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Black History Week and Convergence Past/Current Event Time Warp


CalEden

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1 hour ago, CalEden said:

On the list was Jesse Owens. I told Charla that my dad met Jesse Owens shortly after he won gold in the 1936 Olympics. I even had his autograph. But I would have to find it.

Great story & pics. 

Thanks for posting it.

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My father was on his way to Europe on the Queen Mary. The Army realized that they did not have his Birth Certificate. The Army contacted his mother to get the birth certificate.  The birth doctor thought my father would not survive and left the hospital. The Nuns did not give up and he survived because of persistence and nurturing care of those beautiful nuns.

The first twenty or so years of his life he didn't need a birth certificate. But the US Army thought he needed one to go to war and maybe die.

There's an interesting story of what they found in the basement of city hall to be posted later.  

Edited by CalEden
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10 minutes ago, CalEden said:

The Nuns did not give up and he survived because of persistence and nurturing care of those beautiful nuns.

I have to say that each and every one of those Nuns deserve triple the accolades that a more modern day infamous Nun has received.

I disagree with their beliefs but their commitment to saving a life was a magnificent effort !!! 

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1 hour ago, Derek Dangleberries said:

I have to say that each and every one of those Nuns deserve triple the accolades that a more modern day infamous Nun has received.

I disagree with their beliefs but their commitment to saving a life was a magnificent effort !!! 

Yes, they do. My family and my dad are not Catholic. Those wonderful Nuns made possible my father, myself and my brother and sisters. 

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1 hour ago, CalEden said:

Yes, they do. My family and my dad are not Catholic. Those wonderful Nuns made possible my father, myself and my brother and sisters. 

My cousin’s father( divorced my aunt) was born into poverty, Mom told me he almost froze as an infant near Montreal. He survived by being warmed up in the oven, it happened more than we care to admit. 
 

Saw him at a wedding in 1985, he already had bad MS. Finally retired from his dispatcher job at 76 a few months back, the disease has slowly withered him away to less than 100 pounds but he still drives his car and has a younger GF who takes good care of him. 
 

I look at his life, and think of the folks who cry when the Wifi is down, or their Uber driver handed them the wrong food. Puts things in perspective 
 

 

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aWar4.jpg

Hitler Youth Knife written on the blade in German "Blood and Honor".

 

aWar2.jpg

 

aWar3.jpg

 

Back to the Battle for Koln

My father's unit was bivouac in the basement of Koln City Hall which was near the Opera House and very close to the Rhine. The German Troops were just across the river. Koln was mostly bombed out. 

One evening when the unit was mostly bedded down.  A soldier from a southern state (my dad called him a hillbilly) state said aloud, There's something funny about that wall across from them. A few soldiers joined him and started removing things from the wall. To their amazement they found a large liquor storage area. It contained wine, champagne, cognac etc. presumably for intermission at the Opera.

The bivouac became quite jolly during their stay.

When the end of the battle for Koln ended, there was still much liquor left. So, some concocted a scheme to hide liquor in their Troop transport truck. They hid it all over even in the truck chassis.

Well evidently the advance out of Koln went merrily. Until a soldier peeing out the back of the transport with a bottle in hand fell out of the truck. Just so happen the Colonel in his jeep witnessed the whole spectacle.  They were sternly reprimanded and forced to empty the bottles on the side of the road.    

 

 

 

 

 

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This is the video I mentioned in the first post, but more edited than the original one I saw. Just heart breaking, unimaginable pain/sorrow the mother is going through. Stunningly Disturbing.

 

Life is precious and fragile, let your loved ones know how you feel about them daily.  Greet/Smile at a stranger.

 

 

Edited by CalEden
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Awesome history there Cal, just one slightly awkward question, what are you going to do with all that memorablilia in the event of your passing?.

