boatboy_srq: at the height of their book selling/working out daddy issues, Tom Brokaw had Russert and his old man (who I believe was never called Big Russ until his son needed a hook) on a cable show, and the two Boomers were fawning over the Greatest Generation, Russert all hyper, goggle-eyed breathlessness talking about “guys like my dad, working class kids, went to Europe, won the war, then came home and built this country!” Brokaw, all oily, smarmy condescension trying to sound like respect: “Mr Russert, sir?” The old man: “Yeah, I got drafted, then I came back and got a job”
SFAW
@Hungry Joe:
I had an uncle — my aunt’s first husband — who had a similar situation. Med school, Europe. If my memory is correct, he was in the Battle of the Bulge. I remember my father telling me — they were brothers-in-law and drinking buddies — that my uncle was “not the same” when he returned home. I don’t know if he ever spoke of WW2 to my cousins. I think I should ask when I see them at Thanksgiving.
JanieM
@NotMax: This reminds me of Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration, which (per wikipedia) “explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.” Real people are woven into the story, including the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, about whose death wikipedia says:
The novel treats the homosexuality of several of the characters in such a subtle way that people I met in a book group after it came out (non-gay people, unlike me) didn’t quite pick up on it. I thought Barker did a great job of depicting just how reticent people would have been in that era.
Jay
“Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we mistaking?
But, you see it’s not me
It’s not my family
In your head, in your head
They are fighting
With their tanks and their bombs
And their bombs and their guns
In your head in your head they are crying
In your head
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie, ei, ei
What’s in your head?
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie ei, ei, ei, oh do do do do do do do do
Another mother’s breaking
Heart is taking over
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken
It’s the same old thing since 1916
In your head, in your head
They’re still fighting
With their tanks and their bombs
And their bombs and their guns
In your head, in your head they are dying
In your head
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie, ei, ei
What’s in your head?
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie ei, ei, ei, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ei ei oh”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
Schlemazel
@raven:
Yes, I used to see it when I was a kid. FIrst American shot of WWII
FlyingToaster
My dad was a USAAC MSgt FE/Radio Operator in WWII, Pacific Theater, on a B-24. He’d been recruited as a co-op student at Wichita working at Beechcraft; finished the semester and was put on a train down to Del Rio to train.
His first plane went down in China (mechanical failure) and they had to walk for a month west to get flown out over the hump. Shot the hell up somewhere over water and limped back to base the second time, with his ear half torn off and the eardrum blown (and the Pilot, Top Gunner, Tail Gunner all dead). 6 weeks in a Darwin hospital and they lateraled him into a ground crew TSgt on Tinian. They had a pool on what was “behind the wire” — he’d bet Bubonic Plague; one of the mechanics won with Atom Bomb.
He was a reservist and called back as USAF for 14 months on Okinawa during the Korean Conflict.
All but one of my maternal uncles and all of HerrDoktor’s paternal uncles were vets as well. And a couple of up-the-tree cousins died under Custer (damn fool) at Little Big Horn. One of my first cousins and half-a-dozen of my second cousins are all veterans.
Fuck Trump.
Another Scott
@SFAW: One of my great uncles was from an Ohio farm. He was in the Normandy landing (IIRC). When he came home, he never talked of the war, he returned to the family farm, and he never married.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were a million similar stories that were never told. :-(
Modern war is horrible, no matter how strongly the country as a whole rallies to a just cause.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They’re touchy about him skipping the memorial. My favorite part is how he was tweeting, so we all know he was sitting around watching tv. I picture him tweeting frantically, occasionally bellowing at one of them to bring him a Diet Coke.
My grandmother used to watch soap operas and yell at us to bring her things. “Bring me a piece of fruit- and wash it!” That’s what it’s like for them.
boatboy_srq
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Something tells me the kids saw too many propaganda films.
Schlemazel
@JanieM:
I very clearly remember the fear Sputnik caused, though I was not old enough to understand why.
A lot of morality breaks down in combat. It is one of the unmentioned costs of war. I little light souvenir hunting is almost required I would think.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: some reporter said yesterday they didn’t have the vehicles and security necessary for a motorcade, they never use motorcades overseas, just helicopters. Then this morning the trip he did make to Suresnes was… by motorcade.
and he couldn’t even waddle a couple hundred yards up the Champs-Elysees with the rest of the allied leadership
MagdaInBlack
@Another Scott:
If you are not familiar, you might look up
Studs Terkel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_War
dmsilev
Both of my grandfathers served in WWII in what I will describe as necessary but not glorious roles.
My paternal grandfather was in the Army, in a logistics unit. In plainer language, he drove a supply truck in France and then Germany. After he died and we were going through his things, we found a copy of his unit history, and basically nothing exciting happened to them. Which, I’m sure, is exactly how he and his mates wanted it. Still, the guys on the front lines needed food and bullets and so forth.
My maternal grandfather was a civilian for most of the war, spending most of that time working at the Boston Navy Yard doing electrical wiring work on new destroyers and other ships. He was drafted into the Army in mid 1945 and either was still in Basic or had just finished when Japan surrendered. If there had been an invasion of the Home Islands in late 1945, he probably would have been part of it.
