An Oral History of War

[Crow]

Howdy,

I'm starting this thread because much of history, military and otherwise, doesn't make it into "the books." Personal involvement and stories from family members who fought in wars or lived in areas involved in wars is lost. Tales of life going on despite war often aren't covered.

So here's the place to discuss war stories~~ your own, or that of friends and families. My family has an oral history of many years span. A few years ago I was able to obtain "traditional history" confirmation of our family history that a forebear had indeed been involved in an American Revolutionary War conflict.

I'm going to do an intentional double post and leave this post as a guide. I'll start my stories in the next post. Feel free to comment or discuss, or leave your own stories and opinions.

This isn't the place to discuss the merits of war or lack thereof. This is to discuss what happened and effects. Your grandmother's stories of rationing. Your first day in Desert Storm. Your great grandfather's Civil War regiment. Stories you heard from buddies. Stuff like that.

Crow

[Crow]

My father was involved in 3 wars~ WW2, Korea, and Vietnam.

When I was a kid he told me that he had been a tech on a bomber, and also functioned as a jack of all trades, as all of the crew did. He was stationed in England.

One of the stories he shared was about a colonel's coffee pot. He said that fresh meat, as opposed to tinned, could be tough to come by. There were hundreds of large hares which lived around the base, but legally you couldn't kill them.

One of his buddies killed one with a shovel. There were not many discrete ways to cook his poached game, but in a moment of inspiration, he pinched the colonel's large shiny coffee pot. The hare was cooked in the pot with potatoes and carrots. It was declared the best dinner the crew had had in over a year. The coffee pot was duly cleaned with aviation degreaser and soap and returned to it's customary spot. The colonel was none the wiser.

My father spoke a great deal of what the bombs had done to London. We was disgusted with the destruction of buildings that had endured for hundreds of years. He also spoke of the British people he knew, and of how they showed great bravery and held together as one during the war. He picked up quite a few "fiddle tunes" from both the Brits and a Welshman he befriended while he was there.

[Johnny MacManky]

My grandfather (on my dad's side) was a machine gunner in WWI. After that war a hospital was built for disabled ex-servicemen. In the surrounding countryside small holdings (mini farms) were built for non-disabled ex-servicemen. My grandfather got one of these in 1931. I now live in that house.

My dad was about 11 when the Luftwaffe bombed Clydebank. When the bombers approached Clydebank from the south, they'd fly over the house. One bomb was dropped early, landing in a wood and missing our house by several hundred yards. The next morning my dad and his chums (who lived slightly closer to the crater) went down to see the crater and one of the boys burned his hand. The crater is still there, although it's well overgrown.

Another time a bomber was shot down and my dad was out to see it the next morning. He "salvaged" a machine gun from it and hid it in our barn!

I've still got my grandfather's service medals from the first war and have passed them on to my kid.

[dizzle]

I wish I had some war stories. I didn't appreciate the wealth of experience of my elders until they were gone. :bawl:

[Crow]

One of the funnier war stories is one about my great uncle's war wound.

He returned from the Civil War, claiming that he had been "shot in the hip" during a pitched battle with Confederate troups. After his death my great aunt told the true tale to all of the kids in the family, who included my grandfather, 5 at the time the Civil War began.

Apparantly Uncle John had entered what he thought was a deserted farmyard and drawn water from the well for a drink. He was shot in the buttocks with birdshot by a frightened housewife while he was bending over the well, pulling up the bucket.

It just goes to show you that some of those tales of battlefield bravery are slightly edited for the public.

[Johnny MacManky]

It only just occurred to me that this next tale is also a family oral war story, although it is also recorded in the history books.

I remember my dad telling me that his mother had told him that our family (clan) nickname was "the MacSiccars". Now, this story has been passed down through the family for a long time, because it comes from an event over 700 years ago, and it involves a King of Scotland, and a murder!

After William Wallace (the dude Mel Gibson played in Braveheart) was murdered by the English, there was a period when Scotland had no King. The English had installed a puppet King, but there were two main contenders for the throne, Robert the Bruce and Red Comyn. Bruce arranged a meeting with Comyn in a church at Dumfries. It is not known what Bruce's true intentions were, but after a while there was a commotion and Bruce rushed out from the church to tell his followers that he had stabbed Comyn.

One follower (who was an ancestral clansman of mine) asked "Is he dead?" to which Bruce replied, "I'm not sure"... My clansman retorted, "Well, I'll mak sikar" (make sure) and went into the church with a few others and finished off the job.

