My grandpa, Richard Williams, lived next door to me when I was a kid, and he helped raise me like a parent. He taught me carpentry, plumbing, and electricity, and through countless days together in his workshop he was the one who got me excited about hardware engineering.
I hope to live as he did: to travel every part of the world; to meet and befriend people of all cultures; to be easygoing, and full of childlike wonder; to be a friend even to former enemies; to be driven and hardworking to the point of exhaustion; to cheat death repeatedly; and to make the absolute most of our incredible time on this wonderful world.
Bookmarked to listen to later. listened to the first few minutes and it sounds great. I did my Eagle Scout Project to honor the Veterans at my church. It ended up being more or less a book with a 1 page general biography of each veteran (unit, rank, commendations, notable events etc). I really wanted to do some more in depth personal interviews and recorded narratives with each veteran but they did not really care to talk much about it. The ones that did, was off the record. I had quite a few wonderful conversations that I wish I could have captured doing it. The sad thing is most of those guys are not around any more.
Unfortunately the videos are now offline but you can still access some if you contact them. There were some wonderful interviews years ago that I was able to view.
There is more! A full hour! :-D At some point I may post the rest, I just got the recordings back from a data recovery shop; they were on a hard drive that crashed 4 years ago with no backup... Talk about lucky
The hissing is just the noise from a cassette tape recorder, I recorded this 7 years ago before I had a smartphone. My grandpa was healthy right up to the bitter end!
My grandpa didn't talk much about the war. I'll never know what he went through. He went all the way to Berlin with the Soviet Army, that's the only thing I know.
The other one was sent to China, Canton (not sure how accurate this is, as that is in the South, not North or West, as I would have imagined). It was to "help fight off the Japanese". He also never wanted to talk about the war.
It seems many people who experienced the full brunt of war (like having killed people up close or witness close friends get knocked out again and again) don't even want to remember or talk about it because the it's just too painful.
I don't know - naval warfare in WW2 could be pretty grim.
I can recommend Nicholas Monsarrat's "Three Corvettes" on his wartime naval experiences - I happened to buy this without knowing much about the book in Heathrow before a flight over the North Atlantic to the US. One of the relatively small number of books that has moved me to tears.
It could be because pretty much all branches have ground deploy-able forces so it isn't necessarily true that they aren't exposed to the horrors of war on a person to person level.
I know this outs me as a cloistered american, but my mental narrative of WWII is woefully bereft of accounts outside of the US Britain, and Germany. The thought of your Pop Pop slogging through the countryside towards Berlin gave me goosebumps. Where is that movie, i ask you.
There's a movie released in 2001, called Enemy at the Gates, but it's kind of cheesy. But since you asked, it qualifies as the ever-so-rare Hollywood movie about a WWII scenario, involving a Russian protagonist, as told from a Soviet perspective.
The scale of the War in the Soviet Union was vast. 26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war. The theatre contained hundreds of divisions - many times those in which the US and Britain fought.
Understand, I am well aware of the facts and figures of the East's struggle. I have sat and talked with nearly 50 WWII vets at length, and not one of them from anywhere but the US, Britain, and Germany. The road to victory that Mother Russia took is informative when considering the events of the present.
As I was writing, I refrained from referring to the the theatre as 'Eastern'. The term tends to turn encourage us to turn our backs on the way in which the Second World War shapes the politics of China and Korea [or Koreas] and the way in which the US interprets them.
China was the first of 'the Allies'. It went to war with Japan in July 1937 - more than two years before France and Britain against Germany and four years before the rest of the Allies engaged Japan, i.e. China fought against Japan alone for longer than as one of 'The Allies'. Rana Mintner's Forgotten Ally was on the new shelf a few months ago at the public library:
More recently I read Bruce Cummings The Korean War: A History. Now I no longer write North Korea's actions off as crazy. That's the country whose founders fought Japanese imperialism before and throughout the war. The American military maintained Japan's administrative structure in the South when it 'established itself' their following Japan's defeat. South Korea has had foreign troops in it continuously since 1895. North Korea sees that as problematic.
