My uncle is one of the finest men I have ever known---he is 94 and still very competent. Big man for his time (6'-4" in his prime, probably 225 or so from pics I've seen). Flew in WW2. My Mom said he never ever talked about the war when he came home..to anyone, ever. One day about 15 years ago he was visiting my family (my Mom was here too) and one of our children asked him about the war....the floodgates opened and he talked for several hours. Mom said she thinks no one had ever heard any of that before. All they had known was...he was shot down over Yugoslavia in 1943, ended up listed as a POW, and they heard nothing until after the war....then they learned he had been shot and was a POW for 18 months. He had been in since shortly after the war began...his brother was in the Navy, my father in the Marines, and another uncle by marriage was Army (but wounded during invasion practice seriously enough for discharge).
Among other things that day, we learned that he was the only member of his crew (bomber, B-17 I think) to survive being shot down (he made it fairly clear that it was a typical practice by German troops to shoot parachuting flyers on the way down), he was shot in the leg trying to make it to the woods, and was marked for one of the "better" camps since he was a lieutenant and the Germans thought they would need to trade Allied officers at some point when the allies settled hostilities. Even at that he said he lost 80# during captivity, watched horrors he would not describe, and remembers the absolute joy he felt when, while on a forced march to a different camp, a civilian passing them pressed a potato into his hand. He said the people in this village had heard the American POWs were being marched through and apparently all tried to have a piece of food to slip to a POW. I forget where he was held, but it was not inside Germany. It was heartbreaking to listen to him, but he seemed to need to tell it on that day.
I know my uncle absolutely detested the TV show Hogans Heroes. I'm sure the subject matter was way too sensitive to him.
Band of Brothers was one of the finest pieces of cinema ever done. I imagine there had to be many, many men very much like all of those we met in that series.
Among other things that day, we learned that he was the only member of his crew (bomber, B-17 I think) to survive being shot down (he made it fairly clear that it was a typical practice by German troops to shoot parachuting flyers on the way down), he was shot in the leg trying to make it to the woods, and was marked for one of the "better" camps since he was a lieutenant and the Germans thought they would need to trade Allied officers at some point when the allies settled hostilities. Even at that he said he lost 80# during captivity, watched horrors he would not describe, and remembers the absolute joy he felt when, while on a forced march to a different camp, a civilian passing them pressed a potato into his hand. He said the people in this village had heard the American POWs were being marched through and apparently all tried to have a piece of food to slip to a POW. I forget where he was held, but it was not inside Germany. It was heartbreaking to listen to him, but he seemed to need to tell it on that day.
I know my uncle absolutely detested the TV show Hogans Heroes. I'm sure the subject matter was way too sensitive to him.
Band of Brothers was one of the finest pieces of cinema ever done. I imagine there had to be many, many men very much like all of those we met in that series.