The Memory Project
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I want you to go to The Memory Project website and peruse the stories of World War II veterans for a half an hour or so. There are dozens of great stories and pictures. They are all from Canada, but I have yet to find this kind of repository for stories from an American perspective.
http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/WWII
Once you are done there, please come back here and share one that you found interesting in the comments.
I don’t know if i should know this but I didn’t know canada was part of the war. I learned about a man named Milton a Canadian Air Force guy who was only 19 when he saw a bunch of his friends get bombed and saw there bodies lying dead and bloody.
I wouldn’t feel bad. Canada doesn’t get talked about a lot but they fought with the British before America ever got involved.
Lewis Chow was a Chinese Canadian who didn’t even want to be in the war but was conscripted to be a secret agent (spy) in China. This was a dangerous job though because you got basically no training and then if you are found out you are killed on the spot. It required great bravery and he was given many awards for his services.
Douglas MacDonald was in the Lake Superior Regiment at the Küsten Canal in Germany. He was in the D company, on the north side of the canal. His job was to prevent the German Army from going any further down the road toward Hochwald forest, where a battle was taking place. He had a dangerous job because there was a German soldier with a bazooka, who was supposed to hit British tanks. He was enlisted in 1943, and fought bravely despite the challenges involved in his company.
Catherine McIntyre Anderson left the war when her older brother died and her other brother was severely injured. she worked as a telegram writer, looking up and getting the files of people who where killed in action, missing in action or prisoners of war. After D-Day her office was flooded with released prisoners and people who where no longer missing in action.
Patricia Mary Booth really wanted to join the Air Force but her father wouldn’t give her consent so she went without his permission. She had the choice of what she wanted to do and she chose teleprinter operator. Patricia sent messages that were in figure and letter codes. Even though she didn’t know what she was sending, she enjoyed it.
Eva Olsson, originally named Ester Malek, was a survivor of the horror that was the Holocaust. When she was about twenty years old, she (along with her entire family) was taken from her home in Hungary, ordered into a crowded boxcar, and told she was going to work in a brick factory in Germany. The journey to the “brick factory” was torture in itself. People died from oxygen deficiency. The one pail everybody was to use as a toilet was overflowing into the box car. Mothers of infants were unable to properly feed them. Of course, it seemed to everybody on board that nothing could be worse than the perilous trip that, unbeknownst to them, was ultimately leading them to their deaths. What greeted them at the end of their journey? Auschwitz, they went from deadly traveling conditions to a deadly factory, a killing factory. Instead of smelling human excrements, the smell of burning flesh filled their nostrils. After reading her story, I have one main question. How could anyone treat human life with such disregard?
I honestly believe that there are dark spiritual forces at work behind the kinds of racism that lead people to see other humans as sub-human. It is a denial of the Image of God in another. Remember Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
I learned about a man named Bob Abbott.He did not really want to go to war because he had his family an friends back home, and he had his farm that he was taking care of at the time, He ended up going to war anyways. When he got to war he went directly to the front line and did not know what to expect.
Dalphas Edward Couillard was a member of the Canadian RAF. He was a Gunner on a bomber that was on multiple raids, but said the one that stands out to him was a horrendous one on March 2 1945. They got hit with a barrage of anti aircraft flak guns that blew off one of the wheels, damaged one of the engines, and wounded the pilot. It also somehow jammed the bomb door, so they were unable to drop their bombs. Anyway, they couldn’t land with the bombs, so they had to chop holes in the bomb doors to drop them. Dalphas said they had one 9000 lb bomb and 9 500 lb bomb. He said they dropped all of them and only one 500 lb bomb detonated when it hit the ground. It’s amazing he survived because the ground crew called them and said there were 125 flak holes in the plane that you could put your fist through!
I learned about a man named John Ivan Anderson. His aircraft was shot down by German fighters. Most of the crew parachuted to the ground. Eventually, they got to France but were caught by the Gestapo (German secret police). Anderson ended up in Stalag [Luft]-III in Poland where, he used items from the Red Cross to barter with the guards to get things such as cameras and radios. He and others were later moved to another prison camp where escape tunnels were being dug. They were able to escape and a movie about this escape was made.
How cool that you found that story. Sounds like “The Great Escape” with Steve McQueen. Another good movie set in that environment was “Stalag 17.”
I found this interesting. A man named Arthur Boyle was a tank driver. He exited the tank because there was a malfunction and he told his opperator that it was raining. He was referring to all of the bullets that were shooting at him. Thats just crazy to picture and to imagine that people went through that
I learned about a man named James Clarke who was hit in the back of the leg with shrapnel from a German mortar while his unit was at the Dutch-German border. The surgeons that removed the shrapnel, gave Mr. Clarke these pieces to keep as a souvenir. A shrapnel is a fragment of a bomb, shell or any object thrown by an explosion.
i remember what mr Lawson said about the heroes that fought in war… “The true heroes are still out there”
i think of that phrase as the true heroes are the ones that had risked their lives. they should be remembered for their acts of service and honor.
whoa its so crazy to me that people have witnessed such insane events, after reading a couple stories i found a cool one from George apps and he says he’s witnessed people get shot at while parachuting and he helped the police and army find a German pilot that had bailed out of a plane and they found him hanging from a tree