Stories from WW2

[theoddz]

I think I've posted about this on the other sites, but since this thread specifically addresses stories about WWII, I thought I'd post the story here (again), because I think it's a good little story.

My Pop was 13 years old when WWII broke out in 1941. He born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, the youngest of 7 children (4 boys, 2 girls), to parents who had immigrated from the Chinese province of Canton, in the southern section of mainland China. Pop was playing in the street, that morning, when he watched the Japanese planes flying low over his house in Kaimuki, on their way to bomb Pearl Harbor. Like most boys of that time, he was fascinated with air planes and enamored with the stories of the famous flyer, Charles Lindbergh. He has always told me that he knew the planes were Japanese because these were flying so low that he could clearly spot the red "meatball" painted on the sides of the planes, and even the faces of some of the pilots. No one had any idea what they were doing, or going to do, until the sounds of explosions rocked the city of Honolulu and thick black smoke began to billow into the sky above Pearl Harbor. Pop said that my grandmother gathered everyone into the basement of the small house and kept them there for all of that day. My Uncle Richard was a civil service pipe fitter at Pearl Harbor during that time, and the family didn't see him for 3 days following the bombing and only knew that he was part of the original response team called to cut open the hulls of capsized Navy ships to rescue the trapped crews.

During the duration of the War, Pop continued his schooling at St. Louis High School and also worked part time at the Dole Pineapple factory, in Honolulu. His entire family had worked at Dole, at one time or another, with the exception of my grandfather, who spoke no English, but was an accountant in a book store. Pop's job in the pineapple factory was to monitor and adjust the temperature of the juice that is packed with canned pineapple. When the War finally ended in 1945, Pop was still working in the Dole factory. Funny, but Pop still says, to this day, that his stint in the pineapple factory gave him the incentive to stick to his studies and get an education so he wouldn't be doomed to that kind of physical labor for the rest of his life!!

On V-J Day (Victory over Japan), August 15, 1945, Pop heard the news of the Japanese surrender on the radio while working his shift at the Dole factory. Back then, the Dole factory in Honolulu had a huge steam whistle on the top of a water tower that could be heard over most of the island of Oahu. Pop asked his supervisor if he could climb up that tower and blow the big steam whistle. His supervisor agreed, and Pop said that one of the most joyful days in his life, to this day, has been the memory of pulling (and dangling on, because Pop was always a skinny kid) on that rope and letting that whistle blow and blow.

A few years ago, Pop gave me a package that was carefully wrapped and preserved in a small cellophaned bundle. It was The Honolulu Star evening edition, dated December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. One of his friends from high school had a part time job at the newspaper back then, and had given this to Pop. He'd kept it all of these years and was now turning it over to me to keep. It's one of my most treasured possessions, to this day, from my Pop.

Pop was never able to join the military because his eyes were so bad. I think that's always been a bit of a disappointment for him throughout his lifetime. He made the best of it, though, and got a wonderful education, along with his PhD. He's never forgotten that day in December, so many years ago. I'll never forget him telling me about it.

Those Americans who lived and fought through WWII really were The Greatest Generation. I don't think the world will ever see anything as grand as that generation.

~Theo~

Oh yes, and Mother was a real life "Rosie the Riveter"!!!

[Jet]

Originally Posted by theoddz

[FONT="Book Antiqua"][SIZE="3"][COLOR="Black"]I

Those Americans who lived and fought through WWII really were The Greatest Generation. I don't think the world will ever see anything as grand as that generation.

~Theo~

You are so right Theo....thanks for a sharing a great story.

[Jet]

Originally Posted by theoddz

[FONT="Book Antiqua"][SIZE="3"][COLOR="Black"]

Those Americans who lived and fought through WWII really were The Greatest Generation. I don't think the world will ever see anything as grand as that generation.

~Theo~

Tanno Theo, I just got to thinking....they really were greatest American generation. They knew right from wrong, for the most part, they were spirted and heroic, and eager to win the war, and they had those great big black, rotary dial telephones that wired into the wall so you could hear on the god&%$*mn things, and mouthpiece wasn't on your upper jaw. Geezes, I was born late; I hate technology today. Jus' sayin'....



America had phones just like this.
The irony of all this is that post WWII kicked off a new technological age. *shakes head*

[Mitmo01]

Hitlers ideology was to wipe off the face of the earth most of eastern europe--thats why almost all of the concentration camps were in eastern euprope and mostly in poland...

Lebensraum as the nazi concept-- happened because anything east of germany was considered so low and less than that the germans were trying to not only reinvent history but also reinvent the populations of europe...there were no death camps west of poland, there were internment camps but the death camps were solely reserved for areas east of germany...

