Mom was born to a very rich farm family in the old country of Yugoslavia, in 1927. She was of good German heritage, since years before the Germans had settled there after a war turned that area over to them. Her mom and dad were very influential, and she grew up with manners and well earned wealth. I believe that sometime before WW II her mother died in an accident on the farm, and that her dad remarried. The village, or small town, was called Kathreinfeld and worked well in my opinion because of the strong work ethic the people had, and their shared values. They were all of German stock and made the area a pleasant place to live, from the stories I heard and the research I have done.
Dad was born in Bakersfied, CA, in 1924. He was pure blood Apache, and his family was not rich. His dad either left them when my dad was young, or died, and my grandmother worked as a cook and as a domestic to get her and the two kids through. Times were hard in the depression, much more so than most of us can imagine, but she got them through it with hard work. As WW II loomed my dad, like most of the realists of the day, knew that the US would not be able to sit on the sidelines as tyrants moved against the free world, and joined the Army before Pearl Harbor.
The war was hard on both. At first the Germans were winning, which you would think was good for my Mom's family. But the Nazi ideology was not something they embraced, and when the German army decided to quarter troops in the people's homes there were some rough times. Of course the GESTAPO did their search of local records for any hint of Jewish blood in the family tree. To add to the risk, the family hid a Jewish person or family in the barn. This was risky, but from the little Mom said nothing ever went wrong until the end of the war when the person or people they were hiding turned them in to the victorious Red forces after my grandfather refused to give them the family silver that had also been hidden. No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. So Granddad and one Uncle ended up dying in communist concentration camps, but that happened some time after the war. Back on track now: None of the "wrong" blood was found, so the family was "allowed" to quarter and supply some of the troops that were turning Europe upside down. Later the Soviets started to win, and my mom's dad knew that their life was going to change for the worse, so he sent my mom and one of her sister's on a long walk to Austria to escape the communists.
It was a long walk, several hundred kilometers to Vienna. She did not talk about this part of her life, except to once correct an attitude I, or perhaps my sister, were having (probably about wanting something) by noting that she had once traded a diamond earring for a loaf of bread and that I, or Sis, or the two of us had better not think we had it so bad. Anna Maria had to find a job, and she chose to become a nurse. She passed the test and was trained to be a war nurse - the test being a group being assembled in an operating room, a body being wheeled in and cut open; those who did not pass out or throw up went into nurse training while the rest became orderlies. Lack of food, bombings that left her trapped in a collapsed house once, and other deprivations completed her war years.
In the Pacific, at first the Japanese were winning, and since my dad was stationed in the Philippines in the Army Air Force (34th Pursuit Squadron) things went bad for him from the start. The Japanese attacked the Philippines a few days after the attack on Pearl, and due to the shortsightedness of Roosevelt and the rest of the politicians of the time we were unprepared for war. At a time when for years there had been ever increasing signs that the war that was raging in Asia and Europe was going to drag us in, the American politicians continued to play politics with the economy, funding social programs while ignoring the military. Due to their idiotic blunders the US had barely started the rearmament that would have saved so many soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen in the early part of the war, starting with the nearly 3000 who were killed on Dec 7th, 1941. In the early part of the war, WW I era equipment was used by most of our troops. Look at the pictures of what our troops were equipped with. The old style helmets are an obvious indicator, but worse are the facts that most of the guns, ships, and ammo was older than the men using it. With this disgusting lack of equipment it was no wonder that the Philippines, and our army in that nation, were doomed. We had no ships that could run supplies to the troops, since the Japanese had a more advanced, and much larger, navy. So our troops starved, died from lack of medical care, and fought with weapons that soon ran out of ammo or, if ammo was available, were far less capable than what their enemy was using. Bottom line: Death or surrender was inevitable, but our troops fought a brilliant and brave campaign that resulted in the Japanese schedule being thrown off for several months, with much greater loss to the enemy than we could have hoped for. Amazing what power our troops displayed under those deplorable conditions. The surrender of Bataan led to the infamous Death March, were hundreds of American and thousands of Filipino troops were killed by the Japanese, than prisoner of war camps that led to more thousands of deaths due to continued starvation, lack of medical care, slave work, brutal discipline including near daily beatings and executions. For him as for many others captivity in Japan was next as the West started to grind down the Japanese army and navy, followed by more slave labor in a coal mine. First he had to get to Japan, and the Japanese did this by stuffing hundreds into the holds of old cargo ships, giving the prisoners little room to even lay down without having to be on or next to others. The food was poor quality slop, and little of that, the sadistic Japanese provided much to little water, and there was no way to bleed off the tropical heat except to open the hatches and the scum inhumane captors often did not even do that. Also, the ships were not marked as they should have been according to the Geneva Convention, and so were legitimate targets for our aircraft who were gunning for anything flying the Japanese flag. He apparently was one of the few who made it off of the ship that like several others was sunk by our own air force, only to be loaded onto the Canadian Explorer for a second, successful, voyage. He ended up in Fukuoka POW Camp 1 Kashii (Pine Tree) Camp on Kyushu Island, mining coal as a slave laborer. Near Nagasaki.
Side note: Do not yammer at me about how using the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong, or not needed to finish the war, unless you can discuss how your solution would have saved the approximately 110,000 to 140,000 Allied POWs that the Japanese had on their home soil. I have no doubt that the only reason I am here is that we finished the war without an invasion, without a long drawn out blockade, and without giving the Japanese time to hide the evil they had done, that being the horrible treatment of the POWs throughout the war. Those two cities had to die, in order for the POWs to live, and given that the Japanese would have killed the captives under any other plausible scenario, the trade was totally right. The reasoning: Late in the war, when it became obvious that the Allies were winning, the Japanese high command sent an order, instructing that all POWs were to be killed when the invasion started. There are several witness accounts of preparations they made to do this that I have read, and during the war they had indeed killed off their local POWs several times as various islands fell, so unless you are living in some fairy-tale world you will agree that most of the prisoners would have been killed at the start of an invasion. You will also agree that since the prisoners were starved even during the early part of the war when there was more food that a blockade would have resulted in most of the prisoners starving to death before the Japanese were allowed to suffer that fate. Care to discuss?
Side note: When I was about 11 or 12 I was reading a big book on WW II. I happened to be reading about the Death March of Bataan, and my Mom happened by. She interrupted my reading, turning the page back to where this picture was, and pointing at my Dad's picture, asked if I knew who that was. Of course I did not, but thankfully did not respond with the smart aleck answer that was bubbling up when she asked an obvious question like that - something in her demeanor said she was serious. Her answer to my "No" was: "That is your father". Then she walked off and my understanding of Dad changed forever. Yes, he had PTSD, which he handled by being quiet and moody at times. But he never lashed out at his family, and when he found some of his old companions (when we lived in Seattle he and his good friend Bryce Lilly were reunited - I always liked it when these two old warriors got back together to share old times, times that none of the rest of us could be included in. The positive energy at those meetings was a good thing) they helped each other by being there just as they had as POWs. I remember with greatest respect Mr. Jack Pennant, who had been my father's friend during the war, and was during his final years.
Think about this: At the end of the war, it is almost
certain that many of these men were dead. My Dad:
He is sitting in front of the second tree from the right.
He is centered on the tree, his head slightly forward.
More on Family history, and how that leads to the Greg view of the world, soon. For now, I wish you all a good day.
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