If you are interested in a very good (and long) writeup about world war II from a perspective you probably didn't hear about in school:
When we try to imagine what happened when the Japanese imperial navy approached Midway Island we're likely to get an image out of Star Wars -- daring attack planes, as graceful as swallows, darting among the ponderously churning cannons of some behemoth of a Death Star. But the sci-fi trappings of Star Wars disguise an archaic and sluggish idea of battle.
What happened instead was this: the American squadron commander gave the order to attack, the planes came hurtling down from around 12,000 feet and released their bombs, and then they pulled out of their dives and were gone. That was all. Most of the Japanese sailors didn't even see them.
One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship.
Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.
The last of the carriers, the Hiryu, managed to escape untouched, but later that afternoon it was located and attacked by another flight of American bombers. One bomb set off an explosion so strong it blew the elevator assembly into the bridge. More than 400 died, and the crippled ship had to be scuttled a few hours later to keep it from being captured.
Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.
This was the Battle of Midway. As John Keegan writes, it was "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." Its consequences were instant, permanent and devastating.
It gutted Japan's navy and broke its strategy for the Pacific war. The Japanese would never complete their perimeter around their new empire; instead they were thrown back on the defensive, against an increasingly large and better-organized American force, which grew surgingly confident after its spectacular victory.
After Midway, as the Japanese scrambled to rebuild their shattered fleet, the Americans went on the attack. From Midway till the end of the war the Japanese didn't win a single substantial engagement against the Americans.
They had "lost the initiative," as the bland military saying goes, and they never got it back.
This overstates what Midway accomplished by a bit.
For the Japanese you might say "Midway was an island too far", like Arnhem. It was beyond the parameter they were establishing, and was prompted by Doolittle's raid and their ceaseless attempts to engage the US Navy in a "decisive battle". It resulted in something like temporary parity in naval power (i.e. carriers), and due to institutional failures they never recovered from their losses in trained pilots, Midway, before, and after (e.g. they didn't rotate experienced airmen back home to train new ones, they for the most part fought until they died).
Our landing in Guadalcanal and their failure to quickly snuff it is where they lost the initiative, that attacked and started to unravel their real parameter. Otherwise we'd have stayed on the defensive until enough new carriers and supporting ships and planes were built, then we would have done a much bloodier and somewhat more prolonged sole advance through the Central Pacific, which would no doubt have had even more adverse consequences.
Instead, they and we got into a knife fight in the Southwest Pacific, the Solomons and New Guinea, where both our carrier forces were essentially used up (of our serious fleet carriers only the Enterprise and Saratoga survived, and during this campaign the Saratoga got torpedoed and had to retire for a while for repairs, the Enterprise required serious stateside maintenance and refit while a British carrier covered for her).
Japan and the Allies were pretty evenly matched on paper, and this campaign was brutal in every way, we lost 40+ ships (and two Real Admirals (2 stars) in one night action), they lost 50+, and a slow war of attrition was waged in the skies. I'm reading Fire in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Fire-In-The-Sky-Pacific/dp/0813338697/) right now, which covers that in immense detail, e.g. one of the many reasons the Japanese lost was subpar civil engineering (in general their non-combat specialties didn't get any respect, this critically included intelligence), they didn't keep the taxiways between revetments and runways free of soft spots, resulting in lots of operational losses at critical time (on both sides, this operational losses destroyed more planes than combat)).
Industrially and institutionally they couldn't complete well, and when our 2nd generation of planes and ships came on-line, with adequately trained air crews, maintenance staff, the Japanese in comparison were "used up", and were never a serious threat in the air until they resorted to kamikaze attacks.
"26,000,000 is the commonly agreed on estimate of USSR deaths from the war."
At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "self-inflicted", by the games and machinations Stalin played. Mass slaughter of the USSR's own people was a policy long before the war---that the people who did their 1939 census were sent to the Gulag should be sufficient telling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ---and the war just enabled a continuation if not increase in this.
Note also how the continuous purges of Army officers left the Red Army in a crippled state prior to the invasion.
