I made a comment on a kos diary today - a diary that inspired some controversy. My comment:
I disagree Elvis. Memorial Day belongs to us all. (27+ / 0-)
I - who had six uncles and a father who served overseas in WWII - say this: War is good for no one but profiteers and the politicians and brass hats who serve them.
I'm spending my day remembering my uncles - all gone now - and hoping beyond hope that human kind can find a way to make a lasting peace.
Below the fold, my uncles and my dad.
The oldest, my uncle Clyde, my mother's brother, was the last of the lot who went overseas. Born in 1912, he was already married when he went in. I don't know a whole lot about how it all happened because, like all of them, he didn't talk about it a lot. What I do know is that he went into southern France in Operation ANVIL or DRAGOONin mid-August of 1944. This - and he would laugh when someone in the family said it - was The Champagne Campaign. I'm sure it was not all a frolic, though to hear him talk of it you might think so. At the end of the war in Europe he found himself in Salzburg, Austria, a sergeant in charge of a fancy Keller. Later, he and his second wife made a trip to the old place. My wife and I inherited a set of crystal glasses he "liberated" from the Huns. His brother Baxter was a clerk in the army in England during the war.
The second oldest of my dad's brothers, Jimmy, was probably the first to join the armed forces. He, and his younger brothers Otis and Earl (my dad) were by 1937 all enlisted in the "Naval Reserve" - which meant "mustering" on Mayo's Island in the James River at 14th Street (the tide line) in Richmond, Virginia, and probably getting a fair amount of their training shagging baseballs hit out of the ballpark then operating next to the "Navy Base." Jimmy was a go getter. By the time the war came he had shifted to the army and went though OCS. He always held it over his brothers that he made major. He spent a good bit in England in the Quartermaster Corps, preparing for the invasion.
Otis, next down from Jimmy, stayed in the Navy, and was called up like my dad in early 1941. Otis I think shipped on a transport vessel, sort of like the AK-601, of Mr. Rogers fame. I have a local newspaper clipping somebody in the family saved from 1943 that shows pictures of my dad's three brothers and him "all home from the war."
The third of my dad's brothers . . . Bobby was just 17 when he joined the Marines in spring of 1943. In the newspaper feature he must have been on liberty after boot camp. He was assigned to the Second Marine Division and participated in the battles of Saipan and Okinawa. He, apparently, saw hell. He only talked openly about one incident. On Saipan he was marching with his company by some rubble. There was a baby - a Japanese baby - Saipan had an indigenous Japanese civilian population. My uncle Bob said he picked the baby up and carried it with his squad. The lieutenant saw what he had and according to my uncle said, "Take that baby back where you found it."
Younger than Bobby was my mom's brother Gordon. He joined the Army Air Corps in early 1944. He trained as a radioman-gunner in the B-25. His plane was lost in China in 1945. My mom never got over the loss of her little brother.
My dad. He was called up from the reserves in January 1941. He spent some time on a commandeered yacht guarding the submarine net that stretched between Fort Monroe and Fort Wool in Hampton Roads. In February 1942 he was on the commissioning crew in New Orleans of thePC 496 - a 174 foot subchaser - a no-name ship of the "Donald Duck Navy" that was thrown into the fracas of the Battle of the Atlantic. German submarines sank an average of almost 100 ships a month in 1942. My dad was escort for convoys between New York and Guantanamo. He said the scariest part was when an "old rustbucket" freighter would break down and his ship would be assigned to circle round and round until repairs could be made. But my dad would rather talk about how lucky he was - blues in New York one weekend, whites in Miami the next. Yet I imagine that the PC class was anything but fun - the smallest US Navy combatant to cross the Atlantic - which my dad did on the PC 496 in spring 1943 to support the invasion of Sicily. The mission was interrupted on June 4, when - according to my father - the Officer of the Deck, a "Ninty-Day-Wonder" read the chart wrong off Bizerte and strayed into an allied mine field. Subsequent reports blamed an Italian submarine, but my dad always maintained that the ship was too small to waste a torpedo on, and besides, he saw the 496 from the water when she turned turtle, and the twin props were blown clean off, so it must have been an acoustic mine. Of the crew of 55, 5 were lost. If the incident had occurred 10 minutes earlier it would have done in half the crew, as the explosion took out the mess room, and killed all the messboys. My dad, a petty officer in the black gang, was off watch, sitting on the forecastle reading a magazine when the blow fell. He claims that 40mm shells from the after deck cannon rained all around him. Fortunately, he said, he was sitting on a locker full of life jackets. He spent 45 minuted in the water thinking about sharks. The rest of the war he spent on another converted yacht out of Buzzards Bay, Rhode Island, patrolling for submarines and towing targets for pilot training.
When he died my wife and I were packing up my parent's house and we found a letter he had written to my mom, in July 1945. They had apparently just met when he was on leave. He was clearly smitten. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. He was contemplating being shipped out to the Pacific, for the invasion of Japan. He was in Charleston, South Carolina awaiting orders when VJ Day came.
There was no love for war among these minor heroes of my family. They were just doing a job that had to be done.