re: WWII: Would You Choose the Pacific or Europe?

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My grandfather served in the Pacific and he never went into much detail about the things he saw but some of the stories he did tell me were horrifying.

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So did both of my grandfathers. One was a torpedo pilot on the same aircraft carrier as George H.W. Bush. He was hit by a kamikaze and was the only one of his crew to survive, he ended up swimming in the Pacific for a day before being picked up by a Japanese fishing boat and turned over to the Japanese army. He spent two years as a POW over there and hardly talked about it to us besides things he found to be funny while he was there and that he was much luckier than some of the other POW's you would have read about in Flyboys. He has not had any real teeth since he was 21 because of beatings and poor nutrition; he was 6'2" and only weighed 100 pounds when he was released from prison. His first wife before he married my grandmother was a French woman who was captured spying on the Germans, and according to him her stretch as a POW was much more brutal than his; he never specified why, I always assumed it was because she was an attractive woman.

My other grandfather was stationed on an island somewhere near New Zealand. He said their only job was to protect a radio tower, and they spent the majority of their time killing wild pigs and cooking them in pits on the beach.