My maternal grandfather was in the Japanese Army, and while I do not know the details, spent six years in the mines in Russia.
I could never get myself to ask what his time was like. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer and I knew that he didn't have much more time to live, I still felt that I could not do him the cruelty of digging up those memories from him.
My ex-wife's grandfather fought on the other side (as part of the Romanian Army), and after he came back from the Eastern Front he tried as best as he could to support and tell the story of his "comrades" (he would always call them with that name, even in his 90s). Of course he, like almost all the soldiers involved in that war, had nothing personal against the soldiers they were fighting against, they were just small pawns in a greater, horrible game. He once told the story of a Russian old couple who had received him in their house as the Romanian Army was retreating from outside Stalingrad, in a -30 degrees winter. Without this couple helping him he wouldn't have made it back to his wife.
Although he came from a traditional, rural background, the horrors he had seen in the war scarred him for life, turning him into an atheist. Even in his old age he was saying that there could be no God that would allow happening the stuff that he had seen.
Back in college I spent a semester in France and during the weekends I tried to partially retrace his steps during the war. I went to Normandy and photographed the graves of the seven men from his unit buried there and I visited the bridge over the Rhine he helped capture—my family has the Nazi flag that flew over the Bridge at Remagen, which he removed and replaced with the American flag.
He never talked much about his time in the war but he did write it down.
Around late 1990s and early 2000s, right when the internet started getting into people's homes with Mozilla web browser and IE, I noticed many memoirs that were put up by the old veterans themselves. I spent much time reading through them.
Sadly many of those memoirs are not around anymore as their accounts were shutdown or the web hosting company itself went out of business.
I fear much history is being lost in the transition from pen/paper era to digital era.
I have always wanted to record an interview my grandpa on his military experience, and I did. I was not smart and didn't record the interview. I may interview him again, but just record the whole interview if he is willing to again... I am also a fellow Minnesotan, not sure why, but I felt a little pride there.
Do it. Just do it. If you don't, you'll regret it when you can't anymore. All of my grandparents have passed away, and I missed out on so many stories; one of my biggest regrets in life.
E. B. Sledge's autobiography, With the Old Breed describes his combat experiences as a Marine in the Pacific and is worth reading if your interested in that history.
My grandfather served in the 504 PIR. He never talked with me about his experiences at great length, but the two vignettes he related that stick with are both about his being terrified, the one I remember from my teens was: They were holed up in a house in the Ardennes. It was night and he had to urinate so badly that he took the risk of stepping outside [historically. the 504th was trucked in from reserve to stop Panzer Group Piper and stem the rout]. As he relieved himself, he looked up and for a moment mistook the snow covered saplings for enemy soldiers.
The second, is from my early twenties. Blunt and simple: being in a trench in Italy while the Germans dropped antipersonel bombs on him was more 'unpleasant" than I could imagine. That was true. He had a successful professional career after the war. but fought depression up until his death. I'm both sad that I miss him, and glad that I do.
My grandpa was in the French resistance. He left the family farm at 17 to join the maquis (French wilderness) where he lived for 2 years, trying to hamper the German forces (eg. blowing up trains). He then participated to the liberation of Royan, and received the croix de guerre. It blows my mind to think about what he must have felt like- when I was 17, I was reading computer magazines in my bedroom.
My cousin and I wanted to record him talking about his life, and then he died unexpectedly.
There's always a "next time" until there isn't.
My great grandmother spent some time in a work camp. I don't know which one, I don't know how long, all I know is that she gave birth to one of my dad's aunts inside the camp. According to her it "wasn't that bad". Apparently the guards would even play and joke around with the baby.
Her feelings about the war might be colored by having found the family farm burned down to the ground by the partisans (communist version) upon her return.
Such a shame she died before I was old enough to truly appreciate having a sit down with her and listening to the experience she'd have to share. All I know are scattered bits and pieces, mostly from second-hand retellings. Unfortunately as a kid I never liked talking to her - her voice was feeble, she had a thick accent and local dialect, both of which made her very difficult to understand and kind of scary to talk to.
