WW II Images and Gun Stories

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dk-corriveau

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I recently got a copy of this picture. The solders are from I Company, 347 Regiment, 87th Infantry Division and are in the Ardennes on January 13, 1945. Included in the image is my recently deceased Grandfather, he is in the middle of the image, facing to the left with his face covered and the BAR over his shoulder.

Unfortunately, I don’t have many stories from his time in the war, but he did say that soon after this picture was taken he became a squad leader and shifted back to carrying the Garand. He welcomed the change because of all the ammo he was carrying for the BAR. My Grandfather brought back with him a P38 and a Browning Model 1922, both with Nazi markings all over them. I have shot both, but spend more time shooting the P38. He also brought back an Italian pistol, but I am not sure of its make/model.

I thought some would appreciate this picture; it’s a little piece of my family history. If anyone else has some family images/gun stories from the war I would love to see/hear them.
 
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That picture looks awfully cold.

Grandad (23rd Regiment, 2nd ID) has a favorite story. After the war in Europe was over, they had trainloads of ammo just sitting around. Since his unit was slated to ship out for the Pacific, division decided they should set up shooting ranges (among other things) to keep the soldiers' skills sharp. Grandad has always been a freakishly good shot, and calling him a scoundrel (at that time, anyway) would probably have earned you a knowing smile. So, naturally, he came up with an evil plan.

He started challenging other soldiers to shooting contests. For money. Keep in mind that this was getting to be late spring/early summer, and the grass was drying out nicely. He would fire off his first seven rounds straight into the target, and then fire his eighth, a tracer, into the grass in front of the other fellow's target. Naturally, the grass would start to burn, causing a nice smoky fire...

He bought grandma a wedding ring with the cash he won.
 
Every time I take my M1 to the range I always say a prayer to the men who had to carry it places like The Ardennes in January.
 
My father was there, he was part of an anti-tank gun crew. He just sent me his 101st Infantry Battle Honors book. It is a little yellowed with age, the signatures are getting faded, and many of the men who signed it are no longer with us.

He has never really talked much about the fighting, just always the funny and dumb things that happened over there.
 
Threatend with jail and a court marshall, my uncle could not disclose his role in the Pacific until the 1970's....he was the navigator on the B-29 photographic plane that flew with the "Enola Gay" on it's trip to Hiroshima. At the time they didn't know what effect the bomb might have on the aircraft, all viewed the mission as a possible one way suicide trip....fortunately the planes survived and the mission brought an end to the war.
 
I'm glad I wasn't there!

Read "Citizen Soldier" by Stephen Ambrose. It will give you a new appreciation for what "The Greatest Generation" did for us, and at what cost.
 
Check these, hopefully they post ok,

No Guns but I want you to guess what branch of the service and what theatre. And it's NOT the Navy! :D This is my Great Uncle "Malley"

He never talked about any of it to anyone.

Sorry they're a little blurry. In the center thumbnail he is the one on the left. He is about 38 YO in those pictures. He spent 36 months there.

The sign says "Remember THIS! Take Atabrine! Who know's what Atabrine was?

263 Med Bat. Is what it says just above the sign.
 

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Atabrine was among the first synthetic anti-malarial drugs to appear in the '30s. It's side effects included yellow skin, headaches and nausea. It was also widely, though incorrectly, rumored to cause impotence, which made many men dodge taking it if they could, and stern disciplinary measures had to be taken to enforce it.
 
One of my grandfathers flew missions on B-29s as a flight engineer in the PTO he carried a .45 on his hip. Never bought one when he got home but he talked about the .45 fondly, as him and his buddies often took target practice between missions. My dad now has his AAF uniform. Two of my great uncles were stationed on the SAME island, maybe 2 miles apart and never knew it until after the war. Talk about military censorship working.

My other grandfather served in the Navy in the PTO. The only guns he fired were anti-aircraft guns.

My grandmother's brother served in a Combat Engineer Battalion as a private and radioman that landed in the early days of the normandy invasion, he ended the war as part of the 1st allied airborne division (which if I recalll was part of the 'occupation force' in Berlin?) as an officer (he was mavericked up) and MP, sadly, he was killed when a shotgun in the jeep his was riding in accidentally discharged (read the telegram from his CO explaining the story). I read a number of his letters home, and he didn't talk much about combat... he did make recommendations like buying a cow (since milk was being rationed) and ask the folks back home to send sweets and crackers.