I'll elaborate as to my question, a few years ago I was entrusted with a set of WW2 Medals belonging to a good friend of my dad. I used to cut his lawn, do stuff around his house and get his shopping while he and my Dad chatted about stuff, as his kids had deserted him and moved to Australia so he had no family.

One day he called me over, gave me a leather pouch and said to me while staring me in the eye "Look after these for me old mate", smiled and left it at that. Inside were his WW2 medals, Demob papers, 5 Gold sovereigns and a pic of him and his mates taken in a bar, all in uniform.

He died a couple of years later, his family , like the vultures they were came out of the woodwork and literally raped his house for anything of value. Anything that couldn't be sold went into the bin, including photo's and keepsakes I knew he held dear. I actually went round later that night and dug out what I could.

I knew that by law they belonged to the family but morally, I was entrusted with their safekeeping, and that's exactly why I have them now.

The problem is that the daughter was a snake, very liberal and would have binned his medals as well. I was not going to let that happen, because when we throw history into the bin, it is all too easy to forget any lessons that we might have learned.

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Wow, I have not thought about that regarding the War Chest. I do have nephews and nieces along with a brother and sisters. I think/know they would want it. If not, my dad's hometown has a pretty good historical society and museums.

Butch, I remember you writing about your custodianship and the family issues. You should be honored that he selected you and is a reflection on the type of person you are. 

If you know or should meet a person/veteran of your disposition, they would be honored to be the next custodian of that veteran's mementos of sacrifice towards world peace.

Can you imagine fear and helplessness those soldiers felt in the war? Terror in slow motion. Thats what it's like watching the Ukraine War on TV.      

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That's a fine collection of WWII memorabilia that your father saved - my own father told me that he had also brought back some souvenirs from the war but shortly after his return to civvy life he had become bummed out by the whole experience and ended up giving them away, unfortunately. He was in the engineers' corps during the war and saw a lot of action from France through to Germany; here is an excerpt from his memoirs of an incident similar to the one that CalEden describes and I think it well conveys the horror and the occasional lighter side of combat:

           "Caen was a very smashed-up city; it had been bombed throughout the war to date, and then had come the super-raid of 500 bombers before the Canadians finally pushed into the northern part. As soon as our side was established, the Germans bombarded that poor city with artillery and aircraft. Caen is an ancient city, and has a history going back well over a thousand years. Every house had been built like a fortress to keep marauding armies out and even the normal homes had walls up to a meter thick with some being part of the city wall as much as three meters. To make things even more difficult, the streets had been built for horse drawn vehicles and were narrow. When this immense mass of stone was pulverized by heavy bombing, the rubble would fill these canyons that had been streets up to the level of the buildings or the stumps of them that were left and in places it was quite impossible to ascertain where the street had been. There was no way our fighting forces could get to the front except to go around the city which made them all the more vulnerable to attacks and our mission was clear – we had to bulldoze the streets out so that traffic could move ahead.

            I believe that it must have been on the 19th of July that we were told to fall in on parade and the major made it official – we were to start the very next evening with almost every piece of equipment at our disposal to begin cleaning up. We had, in addition to our own equipment, up to one hundred dump trucks available. The Cats would go ahead and pile up the rubble, and the shovels would follow and load the dump trucks that would haul it away. All the work had to be done at night, and in the daytime we were to remove all of our equipment from the city. Nobody as far as I know ever figured out why it had to be done in total darkness, and it made absolutely no sense to me. 

            As soon as we started to bulldoze, hundreds of people would come out to see if we didn’t plow out one of their loved ones who had not been seen since a particular building was bombed and these poor people were forever in our way; we couldn’t see them and there is no doubt that some were run over by us. 2000 people died in that raid alone and very few were found. In the daylight, when we looked at the pile of rubble that had been hauled out the night before, it was enough to turn one’s stomach – there were dismembered bodies all over the place, here an arm, there a leg, or a head or a body without one, or just an open belly with the guts spilling out. 

