Some of my deepest memories of WWII was my 2 brothers were drafted , one in March 42 and then the other in May 42. Food rationing and food stamps stand large in my mind of the period...
Didn't have time to create a proper thread for this but I wanted to get these out to everyone.
Page 9, 13 year-old Marine who fought on Guadalcanal is exposed and sent back to the states.
My dad joined the army Air corps at 16. After boot camp he was discovered and given an honorable discharge.
He waited over a year then joined the Navy. His shipmates were puzzled at how such a young kid could have an honorable discharge from the Army and didn’t give him the razzing that was reserved for the other newbie youngsters on board.
“In what has to rank as one of the strangest tales ever to come out of the Guadalcanal campaign, Bob related to me the story of the youngest Marine in history — in fact, the youngest person ever to have enlisted and served in the United States Armed Forces. There was a boy named George W. Holle, Jr. who joined the Marine Corps on October 28, 1941, shortly after his twelfth birthday. Bob had known this boy on Guadalcanal. Most of the enlisted men knew he wasn’t seventeen, but not too many knew he was only thirteen. Still, he did his job like everyone else.
Holle’s father had died when he was 10, and he had been living with his stepmother on a farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He was a big kid, well over six feet tall, and he always kept the company of older boys. As the war loomed, Holle followed the lead of the older boys in the area when they left for Milwaukee to enlist. His stepmother, a widow, was destitute in the last days of the depression, and he figured he could get three square meals a day and send his checks back home. Holle, enlisting before Pearl Harbor, reportedly “sent [his mother] and urgent telegram pleading that she would not reveal his age.” (2)
Holle’s actual age was made known a year or so later when his stepmother sought out social security death benefits for her late husband — she had to list her dependents and their professions and ages on the forms. She listed her thirteen-year old son as a Marine fighting in the South Pacific. Once the Chicago papers picked up the story, word got back to the commanding officers on Guadalcanal and Holle was sent back home. He immediately went on tour with the USO and became a celebrity in his own right. Holle even flirted with Hollywood mogul Jack Warner who had discussed making a movie about his life. Holle was a handsome boy, an all-American looking sort who became a killer like all the rest of the young Marines on Guadalcanal. “
http://www.thetigerisdead.com/tokyorose.html