NJFemmie is right that most people dont realize that the intellectuals in poland were the first to be exterminated and interned in death camps that they had to build themselves...the population of poland was decimated and god forbid if you were an intellectual...you wouldve been the first to be targeted...

a great fictional work by William Styron deals with this in his book" Sophies Choice, the movie was good but the book was phenomenal

and Hitler had real power.....what i mean by that is that real power comes when you do not have to speak what it is you wish to happen because your underlings and toadies know exactly what you want to happen....he never had to mention concentration camps but they were built......I always think about that when i look at power as a concept in leadership....makes me shudder

[Mitmo01]

The Shoah series is a tremendous cinematic experience and very accessible....it truly is an incredible feat

[NJFemmie]

I wish I knew of stories to tell - but the "silence" of the Holocaust truly does affect generations. I know nothing about my family history beyond my parents, essentially... and even their lives I know very little about because of the pain they suffered.

I certainly do not diminish what has happened to other cultures, countries and races because of this war, but I can say that as I get older, the desire to know more about my pre-war family has become painful and frustrating.

I remember as a child, I would go through some serious separation anxiety when my mother would take trips to Poland to find ANY kind of information about her brother, who we suspect either died in, or was murdered in a camp. All I know is that they were separated, and never saw each other again. My mother was 14 at the time, and I think her brother was only a few years older.

[Jet]

"War Against the Jews"
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

I would like to recommend, the book, The War Against the Jews by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who is a scholar of Jewish life. The book is regarded as an in-depth, pioneering study of Nazi genocide.


About the Mrs. Dawidowicz and War Against the Jews

She was the daughter of Polish immigrants, was at the center of the study of the modern Jewish experience at Yeshiva University, where she held a chair in interdisciplinary Holocaust studies. Early in her career, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, she went to Europe, where she helped Jewish survivors of the war to re-create schools and libraries, and she recovered vast collections of books seized by the Nazis.

Before that, while in her early 20's, she had lived in Vilna, Poland, from 1938 to 1939, where she witnessed the onslaught of European anti-Semitism, writing about the experience in a memoir, "From That Place and Time," published by W. W. Norton last year. Her other books include "The Jewish Presence" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) in 1977 and "The Holocaust and the Historians" (Harvard University Press), a critical survey of scholarship on the Holocaust, in 1981. Hopes Turn to Agonies

"There was a certain irony to my trip to Vilna," Mrs. Dawidowicz told an interviewer for Publisher's Weekly, speaking of her pre-war experience in Poland. "I went there with the romantic belief that it might become the world center for a self-sustaining Yiddish culture."

When she saw what turned out to be the beginning of the end of Jewish life in Poland, she immersed herself in Yiddish literature and Jewish history, so that she could help to preserve Jewish culture in the postwar world.

Mrs. Dawidowicz (pronounced dah-vee-DOH-vich), a small energetic woman who spoke in the accents of the Bronx, engaged in heated arguments within Jewish circles over both the nature of the Holocaust and the responsibility of American Jews for not doing more to prevent it.

Her major work, "The War Against the Jews," postulates that the destruction of the Jews was a central and inescapable element in Nazi ideology and was always a principle war aim of Hitler, just as important as his military conquest of Europe. In this view, she conflicted with other historians, who believed that the Holocaust was not a necessary part of the Nazi program but evolved in response to such circumstances as the defeats on the Eastern front.

"The War Against the Jews" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) was called "a work of high scholarship and profound moral import" by Irving Howe, in his review in The New York Times Book Review. It is marked above all by its sobriety. Mrs. Dawidowicz allows the coolly accumulated weight of detail -- the growing force of the Nazi's anti-Semitic juggernaut, the evolution of the camps as places of scientific murder, the efforts by the victims to hold onto fragments of normal life -- to create its emotional and intellectual impact.

Mrs. Dawidowicz refused to judge the failure of the Jews themselves to mount a more active resistance to the genocide, and in this she clashed bitterly with a number of other historians.

Her belief was twofold. First, she felt it morally inappropriate for those who did not face the persecutions themselves to criticize the behavior of those who did. Second, she felt that in any case, Jewish resistance was doomed to failure. Given the Jews' isolation, their lack of arms and the overwhelming material superiority of their enemies, there was virtually nothing they could have done to alter their fate, she wrote. Defended Role of Jews

In her book The Holocaust and the Historians, Mrs. Davidowicz is critical of a number of historians and commentators -- Bruno Bettelheim, Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg are among those she mentions -- who described the European Jews during the war as passive, cowardly or, in the case of the Judenrat, set up by the Nazis as self-governing boards in the ghettos, even collaborationist.