The story my dad told me varies here slightly from what I've researched and found. According to the family oral telling, the Pope was so outraged by this, and the fact the Scottish bishops didn't condemn Bruce, that the entire nation of Scotland was excommunicated (:woohoo:) and Bruce spent the rest of his life trying to have Scotland restored to communion. (Bear in mind that in effect this meant all Scots were condemned to Hellfire.) Bruce intended to go on a Crusade as penance, but died before he could, so he had left orders that his heart be taken on a Crusade. This happened and after Bruce's heart was returned from the crusade (to Spain) it was buried in Melrose Abbey. (I've been to the grave.)

[Crow]

That's an oldie!

There was a old tale told in our family about some of my ancestors who had fought a king of England. It had degenerated into "Remember, the _______ once brought a king of England to his knees." No one knew the specifics, only that it was "true." It was mostly the convenient phrase that got tossed out whenever someone whined that he or she was faced with a difficult task.

Many years later, when researching our family's geneaology, my brother found out that several of our ancestors were barons present at the signing of the Magna Carta. There's no way of knowing for sure, but I wonder if this phrase, passed down for hundreds of years, dates to that time? It's awesome to think that this might be the remnant of a bit of factual history that survived for nearly 800 years.

[Longstreet]

I have no personal war story, though I did come close. I was a Navy Reserve Seabee for 8 years, part of which was during Desert Shield/Desert Storm. I had just been selected Military Instructor for our detachment. Before the war had started, we had scheduled a rifle shoot for the beginning of January. Part of my responsibility was making arrangements for weapons, ammunition and security for those items. The ammunition was supposed to arrive a week or so before the shoot, but didn’t. I called the Armory every day looking for my ammo; not here yet, but it’s coming. On the day before we were supposed to leave, I made on final call. The Marine in charge told me it still wasn’t in, and gave me the phone number to a depot in South Carolina that was supposed to have shipped my ammo. Turns out they had diverted my ammunition to Saudi Arabia and never bothered to tell me about it!:whack: I had M-16’s but no ammo, I had 100 Seabees, 2 Humvees, a 2 ½ truck for the rifles, and three buses showing up at 0500 the next morning. I managed to call and cancel the buses, and started to work the phones trying to warn every body off, but there was no way I could get hold of every one. About 50 guys showed up the next morning (including 2 Marine drivers who had come in on their day off to drive the weapons and ammo), just so I could meet them in the parking lot and tell them to forget about the shoot. Not a very happy bunch. The Marines were especially, um, “expressive” of their displeasure. I remember thinking “After all this trouble, I better see some action before this is done!”

To my great pleasure and excitement, we were given alert orders (I think that’s what they were called) at the end of January that we would be deployed to theater, after going to Fort Hunter Liggett in California for 6 weeks of refresher training. We began training (as much as we could at a Reserve Center), doing wills and PoA, all that pre-deployment stuff, preparing for a departure date of around 15 March. Hostilities ceased at the end of February, and the orders were cancelled.

It remains one of the biggest disappointments of my life.

[SteveF]

My Grandad didn't speak too much about his war time experiences, but from what little he said and from the military records my Dad obtained after his death, we have been able to obtain an idea. Basically he was in India and did the bulk of his fighting as the allied soldiers retreated. He was a sergeant in command of Gurkhas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_of_Gurkhas) who went behind Japanese lines to disrupt the advance. Extremely dangerous work by all accounts.

After Slim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Slim) and the army had halted the Japanese advances, he spent most of his time driving supply trucks, before being shipped back to the UK a few months after VJ day. On his way home he stopped in Cape Town; after his funeral, my Dad and I were going through some of his things and found a pressed flower in his diary, from Table Mountain. We also found some nice photos of him; one with him stripped down to the waste, holding a rifle, looking really cool! Another advertising him singing Sinatra songs.

He had a sword from a Japanese officer that he killed in arm to arm combat, close to a Japanese base they were attacking. It's hard to square this image with the kind and gentle man I knew. He ended up giving the sword away, when I was young.

[Storico]

I really want to do some family geneology, but several factors make it difficult to trace any part of my father's family, although I have a common last name that's more likely than not got military ties somewhere in England.

On my mother's side, though, I do have a "war story" about people who escaped the war. My great grandfather was over in Slovakia, and in 1937 decided to get his family out and over to Canada, which probably ended up saving them a lot of grief. The Nazis moved in shortly after they left. My grandfather, a young man at the beginning of the war and in his mid teens by the end of it, found himself working in a tobacco field. He and a friend went up to the local recruiting office, but their boss at the tobacco field asked them not to enlist, and said he needed their manpower back at the field.... so, for a second time, my grandfather escaped getting caught up in the war somehow.

My maternal grandmother grew up on a farm, and she was only 11 when WWII broke out. What she remembers most is people feeling relief when the war came -- due to the Depression that hit Canadian farming communities hard, the war meant jobs for people, and some extra money. Guys left the farms to go into the cities to work. She says that they never had much money, but plenty of food. For either her 12th or her 13th birthday (she can't remember which) her mother had no money to buy her a birthday gift, so she used up the sugar allotment for that week to make a huge cake, and had the whole extended family over, and the neighbors.... and during war broadcasts on the radio, everyone turned the radio off, cranked music on a new record player, and danced.