             Progress was slow, as we did not have enough shovels – two were lost when the landing craft had gone astray on the way over and one had been wrecked when unloading it on that wild night.  The front was less than a mile from our working area and artillery shells were landing all over the place but none even close to us. There was at least one mile that had to be cleared, and not only one but two parallel streets. We had long given up the idea of following the old crooked streets, we just went straight. The bombing had loosened up the walls that were still standing, and if there had been any mortar at all holding these thick walls together, there was no evidence of it now as the stumps of the walls simply crumbled when hit with the bulldozer.

              I was completely supervisory on this job, and worked only a little here and there to give the guys a rest or while they would be reading their mail which I would bring out every day. The order to remove our equipment every day was very time-consuming and soon we found a large church that had somehow escaped some of the bombs and was somewhat intact, and here we would park our machines in the daytime hours. I had one corporal with a radio stay on the job at all times and he would report to me whenever he needed me – one day he called me at 0600, quite excited; he told me that I had better get down to the city as soon as  I could. He didn’t want to tell me what was going on, and only said that a shovel had broken through into what appeared to be a large basement.

               I got out of my sleeping bag and ran down there and by that time, things were just about out of control – the shovel had broken through about four inches of concrete with one track and they had had to pull it out with one of the Cats; then one of the guys went snooping around down in the hole and to their delight and amazement, they found a huge cache of booze – there were hundreds and hundreds of cases of the finest wine and hard liquor that France produced; one whole corner contained nothing but champagne. 

              Well, everything shut down right there and the boys got into the stuff and by the time I got there some of them were already quite loaded. I told them that if they didn’t get out of there, I would put them on charge – to my amazement, they listened to me and after telling me what they thought of me they came out of the hole. I then radioed our HQ and reached the CO, and he promised me that there would be action within fifteen minutes – shortly after, the military police arrived and posted a strong guard around the hole, then some big brass arrived and a Brigadier with a staff of men took stock of what was there. 

               A roster was then taken of all the Canadian troops in the area and the stuff was divided up as per capita; soon the units were notified and they would come up with their own transport and haul their share away. I’m afraid that if the Germans had made a concerted push that night, they would have overrun our forces, as with a few exceptions the whole Canadian Army went on a toot that night. The next day, when everything was back to normal and this vast cellar did not have one drop of booze left in it, a lieutenant and I went down to find out how the Germans had missed that cache. There was nothing we could find from that side so I had one of the shovels dig holes around the perimeter of this large concrete slab in search of the entrance – this we found to be a stairway going down some hundred feet away. When we dug that out, we came to an oak door which we pushed in with the bucket of the shovel; this gave entrance to yet another large cellar which was empty, but after measuring it we found out that this was part of the same cellar we had been in.

            When the Germans invaded France, the first thing the troops were after was booze, just like soldiers in any other army. They cleaned out the cellars of all the large hotels first. In this case, the owner of the hotel had had time to build a concrete wall to divide the cellar into two parts; he then stored all the aged and expensive stuff in one side and left the other side for inferior products. He then artificially “aged” the cement wall by painting it a dirty colour. The Germans cleaned out the cellar with the cheap booze but never even suspected the other portion. The owner had placed his finest stock in permanent storage but of course did not suspect that his hotel would be flattened by Allied bombs – still, if he had not been killed himself, he would have had something to start over with at the end of the war, but it was gone forever now."

armoured-d7-1944.jpg

My father on the right, with Caterpillar D7 armoured bulldozer.

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maipenrai,

I can see why the soldiers respected your father; he appears capable of taking care of matters.  But the stress of prolonged combat can affect even the strongest.

Remarkable story and firsthand one at that!  My story was told to me by my dad on the extremely rare times he talked about the war. Those guys were real heroes and formidable soldiers. 

 My dad trained in Ireland in preparation for the landing. I did find what you would call his black book. It contained the names and addresses of 5 girls. My mother occasionally when she got angry at my father say something about his Irish girlfriend. I was a kid and this made me feel uncomfortable.