My best friend has his grandfather's uniform, 82nd Airborne with jump wings and glider wings. He was a pathfinder. Jumped at Normandy. Made it through without a scratch and made a nice living as a dentist.

The greatest generation indeed.

'Citizen Soldiers' should be required reading.
 
Atabrine was a medication used to fight malaria.
And I'm going to guess Coast Guard, South Pacific.
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Right on Atabrine, wrong on CBs OR Coast Guard, right on S Pacific. New Guinea to be exact.

He was ARMY!!

The best I could do was either 533 Special Boat Brigade or possibly 563 Special Boat Brigade. I've emailed the 533 but no reply I'm afraid.

The Army had their own landing craft and he was involved with that.

Sorry the pix are so blurry, I'm going to have them digitized and when I do I'll post them for all to see. I have quite a few actually.
 

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Atabrine was an anti-malarial medication; the "preventive" dose was 1 tablet daily, the "curative" dose was 4. If one's system could tolerate it, many soldiers took the "curative" dose as a matter of course.

It was also a powerful dye - after a while of taking the "curative" dose, not only your skin, but the whites of your eyeballs assumed a yellow cast, giving you a jaundiced appearance. (This worried medical personnel for a while until they figured out what was going on.)

The local natives liked to trade for it because, as I mentioned before, it was a powerful dye.

In terms of pictures, you've probably seen some my late father took. He fought with the 3rd Air Commando Group in the Pacific during WWII. Though he was no part of the entourage, he somehow he found himself with a Victor movie camera on a beach in the Philipines when MacArthur made his famous landing - so he filmed it. Each time it happened, for several "takes." After which a rather high ranking officer (Colonel?) went around and collected all the film, exposed or not.

When you're a sergeant and a colonel orders you to your face to hand over all the film, you do it.

After which they found a way to bring MacArthur's limo ashore.

When Gregory Peck was on TV hyping his "MacArthur" movie and claimed that fighting was still heavy when the general came ashore . . . my dad just about went through the roof. I didn't realize the old man KNEW those words! ;)

And to keep this gun related - my dad had been issued a .45 made by Ithaca. He shot it a lot - sometimes, the only "leave" was taking a jeep out beyond the end of the runway with a case of beer and a case of ammo, and then "plinking" away all day at anything that moved in the jungle. He wore out more than one barrel with that pistol . . . eventually, the squadron armorer just gave him a box full of replacements so he'd quit bothering him for a new one when the rifling was shot out.

Dad always blamed himself for being "young and foolish" for not bringing the pistol back . . .
 
Yes on the Atabrine. I'm of the understanding that most did not want to take it because it made them ill. IIRC they had to line up befoe chow or something like that so the medics could make them all take it.
 
I'm just recently completed converting an old type written manuscript to electronic text (OCR) from my grandfather's brother's experiences in the Pacific theater and in years of POW camp. I thought this account was interesting. He was commanding a coastal AA battery on Corregidor in the Philippines at this time:

"A Private was on guard duty at the kitchen area on December 27th, on a 'graveyard' shift. I as battery commander always made two inspections of the perimeter guard. One was prior to midnight and the other was one between midnight and morning sunrise. On this night I came to the guard position of the Private on the midnight to morning inspection. I expected a challenge from the guard. None came. I prowled through the kitchen area and came upon the Private. He was sitting on boxes of supplies, leaned up against a field kitchen stove, sound asleep. His rifle was leaned on his shoulder, butt on the ground. His web belt was around his waist as usual with the bayonet attached. In wartime, sleeping on guard duty is a court martial offense and equal to desertion, subject to the death penalty in some cases. Depending upon local circumstances it can have a variable degree of impact upon local security. However, to confine a person for such an offense in this particular situation would reduce battery strength, and require additional time of someone to care for the prisoner and the arrangement of a confinement area on 'rock.' The 'rock' was not equipped for protection against bombardment from the air or from shelling from Bataan or Cavite, for local prisoners. Arrest and confinement would punish the man, but it would not teach him anything about the possible consequences of his dereliction of duty.

