Fascinating thread here. Paternal GF served in the Canadian Machine Gun Corps in WW1. 17 months in France, mostly in a trench. Almost never spoke about it except once when my dad was graduating H.S. in 1943. He talked my dad into joining the Navy because he feared WW2 would wind up as another trench war. Told my dad all about the trenches, the bodies, rats, gas, and that if his son got killed in WW2 it would be better to die at sea. He didn't want his only son to die in the mud. Dad spent the rest of WW2 on a light cruiser as a radioman. They were at D-Day, the invasion of Southern France and did convoy duty in the north Atlantic. Dad's sisters both married WW2 vets so one uncle was a marine radioman in the pacific and the other was a ground crewman on B-17's in England. He was from a German family and bi-lingual and in the spring of 1945 Uncle Sam was suddenly looking for servicemen who could speak German. That was how he wound up at the Mittlewerks at Nordhausen, Germany's V-2 rocket factory hidden in an old Gypsum mine in a mountain. The U.S. went in there before the ink was dry on the surrender papers and packed up the entire place and shipped it here. He was there to communicate with all the German civilians that were hired to pack it all up. Brought home a Luger pistol out of a display case in an office area of the factory that I inherited when he passed in 2001. If this web site weren't so difficult for folks like me to post pics on I'd post a couple.
