OT. VETERANS DAY

In Canada we have Remembrance Day as a national holiday to remember those who fought to stop fascism in all its guises.

John

In the UK we are alone amongst the WWI allies not to have a National Holiday on 11/11 - the mill owners and industrialists wouldn't allow it.

There was a half hearted attempt to make it a UK National Holiday for the Hundredth anniversary of the end of WWI but it came to nothing.

Even this year they had planned a VE Day celebrations National Holiday but did it by moving May Bank holiday from the Monday to the Friday but only *after* several manufacturers had already printed their calendars!

It was scuppered by Covid although some places had a street party where everyone sat in their own front garden and played WWII era music...

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

That would've been a neat deal. I like those things that just spring up out of nowhere. The local grocery store was serving free breakfast for vets from

7-11 this morning. The paper in our state capital is putting vet's pictures in its online edition. I'm in my mid 60s and missed Vietnam. It was winding down just as I graduated high school. This leads to the vet's pictures. One survivor of Pearl Harbor. Some WWII vets, Korea, and Vietnam, plus a few more.

The Kaiser wasn't a fascist!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(dedicated poppy-wearer)

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

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In Australia we have one too. Fascism isn't mentioned. My great-uncle died in 1915 from wounds he got on Gallipoli - a few weeks after he got them - in a military hospital on Lemnos.

Mussolini hadn't even invented fascism back then, though he may have been working on it (as a minor project)at the time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

In memory of Dad, 1926 - 2018, S. Sgt 10th Mountain, Italian campaign, WWII.

10th Mountain?! You're lucky you were even born. They got chewed up pretty bad with something like 70% killed or wounded. The division must have been reconstituted.

It was originally Armistice Day to commemorate the end of WW I, or Weltkrie g I in German. The Kaiser was a great believer in autocratism, not fascism . People were just fungible commodities to the monarchies and autocrats of the day. Millions of deaths didn't faze them. And I recently heard that the Franz Ferdinand character was obsessed with hunting and killing animals, c laiming to have killed 350,000 game animals. And we're supposed to feel sor ry for that asshole?

Right, he was a replacement. Turned 18 in late August of '44, into basic at Ft. Benning right away. On a troop ship across the Atlantic by mid-November and was headed into the mountains by Christmas.

The Germans had heavily dug in by that point in northern Italy and there they sat basically waging a guerilla war till May; he was a mortar-man most of the action he saw (which was not a lot by then) was firing on dug-in hillside positions in the Apennines when they popped out.

After the German surrender they immediately started training for the invasion of Japan, where they would have been air-dropped or glider-ed into the mountains of Kyushu to die.

He was a minister's son and didn't smoke, drink or swear so (among other reasons) was promoted fairly quickly after the war in Europe ended.

After the war in the Pacific ended they offered him to go to OCS but he demurred on that which probably helped my chances of existence also as he would have likely ended up in Korea and the junior officer attrition rate there early in the war was dreadful.

So he finished up his service till 1946 as an MP in Italy where at one point he and his buddies "liberated" a Red Cross shipment of lemonade destined for Italian POWs and redirected it to GIs who'd only had sketchy water for weeks, technically a war crime I guess.

This means a lot across the board!!

Yeah. Not sure what he would have made of a memorial remembering German and/or Japanese soldiers together with Americans and he's not available to ask. I expect his feelings on it were different at age 80 than at age

2. He wouldn't buy a Japanese or German car for many years until he got a Mazda sometime in the 90s and said it was the greatest car he'd ever had.

so there ya go.

Looking over the Wiki for the 10th Mountain and some of Dad's stuff I get the impression he was only fully incorporated into the 10th during the period of preparing for the invasion of Japan, his troop ship sailed in November and was the USS Wakefield and the 10th left in early December on the SS Argentina.

I think during wartime in Italy he was technically with the 5th Army, but the 5th Army and 10th Mountain were associated with each other and there may have been artillerymen from the 5th attached to the 10th for some operations.

c e

Those so-called Italian POWs were the Italian Service Units. There were ten s of thousands serving the U.S. forces in Europe by 1944. The U.S. Army use d them to free up troops from non-combat jobs- things like facilities engin eering, construction and maintenance, motorpools, mess halls, supply wareho using, you name it. Eisenhower liked them so much he wanted to keep them wo rking through 1946-1947, but the law prohibited it after the surrenders.

Interesting, didn't know about that, thanks.

It's difficult for me to know details about his service. By the time I was old enough to understand it over 40 years had passed and a lot of his memories were hazy or possibly just wrong and my older siblings never took any notes from before, unfortunately.

Sadly all of his detailed records about what units he was in, what operations, performance reports, etc. were destroyed in the National Archives fire in 1973:

Only basic information remained from secondary sources, enough to put together a DD214 but that's about it.

The Kaiser was a polofic hunter all right. My grandparents had the "catholic illustrated" in 1918. There is a picture of the Kaiser with several dozens of deer killed. (Some fifty). That took the poor man a whole day.

350,000 ? What did you think he used? 25 cm artillery? 1) The picture suggests he used a regular rifle.

Next time you Trumps tells you that Obama spent his presidency golfing, doing 350,000 holes, try a reality check.

Groetjes Albert

1) That is 10" for you imperialists.

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