Similarly, Mrs. Dawidowicz rejected a chorus of opinion to the effect that Jews in the United States were guilty of complacency and a failure to react effectively to the Holocaust.

In articles in Commentary magazine and The New York Times, she wrote, first, that the Jews here did undertake wipespread efforts to awaken the government and world opinion to the fate of the European Jews. Second, she argued that, in any case, whatever might have been done here, the Jews of Europe were caught in a vise from which virtually no escape was ever possible. The only way to save them, she believed, was to militarily defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible, and that fact justified the Allies' concentration on the war effort, rather than on efforts to save the Jews.

Mrs. Dawidowicz, whose maiden name was Lucy Schildkret, was born in New York in 1915 and educated at Hunter College and Columbia University. She recounts in "From That Time and Place" how she began to work for YIVO's Manhattan branch after her year in Vilna. She met her husband, Szymon Dawidowicz, an escapee from Poland there. Mr. Dawidowicz died in 1979.

Source material:
The New York Times

[Jet]

Originally Posted by NJFemmie

I wish I knew of stories to tell - but the "silence" of the Holocaust truly does affect generations. I know nothing about my family history beyond my parents, essentially... and even their lives I know very little about because of the pain they suffered.

I certainly do not diminish what has happened to other cultures, countries and races because of this war, but I can say that as I get older, the desire to know more about my pre-war family has become painful and frustrating.

I remember as a child, I would go through some serious separation anxiety when my mother would take trips to Poland to find ANY kind of information about her brother, who we suspect either died in, or was murdered in a camp. All I know is that they were separated, and never saw each other again. My mother was 14 at the time, and I think her brother was only a few years older.

Life has a way....NJFemmie....life has away....
I was involved with a Jewish girl whose mother had been sent to Bergen-Belsen as a child. She had been separated from her sister, never to be seen or heard from until....

one day, while visiting in Israel, my ex-girlfriend's mother had met up with several people on her trip in a search for information on Holocaust survivors. She took with her, the only known photograph of her sister.....

who just happened to be in the group of people searching for surviving members of their families. The sisters reunited after 40 some years, can you imagine? After the camps were liberated, my girlfriend's mother came to the US on a sponsorship from the Sears family (as in Sears & Roebuck) who brought many surviving Jews to the US.

God works amazing things....

[Mitmo01]

Hannah Arendt wrote an interesting book called " The Origins of Totalitarianism" and she is credited with the phrase " the banality of Evil"

She posited that the real people responisble for allowing the nazis to rise to power were the same normal people that went to work everyday blindly following orders and doing what they were told....

the people that were signing off on death orders were called "writing desk executioners" they were the workers who went to thier jobs everyday and did what they were told because they followed the rules...


she is very controversial but regardless of the differing opinons on her writing and her philosophy she actually made me think when i had to read that book...

the masses in germany and europe followed orders blindly and did what they were told...no dissent, no arguement, because of conditioning....I hope that in my lifetime im never put in that postion ever....i do not want to be a blind sheeple ever....I always want to have the spirit of dissent in my blood and in my bones even if it means im breaking the law somehow....i never want to forget what happend in that war...

[cinderella]

John, I've been looking for this phone for years!! I am going to look into getting a landline (a requirement for this phone), so I can buy a fully restored and functioning phone. And I want the original ringing mechanism too, DAMMIT!!! No, beeps, buzzes, or virating sounds - I want that loud ringing again - the way it should be!!!

Originally Posted by Jet

Tanno Theo, I just got to thinking....they really were greatest American generation. They knew right from wrong, for the most part, they were spirted and heroic, and eager to win the war, and they had those great big black, rotary dial telephones that wired into the wall so you could hear on the god&%$*mn things, and mouthpiece wasn't on your upper jaw. Geezes, I was born late; I hate technology today. Jus' sayin'....



America had phones just like this.
The irony of all this is that post WWII kicked off a new technological age. *shakes head*

[Jet]

Command radio performance with announcer's intro on behalf of the War Department, 1943



Zing! Went the strings when I heard this today.
I have always liked this tune, especially because it's sung by Judy.

[Jet]

G.I. JIVE

Everything was geared toward the war and war effort including some great tunes about G.I. life.

One of the best had to be G.I. Jive no matter who recorded it—
and many did—Louie Jordan, Ray Mckinley and the great Johnny Mercer.
It's a hot, slow jump blues, boogie woogie.

This is remembering an incredible time and generation of Americans who could dance
and swing like no one's business all the while spitting in our enemy's eyes.
Damn, I wish I could have been there. I'd dance like crazy.

