my Dad reported for induction into the Army under the newly passed Selective Service Law. I cannot imagine what was going through his mind. Pearl Harbor had been ambushed, a nutjob wallpaper hanger named Adolf Hitler had been raising hell in Europe, and the Japanese had been expanding their Economic Empire in Asia for many years, obliterating the nations of Korea and Manchuria, and waging horrific warfare against the Chinese, including atrocities that Americans couldn't imagine, and didn't believe when first reported by western journalists.
Basic and Advanced Training was at Fort Belvoir, just down the road from Mt. Vernon, and trained him to be a Combat Engineer, what he had hoped to get into, since he had been working full time during the day at a local machine shop and taking classes at night in a local engineering college. He learned how to build Bailey Bridges, set up and clear mine fields, build roads and pipelines, and repair battle-damaged bridges of all kinds which existed in the world. What he didn't know was that the Army Air Force, headed up by Gen. Hap Arnold, was working on a new battle concept called Close Air Support, which involved building airfields, setting up defense perimeters, flushing out snipers, repairing enemy airfields which were suitable for use by our air groups, comprised mostly of an ugly looking airplane called the P-47 Thunderbolt, and creating ordnance dumps for the bombs and rockets and .50 caliber ammo that the Thunderbolt used (she had 8 machine guns and was capable, just like her son, the Fairchild Thunderbolt II, nicknamed the Warthog, of taking out the heaviest of the tanks in the Wehrmacht inventory). His first assignment was to join several of these new "aviation engineer" battalions to take over Iceland from the Brit Engineers, and to create airfields near Rekyavik and Keflavik for the airplanes ferrying from Canada and the USA to the UK, and back.
He had qualified on the M1903 Springfield Rifle, but shortly after arriving in Iceland, he was issued a new rifle called the Garand, a brand new one with a serial number in the 3,000 range. Damn, it was semiauto, and could spit out 8 rounds long before a soldier with a bolt action M1903 could get off his 5 rounds! He spent his time in Iceland until May 1944, when he was sent to the UK to fill up open positions in the troops preparing for something called Operation Overlord. On D+1, he landed at Omaha Beach, and the only thing he would ever say was that bodies with Big Red Ones (First Division) and Silver Crescents (29th Division) on their helmets were still floating in the water, some missing pieces, when his Higgins boat hit the beach. Mom told us, after he passed away in 1980 from cancer, that for about 2 years after they were married (June 1946), he would periodically wake up in the middle of the night, screaming. He ended the war on the Czechoslovakia/Germany border, preparing to put up a bridge that the Germans had blown up to slow our guys down. I guess because of his time in service, he had the points needed to come home in November 1945.
I was the first of 5 children they had, arriving on the 2nd anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They call me a Baby Boomer, and I am coming up on retirement age this summer. Mom passed away in May, 2009, and I often think about what they and their generation accomplished. There is no other way to say it. They truly were, The Greatest Generation.