Lots of people I think
Bow and arrow doesn’t seem even at all similar to unexploded ordinance.
Lots of people are stupid as fuck.
You just spent 2 years using this shit every day and survived a war so you are, in fact, bullet proof. So you bring it home and stick it in a footlocker and it’s forgotten about for 50 years. I’m surprised more of it didn’t turn up in the 80’s in robberies or action movies.
There’s no way 20-something me isn’t going to try to sneak home a gun at least as a souvenir.
Band of Brothers spent multiple scenes on guys talking about and eventually collecting lugers as war trophies. A gun at least can be left unloaded and without ammo in your house. No way am I trying to take anything explosive home.
oh yea, I’m not saying explosives were a good decision, I’m just saying a few years in a war may not set someone up to make the best decisions, particularly in the 40’s when we were idiots.
Wife’s grandfather was in the tank group that supported BoB. Complete with a photos from the Eagles Nest (my wife had no idea where he’d been).
My MIL threw out everything he brought back after he passed. Didn’t like that Nazi stuff.
We just learn they were the ground support a couple of years ago. Explained how he got to the EN. Saw the camp survivors too. If he didn’t leave the picture book we’d have had no clue.
Never talked about it. His stories sounded like he was on holiday.
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My (paternal) Grandfather landed on Utah Beach on D-day +1. His company was actually mentioned in one exhibit at the museum there, but I didn’t see him in any of the blurry pictures. I know very little about his time there other than that he was also part of the team that captured/liberated Aachen.
One of the more interesting things about visiting the beaches and the museums there is how they emphasized that as much as the people who landed on D-Day itself get all the credit in e.g. American story telling, that all would have been for naught without the artificial harbors that got created to send more troops and supplies after the first wave as they continued their march into Continental Europe.
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My maternal grandfather got kicked out out of the army due to his allergies, and we have an incensed letter he wrote demanding to be let back in that was ultimately denied. But a boat carrying the company he would have been in was sunk, and everyone on it was lost, so I only exist as the person I am because of his hayfever.
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All grandparents (before parents were born) somehow dodged death during WWII in Eastern Europe, one gdad served and suffered a minor wound. The other was able to stay farming but it’s been a while since I asked how exactly that worked. I guess maps are somewhat misleading when they show the German front engulfing everything on the way to Moscow. Kind of similar to those maps of the Roman empire; like bros, just cuz you established like one military base somewhere and collected some tax doesn’t mean you control 100% of the region.
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Both grandads were in the Pacific, one was in the Army Air Force setting up communications lines on islands, got shot at now and then by planes, got malaria and was shipped back home. Other was in the Navy on a boat that ran into a mine and basically spent the war dicking around waiting for it to get repaired.
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The one grandad brought back home photos of topless native island girls.
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My grandparents were in the pacific too, but one was korean war - he described working on a minesweeper and them messing up while picking one up and it banging against the side of the ship but luckily it was a dud. He described not being scared because “by the time you realized what happened you would have already been blown to pieces anyway”
pretty funny guy. he ate a half tub of lard with eggs and beans he cooked every morning his whole life and smoked. died peacefully in his sleep at 85. lol.
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Same thing happened to my grandfather somewhere in Europe. I forget where he was when it happened, but a plan was shooting at him and he jumped from the pole and managed to land and roll and get nothing worse than scrapes and bruises from the fall.
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We are all so damn soft. I can’t imagine being 20 and doing what they did.
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I doubt they were all doing training montages before the war started, they were just normal people that got put into extraordinary circumstances and they rose to the occasion. Be glad you never had to find out if you would or not.
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Literally nothing matters
Yeah apparently being on top of a telephone pole makes you a great target for planes.
the sound of children screaming has been removed