81st Recon Battalion of the 1st Armored Div - I just have a photo album and a roster of towns in North Africa and Italy they passed through. And a picture of his light tank after it hit a mine.
I know a lot of data was lost when that records warehouse burned down a while back. What a shame.
“Wished I’d have interviewed my dad when he was alive - but he never wanted to talk about it.
81st Recon Battalion of the 1st Armored Div - I just have a photo album and a roster of towns in North Africa and Italy they passed through. And a picture of his light tank after it hit a mine.
I know a lot of data was lost when that records warehouse burned down a while back. What a shame.”
Other than the locations, I could have written this. My dad was not willing to talk about anything until he was so near death he was not understandable. As with you, all his records were gone.
Same here. It wasn’t until after he died and I read his discharge papers that I realized he spent over three months on Okinawa (I don’t think I would have lasted three minutes!).
It wasn’t like it was a secret, or something that distressed him to talk about - he just never did.
Bingo…same thing with my dad, a marine, who fought throughout the Pacific. He talked about non war related stuff during his deployment. Funny stuff. When I prodded him he said “you don’t want to know…you don’t want to go to war…war is terrible”.
A lot of vets never wanted to talk about it. My grandfather served in WW1, he was from Scotland and never said one word about it to my mother or me or anybody. The most I ever got from him was when I was 16 he would say “When I was your age I was dodging bullets” His father was an abusive alcoholic and je wanted to escape and he somehow got recruited by lying about his age. He had a really really tough life, of that I’m sure of. By the time he was 20 for example all his teeth were gone. Back then they would pull them even for a cavity. John Lumsden was his name, born 1898 and he served with the Queens own Cameron highlanders as a pipe major. He use to play bagpipes into battle. Imagine that scenario. I still have his shaving blade and bagpipes. His cousin who I met once had his foot taken off.
My Grandpa’s brother Dale flew B-26 Marauders in WW2. Have a picture somewhere of his plane on a snowy tarmac in D-Day markings. He would not talk to his own family about his experiences. I was just a kid when I asked him at a family reunion and he just lowered his head, mumbled something and walked away. I was hurt at the time, but understood later. One of his daughters told me after he passed they found some memorabilia of his time during the war. They never knew he even had that. Sad, but understandable. He lost a lot of friends. B-26 units flew dangerous, low level missions hitting rail yards, etc.
I was extraordinarily fortunate to actually serve with a WW2 USAAC vet.
It was 1975 in Thailand. LtCol Harley Hooper was on his final assignment and I was on my second; we were flying AC-130s in the 16SOS.
I wondered why nothing really bothered him while everything seemed to bother me; I was that young.
Harley told me he had served as a B-24 crew member in Europe prior to D-Day. He was shot down, captured, escaped, and was being hidden by the French underground in Paris, August 1944.
One day he heard singing, the “la Marsellaise”. When he looked out an window he saw Allied troops marching a newly freed Paris enroute to fighting German forces east of the city.
Harley told me it was both the best and worse day of his life. The best because for the first time in two years he knew, for an absolute fact, he was going to go home alive. The worse because he was the only one his B-24’s 11-man crew who went home.
How do you talk about this to the “home folks”?
To repay Harley for this important history lesson I bought him his brandy for the next six months. It was a very cheap price.
Sorry for the length but it is important to me and, IMHO, the reason why so many real combat vets, past, present, and future, don’t talk about their combat experiences.