"My action against the Private this night was to first quietly remove his rifle from inside his arm and place it 15 or 20 feet away where he could not feel or see it. Secondly, I very carefully removed the web belt from his waist, removing his bayonet. Then I placed my .45 calibre pistol at aim at his face and shook his arm to awaken him. Well, I felt very sorry for the man. He came out of a deep sleep clawing for his rifle and staring at that pistol. The rifle was not there. He clawed at his waist for his bayonet. Then he looked up at the pistol and then at me with a bewildered doomed look on his face. Then I spoke to him and asked, 'Where the hell would you have been had I been a Japanese?' He got the message loud and clear. Some might say that that was a dirty trick to pull upon any man. My contention is that he learned more and was punished more by this insult and the realization of his predicament than he would have been in a month or 6 months of confinement."

Also reading through the manuscript has me wondering, how did they measure muzzle velocity on these huge guns back then?

"The fact that all AA fire that day was short in range and ineffective, caused the belief that possibly the muzzle velocity used on the ammunition was in error due to the age of the ammunition we were using, and it was decided within the regiment to hold a test firing to determine the actual developed muzzle velocity. This text was made on No 1 gun of Battery Hartford, some time during the period December 15 to 24. Four powder lots of ammunition were fired. It was found that for powder lots 8118-4 and 8218-5, the developed muzzle velocity was 2690 f/s. For powder lots 6339-15 and 2727-1, the developed muzzle velocity was 2740 f/s. Most of the ammunition at Battery Hartford was the latter lot, so a muzzle velocity of 2740 was used in lieu of the listed 2800 Vs on the ammunition. We had good results with this corrected MV later."
 
how did they measure muzzle velocity on these huge guns back then?
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My semi - educated guess is they timed the flight of the shell to impact at a known distance.

You can use that in reverse too. For example, if you know your muzzle velocity is 2500 and it takes one second for your bullet to hit you can figure your target is ~ 2500 feet away.

Good stories too !

:)
 
Hmmm . . . not certain how they measured MV for the really "big" guns, but if you look at old USGI references, you'll find that velocity is often quoted at the odd distance of "78 feet."

What they did, is get two discs of cardboard or something similar, and put one at either end of a 150 foot rod. They'd then spin the rod at a known RPM and fire the gun more or less parallel to the rod so the projectile would first pierce one, then the other, disc.

Since the rod was rotating, the hole in the second disc would have an angular offset from the hole in the first. Since this angular offset was a function of distance, RPM, and time of flight, it was pretty simple math to compute the average velocity over the 150 foot path. The average was assumed to be in the middle, so it was the "75 foot" velocity. (They ignored non-linearities of velocity loss.)

So how did they get 78 feet? The first disc was 3 feet from the muzzle . . .
 
Only guns my dad used were attached to the plane....he was the tail gunner on a Navy SBD dive bomber in the Pacific. Interesting patch on his uniform...a machine gun with wings.
sbd-06.gif

Navy3.gif
 
Dk

My father was in the Ardennes at that same time with the 99th infantry division. He received a battelfield commision and went from Sargent to Leutinat. He is 86 now and lives in Southern Okla. Nice picture you have there. Those boys had it rough!!!!!!!!!
 
A couple Special Boat Brigade links...

http://www.armyamphibs.com/html/3rd_esb.htm

http://members.aol.com/famjustin/OSmithbio.html

I'm assuming at this time that Malley was attached to the 563rd due to the reference to the 263rd Med Battallion sign. I can find no history of either the 563rd or the 263rd other than that they did exist. The second link is to a bio of one that served with the 543rd Special boat and is sounding somewhat similar to what the 563rd was doing. It's rather long. I'm also assuming Malley was a coxswain.
 
What they did, is get two discs of cardboard or something similar, and put one at either end of a 150 foot rod. They'd then spin the rod at a known RPM and fire the gun more or less parallel to the rod so the projectile would first pierce one, then the other, disc.
Click to expand...

I once saw a lecture at the Univeristy of Washington (of all places) and the prof. demostrated this exact method of velocity measurement using a .22 rifle fired IN THE LECTURE HALL (using a CB cap and a bullet trap on the other end). I thought that was pretty cool, and completely irrelevent to this thread :neener:

I'll see if I can get some of my grandfather's pics from the war, he was an engineer and an amatuer photographer who took some interesting photos in Germany.
 
Dad would of been 83 this year. He was a LtJG Radio operator in the Merchant Marine. He couldn't afford a camera and they probibly would of taken it from him if he had it. Some of the stories he told were funny and some were serious. He was in the Atlantic, Med, and Pacific.

It's a wonder that most of the guys came home in any kind of normal condition after the thing they saw and did.

He had no regrets about the bomb.
 
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