Grandparent's/Parent's Military Profession/Occupation During WW2

World War II General WWII Discussion
#101

The shooters in the Middle East and other places where undisciplined men fire guns into the sky as an act of anything from celebration to desperation have never struck me as people likely to be concerned with physics or anything else involving even a modicum of intelligent enquiry.

But it turns out that, contrary to my intuition, it might well be that bullets fired straight up don’t do much damage on the way down, unlike bullets fired at an angle and coming to earth as their velocity is ovewhelmed by gravity.

Here’s a fair summary of a Mythbusters episode I saw not too long ago on this.
http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_50_bullets_fired_up_vo.html

#102

The father of a mate of mine was unfit for military service. So, as he was a qualified cabinet maker, he was conscripted by the WWII Australian labour authorities to be re-trained as a metal worker, a trade he never mastered during the war and left as soon as he could. :confused:

No doubt there was a metal worker somewhere else who was conscripted to be a cabinet maker, and who never mastered that trade. :rolleyes:

#103

Unless their explosive AAA shells or incendiary .50 ammo, which was a major problem during the Pearl Harbor attack…

#104

Gods’n’Thunders, Rolling on the floor laughing here . . . you’re so, so very right, dad says his dad watched that kind of thing happen.
One guy was a sailmaker, sent to “camouflage school”, ended up pouring concrete. The other guy had driven steamshovels on building sites, sent to “camouflage school”, ended up being taught to sew camouflage nets and canvas:shock::confused:;):lol:

Regards, Uyraell.

#105

Thing was, it wasn’t the falling metalware that was the issue:
people passing windows ended up in ER because of being diced by glass.
Glass did far more damage than metal.

Regards, Uyraell.

#106

Not entirely surprised, Nickdfresh,
though I’d suggest that in any environment where metal was flying about in those quantities a certain amount becomes a pure statistical likelihood of hitting some one, some how. Sheer volume would seem to guarantee that.

Regards, Uyraell.

#107

I read somewhere ages ago that there was a death or deaths during, I think, the Battle of Britain, where the victim on the ground was hit by a 20mm shell casing ejected from an aircraft.

#108

‘A’ death? I’d think that people dying on the ground would be common.
Considering how many bullets were fired in the dogfights, I’d expect there to be a pretty high probability that a couple of people would get hit by them…

#109

If it was a 20mm it’s from an Me.109, because the Brits didn’t have 20mm in operational service at the time, beyond perhaps 6 cannon-armed prototypes under operational testing. The shellcase in this story is said to be MGFF, which would make sense. Personally, I’ve always wondered about this story, and whether it later became fused with another similar story.

In the second tale, the cannon shell casing hits someone on the ground like an apple-corer, but through the top of the skull. The shellcase in this story is Brit, and the story dates from about Oct’44.

At any rate, I don’t discount either tale, for assuredly, strange things did happen.

Regards, Uyraell.

#110

The problem isn’t truly in the death or injury rate of those on the ground.
The reality was: when any such injury was reported at all it was written up as shrapnel damage, which could include metal fragments originating everywhere from falling casings, falling shrapnel, exploding HE bombs, exploding Incendiary bombs, to mess tins doing a Mary Poppins::rolleyes: it was all reported as one item : shrapnel injury/shrapnel fatality.

(For the thinking, among you: Ever wondered why the US Army has a higher “Blue on Blue” stats rate than the Brit Army? It’s because over 80% of the Brit “Blue on Blue” were deliberately reported as “Shrapnel Injury”. In reality, the Brits were as prone to “Blue on Blue” errors as any other nation, they were just craftier with the bookwork.)

Regards, Uyraell.

#111

My dad enlisted airborne after high school and was assigned to the 506th of the 101st just after D Day.
He spent the rest of the war with them and occupied Austria for a bit.
We had actual photos he took at a death camp.

He was quite affected and disliked Germans the rest of his life.

My uncle was a seabee in the Pacific and another a Marine.

Both my grandfathers went to France in 1917 to help kick the Kaiser’s ass.

All were volunteers.

#112

…my great grandfather was a carpenter at a japanese air force base at Kanoya, i just found out.

#113

Well, thank God the Japanese only had wooden planes.

Imagine what they could have done with metal ones. :wink: :smiley:

#114

Yup. If it had not been for our wooden planes, we would have polluted the earth!:wink:

Speaking of wooden planes, this one of yours quite excelled in its roles…

De-Havilland-Mosquito-NF-Mk-II

#115

Wooden planes… if it was late in the war, I’m thinking Nakajima Ka115, and the similar wooden derivative Ka116, those were interesting aircraft, if inclined to not have long service lifetimes.

Regards, Uyraell.

#116

Alas, it wasn’t one of ours (Australia being a touch short in the aeroplane making business, it not even having a car making capacity when the war started).

It was one of the Poms.

I don’t know if it flew much in the Pacific (as distinct from the Burma / India)theatre, or if there was much it could have done in the Pacific where the Beaufighter performed perhaps the equivalent role, and other roles, and very well.

Someone is bound to provide information on the Mozzie in Aussie. :smiley:

#117

Aussie had Mossie. A few were imported from the Poms about 1946. Some had been Canadian production. Aussie was also slated to produce Mossies, on the same pattern as Canadian, using Packard Merlins, and possibly Griffons at a later stage, though that detail has always remained tantalisingly unconfirmed.
As with the case of the Beaufighter and Mustang, the end of the War killed the production plans, and what few Mossies and Beaufighters Aussie had were flown for a few years then sold off or scrapped.
To this day I remain uncertain a Mossie was domestically produced in Aussie, though I know a few Beaufighters and Mustangs were.
Various fora and publications such as Classic Wings Downunder continue to debate these points.

Regards, Uyraell.

#118

I meant Western allies in general, but oh well, i heard that the mossies came apart because the wood rotted in the humid parts of southeast Asia…

#119

My Grandfather on my dad’s side was an Air Raid Warden for Altona district in Hamburg. I think he was too old for the war so they stuck him with the job of Air Raid Warden. But my mother’s dad was on the Russian front, and I just noticed that he had a dagger with his uniform and the hat emblem I ascertained made him a lieutenant. He fought on horse. He died on the Russian front very early in the war. My parents were in Hitler Youth and too young for the war but my dad said he did shoot off a few shoots from a big cannon when the German Army retreated and soon enough the alied army were shooting back at him and he ran like hell! My grandparents had no special positions in the war but they are special in my heart!

#120

My neighbour was a cook and was captured by an Italian patrol. Reckons he was treated well by the Italians while he was a POW. During the Italian surrender German forces occupied the camps and sent the prisoners back to Germany.

He reckoned the Germans were a lot tougher than the Italian guards and did not take any nonsense from the prisoners.

digger