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COMSUBBBS
Posts: 2561
Location: Rapid City, SD | Subject: A couple things, DEX
You have often referred to life as it was for you when you were growing up. Many times it was during WWII. This isn't a story about the games that we played as kids, but a real-life war story.
When we went to the Saturday Matinees at one of our local theaters, they would always show NEWSREELS; our way of knowing what was going on on the battlefields. One newsreel has stuck (and will stay stuck) in my head forever. A young pilot was landing his plane on a carrier. The tail hook - or his brakes - didn't work as well as he would have wished, and his plane slide a ways over the deck, hanging precariously over the side. He tried to open the canopy. He struggled. It wouldn't open. He was still frantically trying to slide it back when the plane slid completely off the ship, and we watched him still stuggling, as the plane disappeared beneath the waves.
An indelible image.
And - Dex, I responded to your latest query about my Doris, but I see that it has rolled completely off the BBS screen now.
Cora
Edited by Corabelle 2009-09-18 9:17 PM
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COMSUBBBS
Posts: 3202
Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: A couple things, Corabelle
First, As a little tyke, I was living at Fort Bragg, on post with my Mother. The men of the 82nd were overseas, I think the current term is "deployed". The place was loaded with little kids and women, what remained stateside of the troopers' families. Occasionally, returning wounded would return. As a liitle guy, I got to see a lot of men missing limbs and exhibiting some pretty nasty wounds coming home to their kids. There was also a very understandable policy that was pretty heartless. If your husband was killed or captured, the War Department gave the grieving widow or wife of the guy in the Stalag a week to pack up and clear the post to make way for her husband's "follow on" and his family. My earliest memories involve a lot of women hugging each other and crying. The Commissary was a long one story wooden building. It was painted white and had a covered porch that ran about 150 feet along the front of the building...The porch was accessable by steps leading to the main entrance to the Commissary....on the left side of the main entrance to the building on the front wall of the building covered by the overhang of the roof. There was a bulletin board about sixty feet long that contained notices like what movies were scheduled at the Post Theater, Innoculations being given at the Post Dispensery, Blood Drives, War Bond Drives, Scheduled Visiting Dignitaries and Units arriving for pre-embarkation combat refresher training......and the latest casualty lists for units based at Bragg, the principal of which was the 82nd Airborne Division. In the days of WWII there were no "reproduction machines" so the method of creating copies was "flimsies" and carbon paper. The casualty lists had a priority of something like the fifth flimsy....All the letters on a fifth or sixth flimsy looked like they were growing fur and were hell to read. The 82nd took one helluva lot of casualties on every drop...Sicily, Anzio, St. Mere E'glise (Normandy) and Neimegen....After each combat jump women clutching little children or with children wrapped around their legs, sayiing "What's wrong Mommie?"...Women would be running their fingers down the lists looking for their husbands, starting with the names of the known dead...There would be outbursts of grief, women holding women crying uncontrolably....Women yelling "Oh my God...Oh my God...Dick's gone." That building is still there...still at Bragg, but it is no longer a Commissary....It needs either to be demolished or undergo extensive repairs...but that old bulletin board is still there. And when I pass it I can still feel the pain of the horror of human loss and maiming. Believe me Corabelle, there is no movie screen image that could match that image. On that porch the wives of heroes were introduced to their recent widowhood in total bucket saturation. After Neimegen where The Old Man's battalion got pretty well chewed up. Mother moved to Gastonia and bought her groceries at a local store. She was sick of seeing young mothers have to gather their things, pack up, leave Post and face the world in their early 20's and alone or with infants and children. And as for playing Army and war....It was what our Daddy's were doing....for real. DEX |
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Great Sage of the Sea
Posts: 590
Location: Colton, NY | Subject: RE: A couple things, DEX
That's a keeper
HERE
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Master and Commander
Posts: 1431
| Subject: RE: A couple things, DEX
This all started in the 60's & 70's. The author of todays fiasco in medicine was a Chinese American Doctor in Boston. I don't recall the guys name but you can thank him for the mess we're in now.  I don't know if he feels that things got out of control or if this is what he wanted. I shared an elevator with the U.S. Surgeon General once (no names will be used) He was an advocate of goverment intervention in the field of medicine. We discussed what was happening to the medical practice at that time. He told me that what was coming down the road was going to change medicine in the U.S. for the worst. He was right
Edited by RCK 2009-09-19 6:57 PM
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COMSUBBBS
Posts: 3202
Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RCK...Sorry didn't understand the connection
RCK, Sorry...I was intellectually challenged by your reponse about Corabelle and my posts...stuff about economic chaos, Chinese doctors ana a lot of stuff that made absolutely no sense to me in context of what was being said. I came to several possible conclusions (A) You didn't respond to the posting you meant to. (B) You are smoking some really powerful Columbian vegetation (C) You are operating on some intellectual level only understood by Burmese sooth sayers, space aliens, tealeaf readers and flying monkeys. Translation please. DEX |
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COMSUBBBS
Posts: 2561
Location: Rapid City, SD | Subject: RE: A couple things, Corabelle
I'm a little confused too, Dex. I think Bob King was responding to my post about the medical insurance/health care issues that I posted on in a different thread. At least I think that's what he was referring to.
I want to clarify something about my post to you. It wasn't a movie that I saw. It was a newsreel. The young pilot who was unable to get out of his plane before it sank wasn't an actor; he was dying for real right before our eyes. And all in the theater knew it.
The nearest military post that I saw during WWII was Ft. Meade near Sturgis (about twenty-eight miles northwest of Rapid. It was a horse cavalry depot when my brother-in-law was stationed there. His horse's name was 'Hi Hat.' When the horses were phased out, it was converted to a motorcycle type cavalry...he was converted with it, and served in Germany during the war. He lost his eye there.
