Posted on 08/23/2022 5:54:19 AM PDT by daniel1212
So many hardships endued, lives risked, and lost, in helping to save a country from a wicked madman. Yet multitudes of their physical successors chose to go to war with God and work to destroy this nation from within, while a relative remnant of true Christians seek to save souls as part of the larger spiritual war.
Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. (2 Timothy 2:3)
When men were men.. the greatest generation !!
We’ve come a long way to maternity flight suits.
Today, the morons in the defense department think the greater outrage is the term “crewman”
I’ve personally spoken to guys from the WW2 museum and the 8th air force museum.
The stories they tell are horrible, especially Black Week.
Is there much doubt that today’s generation would surrender to seek a false peace rather than accept such conditions and fight for the nation?
When men were men.. the greatest generation !! ............... Nope, when boys became men in their mid to late teens. We had 16 yr. olds using their older brother’s birth certificates. May a couple even younger got away with it. (There was a young teen kid in the Navy, that made the headlines back then.)
Just finishing up Ian Toll's trilogy on the Pacific War. These books are highly recommended to get a better understanding of the war in the Pacific, especially as most WW2 histories is European-centric.
For instance, most people are familiar with the Enola Gay atomic bombing of Hiroshima led by Col. Tibbetts but how many know that the second atomic bombing mission to Nagasaki (Bockscar led by Maj. Sweeney) was riddled with problems and almost a complete disaster. Nagasaki was not even the primary target and as the Bockscar was nearly out of fuel, it had to make an emergency landing on Okinawa with just 7 gallons left in the tanks!
In fact, it was discussed initially bringing Maj. Sweeney up on court martial for what was considered a rash of bad decisions on Sweeney's part during the mission. But fortunately, the bombing itself was a success and brought the war swiftly to an end so it never came to be (fortunately, because Sweeney was a good man who did get his crew back safely in the end). This was not known until decades later.
Anyway, a really good set of books on the Pacific War by Ian Toll. Made for fascinating reading from page one.
I lost a cousin, before I was born, who was a waist gunner. He is buried in Belgium.
As a young man, I worked with a man who was at the Chosin Reservoir. He survived the bleeding from his wound because it froze.
One tough SOB.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
When the ball turret jammed, and the landing gear collapsed, the ball turret gunner was turned into jelly.
11 weeks of Marine Corps boot camp will straighten this lad out. At least the boot camp I went to back in the early 1980s on Parris Island.
Correction: My cousin is buried in the Netherlands. His plane was shot down over Munster, Germany. Only the 2 waist-gunners were killed; tge surviving crew members were taken as prisoners. Charles had just turned 20.
incredible article!
When 19 & 20 year old boys were MEN!
Thank you for sharing this with us.
I knew a guy that had a photo album filled with photos of nose art on a lot of the bombers...photos that he took. The album also contained a safety pin from a bomb from each of his forty-some missions. He enlisted at 17.
My grandpa was a corpsman in WW2 and Korea. He said Korea was the coldest he’s ever seen and he didn’t even know it could get that cold. He had to remove fingers, toes, feet, etc on a regular basis. He said if Chinese and Korean buets didn’t kill you, the cold will
I had two history teachers, in high school and college, tell me almost the same story of commanding tanks at the Yalu when the Chinese attacked. Both were lieutenants and expressed regrets about their command abilities. These were probably reactions to loss and being put in impossible conditions.
I was sorry I never got them together.
My husband’s only maternal Uncle died in Switzerland after they got hit over Germany. Talked with other WW2 Vets who said just surviving the Bomber TAKE OFFS was a major fete, also.
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