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From time to time an old friend of my Daddy from his Detroit days gives me a call, he is 85. When he came to LV I went and had lunch with him and his wife. During the war (WW2) he was the Navy Pilot of a Blimp that was used for anti-sub patrols. He was stationed in Carbibean. He usually calls me up and talks about investing in stocks and bonds..

My Daddy was given a 4F deferment during the war due to the fact that his right foot was crushed by a car when he was 10 years old...and as such worked for Packard 7 days a week building the RR Merlin engines that was used in a host of fighter aircraft during the war. he used to tell me that while he was going to college before the war he would put his Chemistry books up on the machine he was running at night to study. My Daddy started work when he was 12 years old and retired when he was 67.

However other family members fought in both major theaters of war...

I had an Uncle that was an aircraft mechanic on the aircraft carriers (one of his pilots was an ACE, I read that in a newspaper article in his scrap book), an uncle who was in the CB's in the Aleutians, an Uncle who was on Guadacanal, and an uncle who was in command of a Landing Craft at D-Day. One of my Daddys Cousins was part of the ground crew of a bomber stationed in England
and another Cousin was in the same PT Boat Squadron as JFK in the Solomon Islands and got to know him quiet well. None of these people ever really said much about their experiences.

In my life I have had 2 friends that served as pilots in the ETO... both have passed away but their experiences as well as memories live on with me.

One of them was a P-51 pilot who flew in the same Group as Chuck Yeager and was a friend of his. He once told me that he was flying over France when he saw the engine fall off of a P-51 and the pilot was killed, and another time his squadron was told to take off in a fog, he said he refused to do so, and that everybody who did take off never came back. He also went on to say that he always wanted to be the wingman, because he never trusted anyone enough to stick to his wing, but that he always stuck t the wing of his flying partner. Later on in life Paul got his PhD from USC and founded the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.

The other friend of mine was a B-24 Pilot who did 10 Missions over Germany before I believe something happened to him..and he was reasigned as a flight training instructor in CA. After my friend passed away at 86, a mutual friend said that she believed a rear gunner of his was killed by a canon shell on that 10th mission. After the war Arch started a Cloth Supply Business which supplied cloth to Sears and JC Pennys when women would still make their own cloths...he and his partner sold out their business in 1970 for $4M. He gave golf lesson at Brookside Park in Pasadena to the day he died.

Another man that I talked to was in the Army in the PTO and saw McArthur land in the Philiphines over and over until the cameras got it right. He also said that he saw a crashed Japanese Bomber that had a Pratte and Whitney engines and Goodyear Tires on it...stamped made in the USA....my guess is that if it is true the Russians were trading Lendlease supplies to the Japanese.

I even once talked to a German who was in one of the Panzer Divisions...his comment was that the German helmets were made by Ford....

In conclusion I would have to say that most of the fathers of the kids I grew up with served in WW2....and grew up during the Depression... These men as my Daddys 85 year old friend told me today " had a double whammy" yet they rose up and perservered. I told him that if his generation had a fault it was to spoil their children (the Boomers) he replied that was because "we didn't want our children to have to go through the same things we did, we wanted it to be easier for them."