In preparation for D-Day the original scheduled date and through the reschedules, my dad was aboard a troop ship off the Irish coast. They were reserves if the D-Day went bad. It never went that bad.

My dad was not a wagerer. Most of the unit was playing craps or cards and drinking the rum straight, to kill the long-extended confinement to quarters at sea.  Then the seas got rough, and the quarters turned ripe with rum laced vomit.

His unit landed on Normandy (beach unknown) about 5 or 6 days after D-Day. On the hill road off the beach, a dead German soldier was in the middle of the road. Total roadkill, the road surface and the body were one. The foot soldiers walked around the vehicles just plowed forward.

From Normandy they went to the Crouzon Peninsula for their first engagement with the German Army.  

  

 

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apow.jpg

Above: Orders/Roster/Emergency List?

When the War ended in Europe, the US Military created a pointed system that determined when a soldier could return to the US.  My father had more than enough points to be one of the first returning soldiers.

Upon returning to the East coast of the US. He was assigned to a unit that was charged with transporting German POW's (mainly officers) to a POW Camp in Rupert, Idaho (US West Coast State). Idaho borders his home state Oregon.

On the route to Rupert, Idaho they would pass through Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is famous for its volcanic features. One of the most famous is Old Faithful, a large geyser that erupts every 60 minutes. 

It was decided that they needed to break at Old Faithful. They backed the trucks a safe distance away and rolled back the canvas canopies so the POWs could see also.  The POWs got to view America's majesty firsthand.

My father said that the German soldiers were obliging and followed orders. They were not escape threats because there was no place for them to go, great food and good accommodations. Additionally, they were grateful not to be POWs in the hands of the Russians. 

 

 

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21 hours ago, CalEden said:

maipenrai,

I can see why the soldiers respected your father; he appears capable of taking care of matters.  But the stress of prolonged combat can affect even the strongest.

Remarkable story and firsthand one at that!  My story was told to me by my dad on the extremely rare times he talked about the war. Those guys were real heroes and formidable soldiers. 

 My dad trained in Ireland in preparation for the landing. I did find what you would call his black book. It contained the names and addresses of 5 girls. My mother occasionally when she got angry at my father say something about his Irish girlfriend. I was a kid and this made me feel uncomfortable.

In preparation for D-Day the original scheduled date and through the reschedules, my dad was aboard a troop ship off the Irish coast. They were reserves if the D-Day went bad. It never went that bad.

My dad was not a wagerer. Most of the unit was playing craps or cards and drinking the rum straight, to kill the long-extended confinement to quarters at sea.  Then the seas got rough, and the quarters turned ripe with rum laced vomit.

His unit landed on Normandy (beach unknown) about 5 or 6 days after D-Day. On the hill road off the beach, a dead German soldier was in the middle of the road. Total roadkill, the road surface and the body were one. The foot soldiers walked around the vehicles just plowed forward.

From Normandy they went to the Crouzon Peninsula for their first engagement with the German Army.  

  

 

What is even more remarkable is that my father had emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1930! He was happy in his new home and had no use for what Hitler was up to so enlisted with the Canadian Army in late '39 - because he had earned a steam operator's ticket working at a sawmill for a few years, he was placed in the engineers' corps and spent most of the war in England doing various civil and military construction jobs all over that country. Their unit was issued passes that basically gave them carte blanche to go anywhere at any time and they were almost constantly on the move as they managed and operated all of the earth moving machinery. He made it over the channel about a month after D-Day and was involved in actions through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and right into Germany. I met the other fellow in the photo when he and Dad were well into their '80s and he told me that my father would disappear often for a week or two at a time and everyone knew better than to ask why - what was happening is that they were using him for some intelligence purposes as he spoke German perfectly, of course. 