This makes me really sad as my grandpa passed away last year and i just realized i could have saved his life's story for everyone that cares.
Good stuff, we should all do something like this, maybe even build a database to share these kind of live stories ?
The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, mentioned in the narrative, is an extraordinary and tragic one; at that stage of the war the US Navy's Pacific operation was so vast that the ship's disappearance essentially fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy and was not noticed for several critical days. "In Harm's Way" gives a compelling account of the sinking and the subsequent ordeal of the survivors.
Reading the other comments reminds us that in general the men who fought in the war were reluctant to talk about it, which is why first-hand testimony like this is so valuable for future generations.
Of course, many of them were horribly traumatised by their experiences, which goes a long way to explaining their reticence. My stepdad, for example, was in a position that was overrun by a German attack - he shot a fellow who fell dead on top of him with his hand over my stepdad's face. My stepdad then had to "play possum" until a counterattack in turn evicted the Germans. For the rest of his life he would wake up terrified and in a cold sweat from the recurring nightmare of that dead hand on his face.
WWII was unbelievably vast. If you look at the numbers, men, equipment, fronts, battles...all with logistics, supplies, planning and other administrivia handled by hand before computers and modern communication systems. It boggles the mind. I mean, they didn't even really have good photocopiers
When I was in high school, I had the honor of being chosen as a "musical exchange student" along with a dozen other musicians from local schools to spend a summer in and around Yekaterinburg. While there, we formed a small chamber ensemble and played music for various local groups, including several WWII veteran retirement homes (Great Patriotic War Vets). After our performance, many of the very old vets came up and were beyond warm in thanking us for coming and playing for them. A few mentioned remembering the Soviet-American alliance and lamented our animosity since then, they hoped our countries could be friends and we'd have a long future together.
Curious, we visited various GPW memorials and museums and such. It was a pretty intense education. It was the first time I had ever really heard a non-American perspective on the war and the scale of the Soviet involvement, something I had been completely ignorant of before that point, kind of blew my mind. It really set in my mind the importance of not accepting the education I was fed and to expand my horizons to try and look at things from different angles.
It gave me the travel bug and I try and go out of the country at least once a year since then.
As proud as I am of America's part in winning the war, and my father's contribution, it really pales in comparison with what the Soviets went through. They were under supplied, and their leadership was decimated and hampered by demands of political reliability. What they had going for them was huge numbers of artillery pieces, and the T-34 tank.
Watch "Enemy at the Gates" sometime, especially the first part.
The USSR, at the official level, was never free of animosity towards us. Just a few things from what I'm studying right now, plus one big one:
They didn't shut down the Comintern, their official organization for subverting and destroying us, until 2 years minus about 5 weeks after Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion), while we (the US) started supplying them with equipment on credit ~3 months after (for gold and minerals before, while the first arrangement was hammered out).
They refused to supply us with meteorological info, which seriously hindered our campaign against Japan.
They seized all the B-29s that were forced to land on their territory (was later copied as the Tupolev Tu-4); while this was consistent with their need to maintain their neutrality towards Japan after some engagements in Manchuria (where they owned the Japanese, but they really needed those troops; Georgy Zhukov earned his spurs and vital experience there), holding the crews was not, I think. They were "allowed to escape into American-occupied Iran" per Wikipedia and e.g. Tillman's Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 (http://www.amazon.com/Whirlwind-The-Against-Japan-1942-1945/...).
This of course says absolutely nothing about how the two peoples felt about each other, and our mutual gratitude for what the other did in terminating Nazi Germany with extreme prejudice.
No, mid 90s, not too long after the curtain fell. I'd add that we didn't know anything about where we were going which turned into some hilarity when we arrived with winter clothes expecting cold and permafrost (being in Siberia and all that), and instead getting 100 degF weather with 90% humidity. The exchange was loaded with these kinds of cultural and environmental learning experiences, neither group knew anything about each other. It was really a meeting of two complete alien cultures. It was really the point of that kind of thing though wasn't it?