During WWII, Ft. Meade became a prisoner-of-war camp, incarcerating German prisoners. I saw many of them when I went on post with my sister.
Of course, what is now Ellsworth Air Force Base was about ten miles east of Rapid (I think it was called Weaver Field back then), but because we knew no one stationed there we were never on the base. I don't think I was ever on it, until my future husband-to-be was stationed there after the war. So, I didn't have the same experiences that you did.
I have seen death, however. After the war, my mother, sister and subvet brother were at an air show. A pilot had been giving people rides all afternoon, then was scheduled to do a few aerobatics. His first maneuver, was a slow roll about fifty feet (or lower) off the ground. His wing tip touched a hay stack, and he crashed and burned.
I lifted my son off the play slide that he hung himself on. I found my husband dead after a heart attack. I was the first to find my father after he had a stroke. He wasn't dead, but was unconscious; never regained consiousness and died four days later.
My family was the first on the scene of a fatal two-car accident. Three of the six people in one car were dead, as was the lone man in the pick-up that hit them. It must have happened only minutes before we arrived. The pick-up had been thrown off the road onto the weeds. The catalytic converter caught the weeds on fire, and we watched helplessly as both pick-up and driver burned. He must have already been dead because he didn't flinch. My husband and brother-in-law removed two seriously hurt children from the car.
Sometimes I wonder why God is putting these crises in my life. Seems as though I've had more than my rightly (is that a word?) share.
Did you find the post about my Doris?
And thank you, Sid, for re-posting my little story along with Dex's. They look nice.
Cora
Edited by Corabelle 2009-09-19 11:49 PM
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COMSUBBBS
Posts: 3202
Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: A couple things, DEX
Corabelle, I grew up (until age ten) in a parachute infantry officers house. At an early age you learned "Yes Sir" and "No Sir"..."Yes Mam" and "no Mam" (or as we Southern raised knotheads said "Yessum" and "Nome")....You answered the phone "Colonel Armstrong's quarters, Dexter speaking." You had no other options. When your parents had cocktail parties or a group of friends over for dinner....after the meal was over, the kids cleared the table and the ladies retired to the living room and had coffee and "cordials"and talked about cina patterns and volunteer work. The men coll;ected in the kitchen and told dirty jokes, tossed down drinks and played "What in the hell happened to that young platoon leader from East Jeezus, Mississippi....??" "Hell Wes the Krauts got the poor bastard right after we hit the ground near St. Mere E'Glise...I remember stepping on him running for that stone barn with Bob Nichols and Red Hornaday...Hornaday was dragging a legfull of shrap." "Bob Nichols, helluva a good egg...what happend to him?" "Landed in front of a machine gun emplacement in Holland and got both legs shot off...made it back and lives in Dayton Ohio now...Old "Wild Bill" Atkinson got it in Holland...same jump." "Yeah those green kids flying those Air Transport C-47's punched us out over the wrong side of the river...Me'n Zabbo Zorobsky, Roy Lindquist, and Jack Farrow were up to our necks in what turned out to be a bunch if 12 and 13 year old german conscripts that our field interrogators found out had been rounded up the previous week...We must have nailed 50 to 75 of the little buggers....I know, I know it wasn't right and it still haunts me but they were armed to the teeth and spraying automatic weapons fire in all directions. We didn't want our lads who had cut there way from Italy to Holland getting shot all to hell by a load of propaganda soaked wayward juveniles hauling very lethal ordinance. Shooting children and old geezers pressed into service as a dying breath gesture is a rotten vision to carry around the rest of your life...but so were the collected images of extermination facilities, rotting civilian corpses and jumpers executed after hanging up in overhead telephone and electric wires." "Yeah Wes, like the old saying about the 82nd..."You want to know who we are. just ask us where we've been." "What n the hell happened to Major Cockburn?" "Captured after running out of ammo holding a causeway running from Omaha Beach to the hard ground south of our sandtable diliniated assembly area. He held until he and seven or eight glider riders from the 325 ran out of ammo for a 75mm pack howitzer that they drug out of a cracked up CG-4A Waco." ' Hey, the Major left $1200 in his locker in Nottingham that the IG took when we inventoried his gear and mailed the stuff back to Edna...The CO, Col. Roy Lindquist mailed it back to her in a "not to be opened for censorship" envelope cerified by Gavin." Anyone hear the one about the little French girl with no bloomers?" "Yeah...yeah we heard it...Everone in the 508th has heard it." They were old gizzly bastards back from war, getting oiled on Jack Danials, Johnny Walker, Four Roses and Beefeater gin....Remembering good times and bad...eating out of little green cans in the rain...the sound of incoming 88's and shovelling dirt on men whey dropped in hastily dug holes in locations they couldn't remember. They remembered luxuries like finding a dry pack of Luckies tucked in a pair of clean socks in the bottom of their mussette bag. They remembered the nuns who gave them a big block of cheese it took two days to eat. They remembered a big white bra they tied on a fence post outside of Neimegen to use a a 60mm mortar aiming stake, so they could lay follow-on ordinance on jerks using the corner of a stone wall to avoid flat trajectory his. It was like that and great for a big eared 8yr ols sitting quietly in the corner soaking it in like a bloody sponge. Guys lit cigarettes and passed them to guys missing hands and fingers. They just passed bottles around and relived the days when we assisted the Allies in givind countries back to their rightful owners. They were the downline adventures...decendents of Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers, Ali Baba, and the vikings......they were good men...all of them. And when they slogged thriough town and villages on the way to shoot their way across across the Rhine, they left the fresh breeze of LIBERATION in their wake. DEX |
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A couple things, DEX
