My father served in the Army Air Corp from late 1941 till the end of WWII. Late in 1941, gent serving on the local draft board dropped in my grand parents home to tell them to let my Dad know he has a low draft number and would be one of the first to be drafted....that he might want to join some service he'd like to be in. Dad will join the Army Air Corp and will be finishing up his basic/advanced training when Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He will become an armorer in the air corp and be assigned to the 312th Light Bomber Squadron. In the 312th, which will be sent to the Pacific in 1943, as part of the 5th Air Force....MacArthurs Air Force. They should have gone overseas earlier, but the squadron was created to be a dive bomber unit, using the army version of the navy Douglas dive bomber. They were the best dive bomber squadron in the Army Air Force....LOL, they were the only unit with them. Army decided the plane was too obsolete to use and equipped their squadron with the A-20 Havoc light bomber, which was another version of the better known "Boston Bomber" which was used in the European theater of WWII. Anyway, Dad had become the top sergeant in charge of the armorers section of the squadron by the time his unit was shipped to the Pacific.
A story told by my father after I asked him what did you and the men in your squadron do for fun when in the Pacific. I had dropped by my parents home to visit and was chatting with Dad while my mother was in another part of their house when I asked this question. Without much thinking, he replied we played POKER. He then explained they were always on some airfield on some island with nowhere to spend the money they were paid. So, when payday came on the first of each month, their squadron began a poker game and other squadrons on their airfield participated too. It was a continuous game of poker until 2 or 3 guys had won everyone else's money. The poker games could last over a week.
My mother had walked into the room we are chatting when I asked Dad, well, were you ever a big winner in the poker games when in the Pacific? Dad replied, there was one month I was getting good cards for a few days, had won well over $1500, but my luck changed and I lost most of it. As mentioned, Mom had walked into the room and was standing behind Dad listening to his answer. I could see the expression on her face and it changed quickly from being in a good mood to quite angry and she unloaded on Dad.
You see, Dad had married my mother a couple of months before being shipped overseas and my older brother was born when Dad was in the Pacific. Mom's words to my father, expletives deleted, was their I was living with my parents with our baby Larry, having a hard time making ends meet and you didn't send us any money.....cuss, cuss, cuss and stormed out of the room.
Dad never had a chance to reply to Mom's outburst. After she'd stormed out of the room, I will comment, guess Mom never heard this war story and ask Dad, gee, why didn't you send her some of the money before losing it? He replied, as an enlisted man I could send home each month, only the amount of money I actually received, that Mom got most of my army pay. Then he goes on to tell me, "We were paid in the currency of whatever island we were on that had once been some Dutch/British/or whatever island we were on before the Japanese had captured it." We were on a Dutch island and were paid with Dutch money printed in the U.S. She couldn't have spent it if I did send it to her.....it was only good in the Pacific.