The Russian families who took us in were some of the warmest, most hospitable people I've ever met. They really worked hard to integrate us as well as they could and give us a memorable experience. In fact almost everywhere we went, even out into the deep countryside, we were treated incredibly well by almost everybody.
We got to return the favor later when their kids came to stay with us, and apparently that particular exchange program continued on for many years after that. I'm almost sad to say I don't think the Americans they met were as universally warm or welcoming.
44 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI hope to live as he did: to travel every part of the world; to meet and befriend people of all cultures; to be easygoing, and full of childlike wonder; to be a friend even to former enemies; to be driven and hardworking to the point of exhaustion; to cheat death repeatedly; and to make the absolute most of our incredible time on this wonderful world.
:)
Bookmarked for later listening, but heard he's a fellow Minneapolis native. Woo.
Another repository of oral history that may be worth checking out is http://www.goforbroke.org/oral_histories/oral_histories_vide...
Unfortunately the videos are now offline but you can still access some if you contact them. There were some wonderful interviews years ago that I was able to view.
Is the hissing in the background an oxygen machine?
The hissing is just the noise from a cassette tape recorder, I recorded this 7 years ago before I had a smartphone. My grandpa was healthy right up to the bitter end!
The other one was sent to China, Canton (not sure how accurate this is, as that is in the South, not North or West, as I would have imagined). It was to "help fight off the Japanese". He also never wanted to talk about the war.
In the Navy you sink a ship from far away. It's more abstract; you don't see the enemy up close.
In the Army you fight battles face to face with the enemy, and it must be correspondingly more horrible.
So I would guess that Navy people (like my grandpa) had a generally more positive memory of the war than Army people.
I can recommend Nicholas Monsarrat's "Three Corvettes" on his wartime naval experiences - I happened to buy this without knowing much about the book in Heathrow before a flight over the North Atlantic to the US. One of the relatively small number of books that has moved me to tears.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Monsarrat
He also wrote the novel "The Cruel Sea" which was made into one of the best naval war movies of WW2.
Thanks.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215750/
It's the only English-language movie I can think of that fits those criteria.
A book on Stalingrad I recently enjoyed:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140284583/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...
China was the first of 'the Allies'. It went to war with Japan in July 1937 - more than two years before France and Britain against Germany and four years before the rest of the Allies engaged Japan, i.e. China fought against Japan alone for longer than as one of 'The Allies'. Rana Mintner's Forgotten Ally was on the new shelf a few months ago at the public library:
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Ally-China%C2%92s-World-1937...
More recently I read Bruce Cummings The Korean War: A History. Now I no longer write North Korea's actions off as crazy. That's the country whose founders fought Japanese imperialism before and throughout the war. The American military maintained Japan's administrative structure in the South when it 'established itself' their following Japan's defeat. South Korea has had foreign troops in it continuously since 1895. North Korea sees that as problematic.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Korean-War-History-Chronicles/dp/0...
When we try to imagine what happened when the Japanese imperial navy approached Midway Island we're likely to get an image out of Star Wars -- daring attack planes, as graceful as swallows, darting among the ponderously churning cannons of some behemoth of a Death Star. But the sci-fi trappings of Star Wars disguise an archaic and sluggish idea of battle.
What happened instead was this: the American squadron commander gave the order to attack, the planes came hurtling down from around 12,000 feet and released their bombs, and then they pulled out of their dives and were gone. That was all. Most of the Japanese sailors didn't even see them.
One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship.
Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.
The last of the carriers, the Hiryu, managed to escape untouched, but later that afternoon it was located and attacked by another flight of American bombers. One bomb set off an explosion so strong it blew the elevator assembly into the bridge. More than 400 died, and the crippled ship had to be scuttled a few hours later to keep it from being captured.
Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.
This was the Battle of Midway. As John Keegan writes, it was "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." Its consequences were instant, permanent and devastating.
It gutted Japan's navy and broke its strategy for the Pacific war. The Japanese would never complete their perimeter around their new empire; instead they were thrown back on the defensive, against an increasingly large and better-organized American force, which grew surgingly confident after its spectacular victory.
