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Originally Posted by Blood_splat
Is it me or were people just smaller back then? When I look at pics from WWII of 18 and 19 year old kids, I would have dwarfed over a lot of them at that age.
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It's not discussed much now, but there were severe problems in WWII with draftees who were malnourished, short, with horrible teeth, etc. due to the Great Depression. The medical reject rate was about 1/3 I've read. In the 1930s it was not uncommon to find beri-beri, rickets and similar diseases throughout Appalachia and the South, and those kids became WWII's draftees and volunteers. While not a WWII sailor, my father joined in 1949 at 17 and had full dentures by the time he was 19. He'd never seen a dentist before boot camp.