Is anyone related to a WWII Veteran?
 

Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone was related or had a World War II Veteran in their family. If so, what was the Veteran's name? What did he do/take part in, in the war?

My grandfather, Eddie Dempsey was in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and Vietnam. He is a retired from the U.S. Marine Corps however, still alive and working to live..but he has never told me his age, so I wouldn't know that..I believe he was a Military Police at second, he never mentioned what he did first in the war.

My grandfather was a radioman on a merchant ship. Our family has been trying to find out about the ship he was torpedoed on his last mission. He survived but never talked about it to his family.

Yeah, I can imagine all the bad things he has seen and the nightmares it probably gives him..I wouldn't talk about it either, brings back bad memories.

im not directly related to him (uncles girlfriends grandfather), but ive met him a few times.
He's a luftwaffe vet who flew on the russian front and got shot down and afterwards captured where he survived ofcourse
i belive he's name is Edvard Stark (Edvard Lanka during the war) and sadly i dont know much about he's wartime experience.

Then we have a guy on the croatian side of my family who served on the german side too (dont know hes name, unit or anything)
he came home after the war, and proceeded to hang himself in hes dad's barn shortly after getting home as he didnt know how the people in the village would react to him fighting for the germans

My paternal grandfather was an assault gun driver, later gunner on the east front, my maternal one a mountain trooper in Norway and the east Front.
One of my grand uncles was an NCO in Luftwaffe ground troops, but I am not exactly sure what he did. Some other grand uncles apparently were in the Kriegsmarine, and one was apparently killed in the fighting off Normandy. One other disappeared after the Falaise pocket and was presumed dead and turned up alive in 1980.
Also I know that in WW1 my paternal great grandfather served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Alpine front. He often told my father about warfare in the high mountains.

But I suppose nearly every European has ancestors that fought in WW2.

My grandfather was a "Kanzelwart" (a mechanic for the fuselage if I understood him correctly:hmm:) for Messerschmitt BF-109 fighter aircrafts in France. He didn't see much combat (except air raids of course). He was then transferred to an area near the German/Italian boarder. While being on the train they were attacked by fighter bombers which destroyed the power line and killed several of his comrades. After being stuck somewhere without transportation his group was "volunteered" to serve as engineers and to build bridges over some river to allow the German forces to retreat from Italy... Unfortunately they were neither trained nor equipped for such tasks and therefore these bridges were never completed. ;) After being send back to France his unit eventually surrendered to the US Army (where he almost starved being a POW).

Well the result for my family was no loss of lives but they lost there home (and all their possessions) twice to air raids. My family came from Stettin which belongs to Poland nowadays and is now called Szczecin, but after becoming a POW he claimed to be from West-Germany to avoid to be send back to Soviet occupied territory when his POW-time ended (He knew already that his family had fled to the west too).




My grandfather died in january 2002 and has never seen his home city again.:cry:

How very sad :(

No matter what "side" these people were on, we can all honour their service to their native countries :yep:

My maternal grandfather was an AA gunner in the Luftwaffe stationed on the eastern front.

Two Uncles and one Aunt

Edward Schultheis..PTO, torpedo mechanic and aircraft mechanic still living in NJ
Charles Schulthies..ETO, B17 pilot. Shot down Kiel Germany June 13th 1943 did not survive.
Jean Schultheis..PTO, wife of Edward Shulthieis, WAVE, nurse WWII, passed on, natural causes.

My Father served 4 years in the Canadian Navy (1941-45), on River Class frigates (crewed a K-gun as his action station), mostly doing convoy runs from NewFoundLand to Britain and later, Russia. He joined up at 17 and got his mother to sign the age waiver (told her if she didn't, he'd run away and join up anyway). His last ship was even sent to the Pacific in 1945, but the Pacific war ended before they had a chance to do anything there. They were paid off and discharged in Vancouver though (the ship was sold to the Indian Navy a year or so later). My uncle was killed (father's brother) in Italy while serving in the Canadian Army (he was a tank driver). We had another very good family friend who was practically an uncle to me who served with British Intelligence and I know spent most of 1942/43/44 in Europe, but he never really liked to talk about it much at all (I do remember he said he'd flown over in a Lysander at least once - I assume that was via 161 Squandron).

They are all gone now though.

My farther served on a minesweeper stationed in Darwin during WW2.:)

My grandfather, Raymond Purcell, flew reconnaissance over Gemany for the US in a small plane that looked like a little private plane. He would fly over enemy targets and take pictures with his camera.
He said that he often would encounter the German reconnaissance pilots going the other way to do the same thing. They actually were friendly with each other and would wave as they went past.
Another interesting thing is that he nammed his plane "Diane" after his daughter (My mother).
His plane once experienced an engine problem and he crash landed it. There's a picture we have of him smileing, posing with his crashed plane in a field somewhere (I assume in France or Russia).

My dad went to Egypt and fought the Afrika Corps as a small-time local resistance member.

Otherwise, not another soul in my family ever fought during World War II. My grandfather, however, did fight for the Ottomans during World War I.

My grandfather from my father's side was too young to join when the Winter war between Russia and Finland broke out in November 1939, but when the hostilies resumed after a year and a half in 1941 he was in. He served as an engineer in various places around the front, most notably in the battle of Tali-Ihantala, where the Finns finally stopped the Russian offensive of 1944. There he practically lost his hearing from one ear when some kind of grenade hit the rock he was sheltering behind, but otherwise he came out unscathed. The war stories he has told us have always been about the "happy times", like when they were fishing lobsters, when everyone got sick and was ****ting all over the place because there was a dead reindeer just upstream from their camp, when they found a cellar full of vodka and got so drunk they had to pull back momentarily etc. On new year's eves he used to build some nice devices(that went BANG) from the stuff he brought back from the front, but I guess he's already run out of it because it hasn't happened for a couple of years now. He's still alive and well and living on a farm in southern Finland.

Neither of my Grandfahers fought in WWII.

On my father's side of the family my grandfather was declaired unfit for service, he didn't have a very healthy heart probably due to a very poor childhood (he almost died of malnutrition when he was 4 and had been pretty ill too). Anyway he worked in forestry as a foreman during the war; was in charge of some Italian POW's. He told them on the first day that if they wanted to try escape he wouldn't try to stop them, none of them did; they were all sick of the war and were just happy that they weren't being shelled or bombed anymore!

My mother's father was too old to fight so he served in the Home Guard instead. He was mostly involved in 'Fire Watching' i.e. keeping watch over important sites like factories incase they caught fire during air raids.

My Great Uncle (my dads mother's brother) was involved in the Norwegen campaign. The transport he was on was bombed and sunk and he spent a while freezing in a lifeboat which was washed up on a beach with many other survivors. He was then straffed and bombed by the Luftwaffe pretty heavily until finally another transport came to pick them up; which was then sunk by a U Boat; so back in the water he went. When he got back to Britain he was very traumatised (he was always highly strung and later suffered from manic depression) so he was transfered to light duties on base in the UK. Later he was discharged for medical reasons after he was involved in an accident.

Both my Great Grandfathers on my dads side fought in WWI one on the Western front and the Balkans and the other in Mesopotamia and the middle east. Both survived.