I just found a photo of my maternal grandfather, Paul Clarence Westad.
The patch on his arm says he was an Army technician, 5th class — that meant he served in a non-combat role, but had specialized skills. He was a farm boy straight out of northern Minnesota, and I think his skill was being able to drive a tractor. From the little he said about his service, he was driving a bulldozer and building airfields on remote Pacific islands, but he didn’t talk much at all about what he did. He would tell stories about the giant lizards living in the rafters of his hut, and he had a secret stash of photos he smuggled out at the end of the war that showed burned and chopped up Japanese corpses, so I think part of his duties involved burial details.
He came out of the war with incipient alcoholism and possibly a bit of PTSD. He worked for the Washington State highway department driving a bulldozer, naturally enough, until the alcoholism left him a wreck. I have great memories of him when I was a child that turned into horror stories when I was an adult. I don’t know if I can blame the war, but maybe.
Respect.
Back when the USoA fought and beat Nazism & Fascism & imperialism rather than embracing it.
Mtygrandpoa fought in WWII -Air force. Lost an eye & allhis freidns and group except him died.
Clarity fix : My grandpa fought in WWII – in the Aussie Air force vs Imperial Japan.
He lost an eye & all his friends and the group he had been assigned to until a RADAR tower fell on him died whiulst he was in hospital.
I can only begin to imagine what that was like. He didn’t talk about it much. He was a good person.
And words are so damn inadequate.
My dad was a pharmacist’s mate in the US Navy in WW2. Most of his time was spent on ships in the Pacific. He too came out of the war with PTSD (which was not recognized as a thing til the late 80s/early 90s.) He recounted being on a ship where there was the worst outbreak of walking pneumonia during the war–so bad that they had to divert to New Zealand. He could barely talk about watching sick, dying, and dead young sailors being taken off the ship. 60 or 70 died. There was no such thing as antibiotics then. He told me this when I came down with walking pneumonia myself in 1998. He never followed his dream of immigrating to New Zealand after the war was over.
My grandfather fought on the other side in that war, driving a Panzer IV through the Ardennes.
I don’t think he ever got over what he saw and what he did for a regime that mudered his friends back home while he was on the front.
He often talked about the war, but never about actually fighting, not to me and I don’t think he talked to anyone else about some things he told me.
He always taught me that war is evil and should be avoided at all cost. He was against the German reunion because Germany should never again be strong enough to star another war.
I think you can blame the war. My father served in the Royal Australian Air Force. His first squadron, based in Darwin during the bombing was disbanded after they lost 80% of their members and were left with only two serviceable planes. For that his squadron was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation but they were not allowed to accept a foreign decoration. He converted from medium bombers to Liberator heavy bombers and served in a joint Australian-US squadron until transferred to an all Australian squadron. He rarely talked about the war, mostly some of the high jinks they got up to. Towards the end of his life he opened up more about the unpleasant aspects of it. He did like a drink and he suffered all his life from PTSD. For several years he lived under a flight path and if a plane flew over at night he would wake thinking it was a Japanese bombing raid. He was a top turret gunner and any time he was under stress he had a habit of craning his neck and scanning the sky for enemy fighters.
My paternal grandfather died in WWI somewhere in France.
His wife (my grandmother) died in the subsequent influenza epidemic.
My father served in WWII and lived to die of alcoholism and Alzheimers.
My mother died 3 weeks before her 93rd birthday.
My granddad was in the Royal Signals Corps. He was shipped off to war on a ship that had been sunk twice already. Churchill wasn’t fussed about that; he wasn’t an upper class type. After his ship was torpedoed by Japanese fighter/bombers he ended up in the prisoner of war camps made famous by the movie Bridge over the River Kwai. It still boggles my mind that the site of his imprisonment is the location of a super-futuristic airport (Changi). It also served as the inspiration for King Rat, and Planet of the Apes, written by the same author as the Bridge over the River Kwai, who decided based on his experiences in WWII that humankind could not be the most evolved form of life.
My grandfather served in the Pacific theater in a heavy weapons platoon and fought in the Philippines. Received a Bronze and Silver Star and a field commission. Also saw a little of Korea,
@ 違う
Dude, I think the mask just slipped. You’re supposed to be pretending to be Japanese, remember? It’s been your entire shtick for years.
(Not that I’m suggesting any intelligent person bought it for one second.)
My dad was a radioman in the Navy and he served on a small island in the Pacific. He never said much about his service except that there was an airstrip there that was built, bombed, rebuilt, and re-bombed repeatedly. The other thing he mentioned was that Jackie Coogan, former child actor, was stationed in a different unit on the same island and they chatted with each other a few times. He LOVED to watch the TV shows Combat!, McHale’s Navy, and MAS*H . . . .
df#10
Interesting choice of a thread to start this up again.
Stay classy, dude.
My father dropped out of college to enlist in the army in 1940 at age 21. Not the greatest timing but maybe he saw what was coming and wanted to join on his terms. He was in the Quartermaster (supplies) section and spent the early part of the war in Darwin and New Guinea. He then suffered an injury of some sort he never talked about (he did have a Purple Heart) and after recovery, was stationed in Wyoming until the war was over. After that, he spent four years in Japan and two in Korea until retiring in 1961. He never talked about his war experiences and died at age 51, a heavy smoker and alcoholic. I was 14. The Veterans Administration decided he died of service-related causes, which let my siblings and me get our college education expenses supplemented by the VA, something I’ve always appreciated.
I have my father’s and grandfather’s war medals — no Vic Crosses or anything like that, all of the “showed up and did your job, thanks” variety. Granddad (Gunner Thomas Watson) was, according to my Dad, in the trenches for a lot of the big actions of WWI — Somme, “Wipers”, etc., which is not a small thing. Dad had an easier time in WWII — Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, spent most of it in England, with a rear-area stint on the Continent post D-Day. A pacifist at heart, he was glad he never had a combat role. His sister was a messenger girl, who got to roar all over England on a motorbike (there’s a picture of her on it), which she thought was great fun.
Weird anecdote: We also have a few unissued German WWII medals which were among my wife’s Zaide’s effects, with the note “Found by Allied soldier in the ruins of the Reichstag”. We keep intending to donate them to a suitable museum (not going to sell them, as they might wind up in the hands of some Nazi fetishist).