G.I Jive is one of my favorite jump jitterbugs during WWII from the great Johnny Mercer.

[Jet]

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:
your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

_____

Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 30, 1940

_____

[Jet]

BBC-LONDON
24 Dec. 1944

Major Alton Glenn Miller,
leader of the Army Air Force Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces,
is missing on a flight from London to Paris, it was reported today.

Miller and crew members were aboard a UC-64 Noresman
single engine monoplane flying across the English Channel at last contact.

No trace of the plane has been found since leaving London nine days ago.

__________________________

For Glenn

__________________________

[Jaques]

Originally Posted by cinderella

John, I've been looking for this phone for years!! I am going to look into getting a landline (a requirement for this phone), so I can buy a fully restored and functioning phone. And I want the original ringing mechanism too, DAMMIT!!! No, beeps, buzzes, or virating sounds - I want that loud ringing again - the way it should be!!!

....when i lst began working as an office junior in l964, aged l5, we had those phones on our desks!!!

My Dad was a desert rat with monty's 8th army during the war, before i was born, he and my mum wrote letters to one another for the 6 long years he was away and when they died, i read them, i cant tell you how moving they were, i have seldom been so moved and as my parents i couldnt imagine them being young and in love - well you dont do you - i have her wedding dress, his war medals and these letters, along with photos and other momentos i shall always keep............

[cinderella]

And proud you should be, coming from such fine stock.

Originally Posted by theoddz

I think I've posted about this on the other sites, but since this thread specifically addresses stories about WWII, I thought I'd post the story here (again), because I think it's a good little story.

My Pop was 13 years old when WWII broke out in 1941. He born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, the youngest of 7 children (4 boys, 2 girls), to parents who had immigrated from the Chinese province of Canton, in the southern section of mainland China. Pop was playing in the street, that morning, when he watched the Japanese planes flying low over his house in Kaimuki, on their way to bomb Pearl Harbor. Like most boys of that time, he was fascinated with air planes and enamored with the stories of the famous flyer, Charles Lindbergh. He has always told me that he knew the planes were Japanese because these were flying so low that he could clearly spot the red "meatball" painted on the sides of the planes, and even the faces of some of the pilots. No one had any idea what they were doing, or going to do, until the sounds of explosions rocked the city of Honolulu and thick black smoke began to billow into the sky above Pearl Harbor. Pop said that my grandmother gathered everyone into the basement of the small house and kept them there for all of that day. My Uncle Richard was a civil service pipe fitter at Pearl Harbor during that time, and the family didn't see him for 3 days following the bombing and only knew that he was part of the original response team called to cut open the hulls of capsized Navy ships to rescue the trapped crews.

During the duration of the War, Pop continued his schooling at St. Louis High School and also worked part time at the Dole Pineapple factory, in Honolulu. His entire family had worked at Dole, at one time or another, with the exception of my grandfather, who spoke no English, but was an accountant in a book store. Pop's job in the pineapple factory was to monitor and adjust the temperature of the juice that is packed with canned pineapple. When the War finally ended in 1945, Pop was still working in the Dole factory. Funny, but Pop still says, to this day, that his stint in the pineapple factory gave him the incentive to stick to his studies and get an education so he wouldn't be doomed to that kind of physical labor for the rest of his life!!

On V-J Day (Victory over Japan), August 15, 1945, Pop heard the news of the Japanese surrender on the radio while working his shift at the Dole factory. Back then, the Dole factory in Honolulu had a huge steam whistle on the top of a water tower that could be heard over most of the island of Oahu. Pop asked his supervisor if he could climb up that tower and blow the big steam whistle. His supervisor agreed, and Pop said that one of the most joyful days in his life, to this day, has been the memory of pulling (and dangling on, because Pop was always a skinny kid) on that rope and letting that whistle blow and blow.

A few years ago, Pop gave me a package that was carefully wrapped and preserved in a small cellophaned bundle. It was The Honolulu Star evening edition, dated December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. One of his friends from high school had a part time job at the newspaper back then, and had given this to Pop. He'd kept it all of these years and was now turning it over to me to keep. It's one of my most treasured possessions, to this day, from my Pop.

Pop was never able to join the military because his eyes were so bad. I think that's always been a bit of a disappointment for him throughout his lifetime. He made the best of it, though, and got a wonderful education, along with his PhD. He's never forgotten that day in December, so many years ago. I'll never forget him telling me about it.

Those Americans who lived and fought through WWII really were The Greatest Generation. I don't think the world will ever see anything as grand as that generation.

~Theo~

Oh yes, and Mother was a real life "Rosie the Riveter"!!!