My grandparents married just a while after WWII ended. Both of them were very young, neither of them had much money, so they did the only sensible thing they could think of -- they got a little house, raised four girls, and have kept a stocked freezer and pantry to make up for lost time. :tongue:

[The Curtmudgeon]

Here's a few stories from my family's tree:

One of my maternal grandmother's ancestors was in Georgia at the time of the American Civil War, and enlisted in one or another of the Georgia State Militia corps that were being raised. After fighting for sometime (really, mostly marching this way and that, I'm not sure how much fighting he actually saw), he pulled a rather common manuever of the time, and deserted to go home to tend to the farm (the Confederates, and to a lesser extent the Union, were plagued by this throughout the war, every harvest season). But after a while at home, his conscience (or something! :lol:) got to him, and he wanted to return to the army -- but he couldn't, because he was listed as a deserter from his unit, which carried an automatic death sentence. So he crossed the state, and enlisted under an assumed name in a totally different unit. Then he did the same thing again! He fought in three different units, under three different names, during the war. :lol:
My paternal grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War in 1898, in the Caribbean theatre (as opposed to the Philippines). Apparently, he liked it so much that when the war ended and he was mustered out, he decided to simply bum around the Caribbean for a while. His family didn't know where he was or what had happened to him for 10 years because he never wrote; when they asked the Army what had happened, all the Army could say was that he wasn't killed during the war, but after he mustered out he wasn't their concern. Finally, after about 10 years, he showed up back in the old hometown, much to the surprise of his family. [Note: This is the story as told to my mother by his (my paternal grandfather's) half-sister. Since then, I have found a record of his Army service, giving only the years, but it disagrees with this; his official record is that he was in the army 1904-08, much too late for the SAW. But his half-sister had some reason for remembering it differently, or it could be that the records are simply wrong (it does happen, especially back when records were all hand-written and mostly haphazard). So I continue to tell the tale this way, but I admit the caveat that it might be "stretched" a bit.]
My maternal grandfather volunteered to be an Army chaplain when the US entered WWI in 1917. He was turned down because he was newly married; Mom, his eldest, would be born the next year, a bare two months before the Armistice. So if he had been accepted, I might not be here to type this now. [I guess this counts as a non-war story, since he didn't get into the Army Chaplaincy.]
Mom got accepted to a job as a pastor's secretary (the pastor was a friend of my grandfather's) in N'awlins, and her last Sunday before leaving Texas (or else, her first Sunday after arriving in N'awlins, I forget precisely which) was 7 December 1941. Shortly thereafter, her next sibling in line, my uncle Malcolm, who was in the Army Air Corps, was sent with his unit to an unnamed destination -- which turned out to be N'awlins. Then, Grandmother decided to send the next sibling, my aunt Sara (who was a handful most of her life :lol:), down to Mom to take in line, so the three of them spent the war more or less together (Mal was on base most of the time, of course, but they could see him from time to time). Mom and Sara got into several interesting 'scrapes' while there (two young women on their own, in a major shipping port during wartime -- you can imagine the possibilities! :lol:), but one in particular I'll tell here. There is a part of N'awlins not far from the French Quarter known as the Irish Channel; it's always been a very tough part of town (e.g., drunks traditionally get rolled if they fall asleep on the streets in the rest of the city; they get dead if they do it in the Channel), but there were some bars and clubs that, if you knew what you were doing and went in groups were not too bad. One night when Mom and Sara were on their way to one such, a Navy sailor came stumbling toward them out of a dark alley. Thinking he was drunk, at first, they were appalled to discover, when he collapsed at their feet, that his throat had been slit and he was bleeding to death. Sara wound up holding the sailor's head in her lap and holding his wound closed while Mom hared off to find a phone and call for help. A military ambulance eventually reached them, and the sailor was loaded in and they drove off. The sequel was interesting: The next day, they couldn't find any mention of it in the paper, nor was there anything that they ever found about the incident. They never knew the man's name, nor what became of him.
[Edited to insert:] Almost left out one of my favourite stories about Mom in N'awlins during the war. Mom gave up the church secreatary job after a while, and got a clerical job working for Consolidated Vultee, a manufacturer of PBY sea-planes (their home office was in San Diego, but they opened up the N'awlins factory to save time and money shipping planes to the Atlantic theatre). She had a desk in a room full of other clerical types, but her desk was right next to an interior window to the main hallway. So Mom, being the nutcase she was, kept a "short-snorter" pipe in her desk drawer, and often as various company hierarchy and/or military brass came to visit or inspect the factory, she'd pull it out and light up when they came down the hallway. She'd sit there calmly at her desk, puffing away on the pipe like Mammy Yokum, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. :lmbo:
Uncle Mal played trombone in the post band on his AAC base -- a band which included Al Hirt and his brother Jerry, as well as some other, lesser lights of the N'awlins jazz scene.
Mal was "dying" to be a fighter pilot, but like most of the family, he had bad vision. He couldn't get into fighter training because he couldn't pass an eye chart test. So, after having flunked numerous (my memory says 3 or 4) attempts, he sat down and simply memorised the chart. The next time he was able to take the test, he passed with flying colours, and was cleared for fighter pilot training -- and literally as soon as he completed training and was certified for combat, the war ended. [Note: I've known this story all my life. So imagine my surprise when Donald Sutherland pulls off a very similar stunt in the movie Space Cowboys! But that was long after the time I first heard the story of Mal doing it.]
Another uncle, Mom's youngest brother Elton, was drafted into the Army for the Korean War. Since he had flat feet already, of course they put him in the infantry. [Other than that, I don't think I heard one single thing about his war experiences. I don't know if he just never saw combat, or else it was so bad he didn't want to talk about it.]
I just missed the draft for Vietnam. I turned eligible the year we pulled out, and never registered. So, no personal war stories.