His memoirs are quite extensive and the war years are fascinating - unfortunately some of his best war stories didn't make it into them and are now lost forever with his passing; he was always willing to talk about his war experiences and I can recall going for supper at the parents' place and then spending a couple of hours later listening to him talk - how sad that I never thought about recording some of this when I could have. 

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maipenrai, your dad entered the war at an early stage of the war. In war nations have utilize all their assets to win and your dad possessed many. Lucky for him and you too.

My high school sweetheart's father was born in the US.  When he was just past being a baby his mother sent him back to Germany to live with relatives. He was very fond of growing up in prewar Germany. He even had a German accent. But he would say, you have no idea what it is like as 12 year old to only have the clothes on your back, fleeing the Russians. No idea where to stay or eat.

He joined the US Air Force and after active duty, was a Colonel in the reserves. He spoke fluent German like a native speaker. He was a Computer System Analyst at the Monterey Defense Institute responsible for computer war simulations.

Like your dad he would often disappear for a couple of weeks at a time. His family new he was in West Germany. I once had him buy me a cuckoo clock for me. He said once something about interrogating East German.

At the time I did not know what SR71 spy plane was. He essentially described it to me, I did not realize it was the SR71 until it was declassified.

I worked in the aerospace industry for well over a decade. An engineer I worked with, who immigrated to the US from prewar Germany as a teenager. Like your dad enlisted in the Army. His job was to interrogate German prisoners. He told me some of the Germans were bragging about a new super airplane the Germans had. Then one day there was this very loud sound they had never heard before and something streaking through the sky like V2 but wasn't a V2. 

 

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21 hours ago, CalEden said:

maipenrai, your dad entered the war at an early stage of the war. In war nations have utilize all their assets to win and your dad possessed many. Lucky for him and you too.

My high school sweetheart's father was born in the US.  When he was just past being a baby his mother sent him back to Germany to live with relatives. He was very fond of growing up in prewar Germany. He even had a German accent. But he would say, you have no idea what it is like as 12 year old to only have the clothes on your back, fleeing the Russians. No idea where to stay or eat.

He joined the US Air Force and after active duty, was a Colonel in the reserves. He spoke fluent German like a native speaker. He was a Computer System Analyst at the Monterey Defense Institute responsible for computer war simulations.

Like your dad he would often disappear for a couple of weeks at a time. His family new he was in West Germany. I once had him buy me a cuckoo clock for me. He said once something about interrogating East German.

At the time I did not know what SR71 spy plane was. He essentially described it to me, I did not realize it was the SR71 until it was declassified.

I worked in the aerospace industry for well over a decade. An engineer I worked with, who immigrated to the US from prewar Germany as a teenager. Like your dad enlisted in the Army. His job was to interrogate German prisoners. He told me some of the Germans were bragging about a new super airplane the Germans had. Then one day there was this very loud sound they had never heard before and something streaking through the sky like V2 but wasn't a V2. 

 

One of the stories Dad told me verbally was of seeing a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter fly over for the first time - said it scared the hell out of all of them because they had never seen or heard anything like this before. 

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1 hour ago, maipenrai said:

One of the stories Dad told me verbally was of seeing a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter fly over for the first time - said it scared the hell out of all of them because they had never seen or heard anything like this before. 

That's exactly how the Aerospace Engineer described their feelings too. Luckly, Hitler did not understand how to deploy it and it arrived late in the War.

Messerschmitt Me 262 "Schwalbe" - First Flight Over Berlin after 61 Years, Historical Footage!

https://youtu.be/8FA1yCfz9s4

 

The link could not be embedded because youtu.be does not allow embedding of that video.

 

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 Another story my dad told me: He saw very large formation of US Bombers bombing a German city. Flack was all over the sky, the Bombers were flying at various altitudes. He saw the Bombers open their Bomb bays. One B-17 dropped bombs on another B-17.  The wings of the B-17 just Ve'd up and flew away.

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