Logistics and construction, arguably America’s greatest strengths during that war.
Schlemazel
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Judging from my uncles it is my belief that the more you saw the less you were impressed by what you did. Guys with purple hearts & Navy Crosses won in the Pacific who said it was nothing really, just something they did. Guy that got there late as a pilot seemed to think a lot more of his service. I often think the biggest talkers were probably librarians at Fort Bragg.
Worst beating I saw a man get was while I was in college. Out drinking with two classmates who both had been in combat. Something one of them said reminded the other of something & they talked about it. Guy at the next table overheard them & started big talking about “burning gooks”. They asked where he had been & whatever his answer was it was wrong. I had to drag one of my friends off him I thought he was going to kill the clown.
Apparently he had been stationed in the safest place possible
NotMax
@dmsilev
My father was in the Seabees during WW2.
Never uttered word one about his time in the service.
SFAW
@Schlemazel:
In a more perfect world, the “guy at the next table” would have been Shitgibbon. Of course, then he would have claimed he received a Purple Heart.
Schlemazel
Another bit of trivia I picked up along the way. Do you know that the US took more casualties on 11/11/1918 than on D-Day?
Some commanders sent men over the top as late as 10:30 despite knowing the war was over. A story I read but have not verified was that white offices sent an African American unit into no mans land white the white soldiers stayed behind. They took terrible casualties for no real reason
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Right. But he found the time to scream incoherently at the…state of California. I myself don’t believe that most Republicans aren’t cringing with shame at this stuff- he’s killing them inside. It’s a possible explanation for why they’re so angry all the time. Every fucking day they have to defend him, and he’s not even loyal! He has absolute contempt for them. It’s such a sick relationship.
drdavechemist
For more than 20 years, our church choir has performed an abridged version of this piece entitled As the Leaves Fall by Harold Darke.
https://youtu.be/gyE00yf3cfs
This year, for the 100th anniversary, we hired an orchestra of local Philharmonic players, and a soprano soloist who sang at the Met in her younger days to perform the entire cantata. The text/poem was written by a British soldier after the battle of the Somme and it’s a lovely metaphor comparing the falling autumn leaves to the fallen soldiers. It’s always hard for me to sing the line “There is no death” but it was especially moving this year. My grandfather served in the Great War and my dad in WWII, and though they have both been gone for many years, Ithink of them and all their fallen comrades whenever we perform this piece.
ETA link is being finicky on iPad, but Google will help you out if you use the title and composer
Jay
My Grandfather on my Dad’s side, was 1 of 15 children. After WWI, he was one of 7. He survived WWI by being a RAF Aircraft Fitter, and thus too valuable to be placed in harms way.
He was a Air Raid Warden during WWII, and luckily, WWII ended when my Dad was a year too young. At the end of WWII, my grandad was 1 of 3 still living.
My Grandfather on my Mother’s side, was a AustroHungarian orphan from Western Galacia. He never talked about WWI or the death of his whole extended family.
I’m named for an “uncle”, who was a premature Anti-Facist. He was a big brother to my Mom, who joined the Mackenzie Papineau Brigaide and served in the Spanish Civil War. Marked as a “communist” he wasn’t allowed to serve in the Canadian Army during WWII, so he got false documents and enlisted in the British Army. He fought in Greece, Crete, the Middle East, where he was both decorated and found out.
British MP’s “transferred” him to the Canadian Army, who decided his combat experience was valuable. He served in the Invasion of Sicily, Italy, the Italian Campaign, then the push into the Netherlands and Germany.
After WWII he had a hard time holding a job, marked as a “Communist” and harassed by the RCMP Red Squad, to the point that in the late 50’s, he took his own life, leaving behind a wife and 2 children.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Government imported some 1500 high ranking Nazi War Criminals and gave them “security” jobs for their “anticommunist” experience, and turned a blind eye to the immigration of another 12,500 Nazi War Criminals.
Yarrow
Danny Boyle (director) created this Pages of the Sea project to commemorate the WWI centenary. There’s loads more in the 14-18 NOW Twitter feed but here’s a good tweet with a video showing the sand art. Very moving.
Schlemazel
@Jay:
I was unaware that my Northern neighbor had assholes as big as ours. NASA & the CIA got a lot of value out of Nazis while the FBI and tail gummer Joe destroyed a lot of decent people
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It wouldn’t happen because Trump’s too racist so he would lose the primary, but I do wonder about it. How long would Democrats stick with a truly awful human being as President? All we had to do was defend Obama on “you can keep your doctor” and the tan suit and I thought he looked great in the tan suit. They have to defend the President attacking the survivors of a huge fire. “Well, forest management IS an issue” Okey doke.
Jay
“The day after a midterm election in which President Donald Trump played up the Pentagon’s mission to provide logistical support along the southern border, the Pentagon said Wednesday it will no longer publicly refer to the mission as Operation Faithful Patriot. Instead, the deployment of active duty troops will be referred to as what it’s always been: a border support mission.