After Midway, as the Japanese scrambled to rebuild their shattered fleet, the Americans went on the attack. From Midway till the end of the war the Japanese didn't win a single substantial engagement against the Americans.
They had "lost the initiative," as the bland military saying goes, and they never got it back.
http://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
For the Japanese you might say "Midway was an island too far", like Arnhem. It was beyond the parameter they were establishing, and was prompted by Doolittle's raid and their ceaseless attempts to engage the US Navy in a "decisive battle". It resulted in something like temporary parity in naval power (i.e. carriers), and due to institutional failures they never recovered from their losses in trained pilots, Midway, before, and after (e.g. they didn't rotate experienced airmen back home to train new ones, they for the most part fought until they died).
Our landing in Guadalcanal and their failure to quickly snuff it is where they lost the initiative, that attacked and started to unravel their real parameter. Otherwise we'd have stayed on the defensive until enough new carriers and supporting ships and planes were built, then we would have done a much bloodier and somewhat more prolonged sole advance through the Central Pacific, which would no doubt have had even more adverse consequences.
Instead, they and we got into a knife fight in the Southwest Pacific, the Solomons and New Guinea, where both our carrier forces were essentially used up (of our serious fleet carriers only the Enterprise and Saratoga survived, and during this campaign the Saratoga got torpedoed and had to retire for a while for repairs, the Enterprise required serious stateside maintenance and refit while a British carrier covered for her).
Japan and the Allies were pretty evenly matched on paper, and this campaign was brutal in every way, we lost 40+ ships (and two Real Admirals (2 stars) in one night action), they lost 50+, and a slow war of attrition was waged in the skies. I'm reading Fire in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Fire-In-The-Sky-Pacific/dp/0813338697/) right now, which covers that in immense detail, e.g. one of the many reasons the Japanese lost was subpar civil engineering (in general their non-combat specialties didn't get any respect, this critically included intelligence), they didn't keep the taxiways between revetments and runways free of soft spots, resulting in lots of operational losses at critical time (on both sides, this operational losses destroyed more planes than combat)).
Industrially and institutionally they couldn't complete well, and when our 2nd generation of planes and ships came on-line, with adequately trained air crews, maintenance staff, the Japanese in comparison were "used up", and were never a serious threat in the air until they resorted to kamikaze attacks.
http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Red-Snow-Memoirs-Soldier/dp/0760...
At one level you should temper this appalling statistic: a whole lot of it was "self-inflicted", by the games and machinations Stalin played. Mass slaughter of the USSR's own people was a policy long before the war---that the people who did their 1939 census were sent to the Gulag should be sufficient telling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) ---and the war just enabled a continuation if not increase in this.
Note also how the continuous purges of Army officers left the Red Army in a crippled state prior to the invasion.
I could never get myself to ask what his time was like. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer and I knew that he didn't have much more time to live, I still felt that I could not do him the cruelty of digging up those memories from him.
:(
Although he came from a traditional, rural background, the horrors he had seen in the war scarred him for life, turning him into an atheist. Even in his old age he was saying that there could be no God that would allow happening the stuff that he had seen.
War is hell.
Back in college I spent a semester in France and during the weekends I tried to partially retrace his steps during the war. I went to Normandy and photographed the graves of the seven men from his unit buried there and I visited the bridge over the Rhine he helped capture—my family has the Nazi flag that flew over the Bridge at Remagen, which he removed and replaced with the American flag.
He never talked much about his time in the war but he did write it down.
Sadly many of those memoirs are not around anymore as their accounts were shutdown or the web hosting company itself went out of business.
I fear much history is being lost in the transition from pen/paper era to digital era.
How about the wayback machine ? Did it save anything ?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0891419195/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...
My grandfather served in the 504 PIR. He never talked with me about his experiences at great length, but the two vignettes he related that stick with are both about his being terrified, the one I remember from my teens was: They were holed up in a house in the Ardennes. It was night and he had to urinate so badly that he took the risk of stepping outside [historically. the 504th was trucked in from reserve to stop Panzer Group Piper and stem the rout]. As he relieved himself, he looked up and for a moment mistook the snow covered saplings for enemy soldiers.