The (I rather think that's a good thing, although I'm not against the war per se) Curtmudgeon

[One Bad Pig]

My great-grandfather tried to enlist in WW I, but got turned down because he had a heart murmur. He lived to be 102.

Thanks to the Delayed Entry Program, I'm a "war vet." I committed to enlisting in July of 1991; though I didn't actually go to boot camp until nearly a year later, the intervening time retroactively counts as active duty. :shrug: I did get a Navy Expeditionary Medal during my time of service, but I'd hate to have to kill everyone who stumbles across my post so I won't reveal where I was or what I did.

:fish:

[Rayado]

This is a good thread (and has thus been stickied). I'll have to try and find some of my grandfather's stories that he recorded from WWII. (We still have some silk maps of the Philippines in our possession--paper maps were known to disintegrate too quickly in the humidity so they had to use silk.)

[The Curtmudgeon]

This is a good thread (and has thus been stickied). I'll have to try and find some of my grandfather's stories that he recorded from WWII. (We still have some silk maps of the Philippines in our possession--paper maps were known to disintegrate too quickly in the humidity so they had to use silk.)

Silk was also used because it's easier to conceal in your clothing than a paper map would be -- paper folds leaving corners which can stick out, or stick you and make you flinch at the wrong time, and paper rustles at the exact wrong time when you're trying to conceal something. A nice silk handkerchief or head-scarf, which "just so happens" to have a very handy map pre-printed onto it, can be balled up and hidden in a second, without noise or discomfort. And it compresses into a smaller space than the same-sized piece of paper would, even if the paper is onionskin (which tears if you give it a strong look).

The (this was especially important for paratroopers dropped, or troops amphibiously inserted, behind enemy lines) Curtmudgeon

[Lazarus]

In 1968 my father was sent to Vietnam. My mother, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, decided to return with her children to her home and stay with her father for the year my father was away. Two weeks before my father was to ship out, he took us to the small local airport to put us on a plane that would take us to New Orleans where we would catch our connecting flight to New York and on to Glasgow. I was 11 at the time and two of my other brothers were 10 and 9. We took the entire parting rather stoically. But my youngest brother, Andy, was only 5 and couldn't understand what was happening. As we were walking across the tarmac to our plane my brother began sobbing and screaming "I want my daddy, I want my daddy." He was beyong comforting and as we sat on the plane waiting to take off he sat in my mother's lap and sobbed against her shoulder. The small plane was very quiet until one gentleman leaned towards my mother and asked if there was anything he could do to help. My mother thanked him and explained that we had just said goodbye to my father who was leaving for Vietnam in the next week. I remember the silence most of all. Even the hostess didn't move. Then, somewhere behind us, I heard a soft, almost tender voice. "F... the war", it said. It was the first time I had ever heard an adult swear.

[Spiritus Naturae]

Me mum is from England and she has told me often of the bombing during WW2. Mom was a little girl then having been born in Cheltenham in 1935.

To this day she is claustrophobic, due in part to running into the cramped bomb shelters and all the chaos and noise.

This thread has inspired me...I'm going to get some info from mom and return with a yarn or two.

My grandfather on my dads side, died before I was born, but I know he served in the Korean War. Unfortunately all his tales went with him to the grave.

[Gabby]

Both my parents we're children in Germany during WWII and have an abundance of stories.

This past Christmas we had a nice visit with dad and his memories. It was sad though as he is loosing his memory and has become so unsure of himself. :sad: I am grateful for the times past that I have been able to learn about his growing up years. They will always be a cherished memory.