“We are not calling it Operation Faithful Patriot, we are calling it a border support mission,” said Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/post-election-day-pentagon-drops-border-support-mission/story?id=59032060
Kay
This will be a focus of House education Dems. They’ve been chomping at the bit to call her for hearings – they can do a really good job. She appointed a for-profit college crony and there are lots and lots of debtors to call as witnesses. She simply decided unilaterally to stop processing these discharges and she’s lying about it because they know it’s politically damaging.
She’s absolutely terrible at hearings- stiff, combative, ill-prepared. She’ll blow it.
Jay
@Schlemazel:
Sadly, it started in the summer of 1944, and was “common” policy amongst all the Western Allies.
Support was pulled from Communist, communist and socialist Partizan Groups, their operations were betrayed to the Nazi’s, ( often leading to the deaths of Allied SOE detachments embedded in those groups) those who protested had their careers destroyed, and their lives hounded.
Official overtures were made to attempt to “recruit” the “ethnic” Waffen SS and other pro-Nazi militias and armies for the “post war” period.
The Canadian, British and Australian records covering these events are scheduled to be declassified on 2045, so far.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Yes, but during my formative years November 11 was Armistice Day. And being steeped in Anglo-Canadianism, I tend to observe it as Remembrance Day. But I do know the difference between Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day.
I’m sorry about your 19-year-old buddy.
Yutsano
This is especially for Adam:
My grandfather was considered not healthy enough at first to be part of the Army in WWII at first. Then the drafters needed bodies, and he went. That service not only led to the Battle of the Bulge but also to being one of the few American units to participate in international maneuvers in Egypt. I don’t know the precise details here save that it was a very uncommon thing. He also did a short stint in Korea but then got out of the military. He is just one of the many vets I have in my family.
2liberal
My paternal grandparents came over in about 1917 and kept in touch with family back in The Netherlands. They watched as Germany overran their hometown and sent 3 sons off to war. My Dad worked on airplane radios in the European theater. All 3 sons came home in good shape.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: Tracking.
Tehanu
@Hungry Joe:
My dad too, a Jewish staff sgt. and radio operator… but he spent his war in the Belgian Congo, then Cairo and Palestine, then the Persian Gulf, then finally north of Teheran relaying messages to & from the Russians and the British command in Cairo. The Congo part was because the AAC had some plan to build air bases all across Africa to Kenya, which fell through. Then he got a foot infection and was hospitalized while his unit went up to Tobruk and got wiped out. He and my mom are in the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery now.
NotMax
Offhand can’t remember the name of the unit Churchill set up in Great Britain, training civilian men who would act as saboteurs and guerilla fighters should the Germans invade and take over. Including setting up explosives in advance to blow up bridges and railways. They were under such strict secrecy that no one talked about it for fifty years afterwards, and up into the 1990s construction crews were coming across unexplained caches of explosives, still in place, when doing rebuilding and such.
Procopius
I can’t make out a word he’s singing, so I don’t know what the song is about, but I have my own favorite. As a retired soldier who was lucky enough never to be wounded, I was surprisingly moved by a song from a different country that expressed the cost of war in a way that moved me as nothing else has. It’s an Australian song, but I think a lot of Americans have a strong feeling of kinship for Australia. If you don’t already know, an Australian’s matilda is the same as a hobo’s bindle. “Waltzing Matilda” is roving with all your possessions in a bundle you carry with you. The image of being free to rove as you will over the wide open spaces is something I picked up from the Saturday movie matinees when I was a kid, soon after World War II. Anyway, this song damn near makes me cry every time I hear it.
Ruckus
@JanieM:
My father served on a tender in the south Pacific during WW2. He would never talk about it so I have no idea the name of the ship.
Sloane Ranger
My memories are tied up with the wreath laying at the Cenotaph so Edward Elgar’s Nine of played by a military band always does it for me.
As for family, my Grandfather was in the Machine Gun Corps. He was taken prisoner during the Battle of Cambrai and eventually repatriated just before Christmas 1918. My other Grandfather died during WW2 while in the Royal Artillery.
I also have 2 Great Uncles, one on my father’s side and 1 on my mother’s, who were killed on the Western Front while serving with the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Sherwood Foresters respectively plus a number of more distant relatives who were killed during WW1, the saddest of all being my Father’s father’s cousin. His family emigrated to Canada when he was a child but he was killed in France, aged 19 while serving with the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. He had started a new life but was pulled back into the Old one through the insanity of this war.
On a different note, service records indicate that he and my Grandad would have been in the same camp for several weeks and I often wonder if they knew that and met up. I wish I’d talked to my Grandad more about this but he only opened up once and I was too young to understand and too impatient to listen.
Albatrossity
No other song sums up the idiocy of war better than Dylan’s “Masters of War”. Here’s Odetta’s unforgettable version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38dOYW7-B0E
Another Scott
@MagdaInBlack: Thanks for the pointer. I put it on The List.
Cheers,
Scott.