Pearl Harbor!

[youroo]

75 years ago today December 7 1941 "A day that will live in Infamy"! PEARL HARBOR Youroo! !

[Mr Havercamp]

My paternal grand father was on the USS Maryland and luckily survived it with minor injuries. He passed away in the mid eighties but when we were kids he would tell us stories about it in detail. I didn't notice it then but in hindsight he sometimes would tell a story and get to the point where he almost broke down. I guess telling the stories to us somehow let stuff off his chest.

[Herk7769]

Going through this now with my 91 year old father.

Survivor of the 79th Infantry Division, 315th Regiment, Company G, 60mm Mortar Gunner from D-Day plus 6 to Czechoslovakia. Train wreck in England that killed or injured many of his regiment; wounded 3 times in the Normandy hedge rows; surrounded by the Germans for 10 freezing January days in Hatten during the "Little Bulge" (German Operation Northwind); in nearly continuous combat for the entire war; then dug in and faced off the Russians for 3 months afterwards before being allowed to come home.

No one met him at the train station and he walked home to an empty house.

Anyone familiar with the "points system" of stateside rotation will understand how typists, supply clerks, and other RE types, who suddenly started appearing in front line units after the war as "replacements", got to go home first while surviving combat troops were forced to stay.

The point system was so unfair, it even got its own episode in "Band of Brothers" and an entire chapter of the book of the same name.