My father lugged a BAR through four campaigns in the Pacific. In November 1944, he used his BAR to take out a couple of Japanese machine gun nests that were holding up his squad on a recon mission on Leyte. He earned a Bronze Star that day and a promotion, which meant he didn’t have to carry the BAR on Okinawa because then he was toting a Garand.
“..My father lugged a BAR through four campaigns in the Pacific. In November 1944, he used his BAR to take out a couple of Japanese machine gun nests that were holding up his squad on a recon mission on Leyte. He earned a Bronze Star that day and a promotion, which meant he didn’t have to carry the BAR on Okinawa because then he was toting a Garand....”
Cool...seriously, that’s something to be proud of..for sure.
Mine was a PFC, 1st Marine Div., G27. He did manage to pick up a couple of purple hearts on Okinawa. Back then, IF you could still walk and shoot, you stayed in the fight. He was wounded twice. Both times it was non-life threatening although he did walk with a slight limp during cold weather until the day he passed.
He didn’t talk about the war a whole bunch, but the few times he did, he swore by that BAR. I do believe he’d have brought it home with him if they’d had let him have it. If he said it once, he said it a thousand times: “It was a real love/hate thing. I hated carrying it, but I loved the way it shot.” Or something like that.