Alaska, thanks for the thread. My Dad was drafted in the summer of 1941. The two stories he was willing to tell about the subsequent five plus years he spent in the army were that in October 1941, after basic training, he had orders to go to the Philippines, but got appendicitis and after surgery was redirected to Camp Roberts in California to learn gunnery. All his children assume that had he been deployed, we probably would not be here.
His second story was that in the last two days of the war in Europe, as a battery commander in Austria, a sniper in a bell tower of a church in Austria that looked like a scene from the Sound of Music was firing wildly at an infantry platoon, and his commander issued orders to level the church. He evaluated the threat, and ordered two howitzers to bracket the church. As soon as he did, the sniper (who was maybe 15) surrendered and the church went untouched. Thirty years later, he and my Mom visited the town and church, talked to the pastor, and took a picture of the bell tower that hung on my Mom’s wall the rest of her life.
He was drafted as a private and finished as a Captain , which said a lot about the military in those days!