The second, is from my early twenties. Blunt and simple: being in a trench in Italy while the Germans dropped antipersonel bombs on him was more 'unpleasant" than I could imagine. That was true. He had a successful professional career after the war. but fought depression up until his death. I'm both sad that I miss him, and glad that I do.
My grandpa was in the French resistance. He left the family farm at 17 to join the maquis (French wilderness) where he lived for 2 years, trying to hamper the German forces (eg. blowing up trains). He then participated to the liberation of Royan, and received the croix de guerre. It blows my mind to think about what he must have felt like- when I was 17, I was reading computer magazines in my bedroom.
My cousin and I wanted to record him talking about his life, and then he died unexpectedly. There's always a "next time" until there isn't.
Her feelings about the war might be colored by having found the family farm burned down to the ground by the partisans (communist version) upon her return.
Such a shame she died before I was old enough to truly appreciate having a sit down with her and listening to the experience she'd have to share. All I know are scattered bits and pieces, mostly from second-hand retellings. Unfortunately as a kid I never liked talking to her - her voice was feeble, she had a thick accent and local dialect, both of which made her very difficult to understand and kind of scary to talk to.
Of course, many of them were horribly traumatised by their experiences, which goes a long way to explaining their reticence. My stepdad, for example, was in a position that was overrun by a German attack - he shot a fellow who fell dead on top of him with his hand over my stepdad's face. My stepdad then had to "play possum" until a counterattack in turn evicted the Germans. For the rest of his life he would wake up terrified and in a cold sweat from the recurring nightmare of that dead hand on his face.
When I was in high school, I had the honor of being chosen as a "musical exchange student" along with a dozen other musicians from local schools to spend a summer in and around Yekaterinburg. While there, we formed a small chamber ensemble and played music for various local groups, including several WWII veteran retirement homes (Great Patriotic War Vets). After our performance, many of the very old vets came up and were beyond warm in thanking us for coming and playing for them. A few mentioned remembering the Soviet-American alliance and lamented our animosity since then, they hoped our countries could be friends and we'd have a long future together.
Curious, we visited various GPW memorials and museums and such. It was a pretty intense education. It was the first time I had ever really heard a non-American perspective on the war and the scale of the Soviet involvement, something I had been completely ignorant of before that point, kind of blew my mind. It really set in my mind the importance of not accepting the education I was fed and to expand my horizons to try and look at things from different angles.
It gave me the travel bug and I try and go out of the country at least once a year since then.
Watch "Enemy at the Gates" sometime, especially the first part.
They didn't shut down the Comintern, their official organization for subverting and destroying us, until 2 years minus about 5 weeks after Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion), while we (the US) started supplying them with equipment on credit ~3 months after (for gold and minerals before, while the first arrangement was hammered out).
They refused to supply us with meteorological info, which seriously hindered our campaign against Japan.
They seized all the B-29s that were forced to land on their territory (was later copied as the Tupolev Tu-4); while this was consistent with their need to maintain their neutrality towards Japan after some engagements in Manchuria (where they owned the Japanese, but they really needed those troops; Georgy Zhukov earned his spurs and vital experience there), holding the crews was not, I think. They were "allowed to escape into American-occupied Iran" per Wikipedia and e.g. Tillman's Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 (http://www.amazon.com/Whirlwind-The-Against-Japan-1942-1945/...).
This of course says absolutely nothing about how the two peoples felt about each other, and our mutual gratitude for what the other did in terminating Nazi Germany with extreme prejudice.
Was your visit during the Cold War?
The Russian families who took us in were some of the warmest, most hospitable people I've ever met. They really worked hard to integrate us as well as they could and give us a memorable experience. In fact almost everywhere we went, even out into the deep countryside, we were treated incredibly well by almost everybody.
We got to return the favor later when their kids came to stay with us, and apparently that particular exchange program continued on for many years after that. I'm almost sad to say I don't think the Americans they met were as universally warm or welcoming.