I shared this story a while back but it fits this post so I'm resurrecting it.

My great uncle Martin Robinson was a 17 year old landing craft driver during Operation Torch and then at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He said the kamikaze attacks at Okinawa were the worst part of the war for him. His GQ station was a.30 cal machine gun and they pretty much stayed at GQ for more than a week. Said a few times he could see the face of the Japanese pilot. He wore hearing aids and said he lost his hearing at Okinawa from the incessant naval bombardment by the big ships like the Texas. I suspect hammering on that .30 might have had something to do with it.

When the war ended he had enough points to go home but volunteered to stay and let some of the men who had families but not enough points go home. He said that happened a lot. For his kindness, he got to be part of a recon team that surveyed what was left of Hiroshima a few weeks after the bomb dropped. All before he turned 21.

I forgot to mention that although I knew him for 50 years, he never mentioned any of this to me or my dad, who is a Navy veteran, until one day when we were at my uncle's house and my father in law (also a Navy veteran) happened to be there and they were sharing their Navy stories. Talking about boot camp and then being in Norfolk (my uncle in 1942 and my dad and FiL in the late 50s and early 60s and suddenly my uncle started talking and we all sat there just wide-eyed and slack-jawed. I couldn't believe he never shared the stories. Luckily, my young junior high aged son (his great great nephew) was there and got to hear it all.

Last note for those of you from Houston. He grew up in Houston. He retired from HISD after 40 years And moved to PA where his wife was from. My great grandmother's shotgun shack house where he and my grandmother lived was at 1818 Polk, now where the George R Brown Convention Center is located. He was a delivery boy in Houston and as part of his job he had to memorize the street grid. He came back from PA to visit a year or two before he died and my mom and dad drove him around Houston, which had changed quite a bit since he moved away. He was in his 80s and still had the grid memorized.

Different breed of cat!

My granddad on my father's side and all three of his sons (my dad and his two brothers) served during WW 2.

My granddad had been drafted in WW 1, went through OCS to become an officer, served in the CCC between the wars, and was then recalled to active duty during WW 2. He helped in the formation of the MP service and was Provost Marshal of San Antonio for a time. His only overseas duty was some time in China, and he always assumed that his German heritage was what kept him out of combat duty. After he died, we found some correspondence between him and a buddy of his who was a detailer. The buddy claimed credit for keeping my granddad out of combat, to which my granddad replied angrily. He wanted both to serve and promotion, and combat was the best way for promotion for an older officer. Nevertheless, he retired as a full colonel which wasn't too bad for a 7th grade dropout who's second language was English.

A cool story is that, after the war, my granddad was in the Army of Occupation in Germany. His job was to protect the distribution throughout Germany of the new currency that the allies had issued to replace the worthless German Deutch mark. The Army, realizing that his job would require extensive train travel by him, assigned him von Hindenburg's personal rail car for his own use. That cracked my granddad up - a German peasant riding around in von Hindenburg's rail car.

His oldest son had dropped out of A&M to become an aviator (he was working as a crop duster) and quickly volunteered to fly for the Marines. He was shipped out to Guadalcanal in early '43 and was listed as MIA on July 3, 1943. Unbelievably, a Naval intelligence officer on Guadalcanal painted a watercolor painting of him getting into his Corsair on his last flight. That officer's family tracked me down and gave my dad that painting about 10-15 years or so ago.

My other uncle was in the Navy as an enlisted man and saw lots of action. His boat supposedly was the first one into Tokyo Harbor after the Japanese surrender. He also recounted shooting down kamikaze's. He also claimed that he had to show the gunners on his ship how to lead their targets, just like he'd done shooting doves and quail growing up in Texas. That uncle survived the war and after several attempts, finally graduated from A&M in the late 40s. That uncle died, probably of a stroke, sometime in the 90s.

My dad enrolled in A&M in 1944, having promised my grandmother that he'd spend at least one year in college before joining up. After his fish year (with no upperclassmen around to haze him), he enlisted in the Marines. He was in Puerto Rico staging for the invasion of Japan when the war ended, after which he returned to A&M, was the sports editor for the Batt, and graduated in '49 (class of '48). He took a Regular Army commission and spent 20 years in the Army, serving in Korea, Germany in the early 60s, and in Vietnam. His only combat experience was in Vietnam and it did not change him much at all, and he had no problems discussing his experiences there. After the Army, he returned to grad school, got a PhD in history, and then embarked on a second career as a college professor. My dad died last year at age 94.

My dad always said that the greatest generation was not his, but rather the previous generation. It was the generation that fought WW 1, got us through the Depression, and then led us through WW 2. They were the ones that were able to take an Army of around 100,000 men and, within a year or two, train, mobilize, equip and transport an Army of over 7 million! They also created a massive Navy and an Army Air Corps out of thin air.