Seeking Freeper Help for Converative Stepdaughter's WWII Project(Vanity)

Hi Freepers. My Stepdaughter has a social studies presentation next week. 5-7 minutes on 1 aspect of WWII. After much give and take with the teacher, a DemocRAT, she is going to speak about the select service system. Do any of you have stories of being drafted or voluteering? Any good internet sites that you know of? I hope you can help. If you don't and read this please bump me along.

Hubby has this to say:

He had a family friend, Lee, who worked for his grandfather who was drafted about six months prior to WWII. Obviously when the war started he was on his way to the South Pacific.

However, when WWII started, people voluntarily signed up in en mass. Every able-bodied man felt it was his duty to go and would have been considered a coward in the community if he did not.

It wasn't like Vietnam when they ran away to Canada or wrote letters like Bill Clinton did trying to get out of service.

Hubby, who is now 65, was obligated to sign up for the draft the day he turned 18.

You may think hubby was too young because he was just barely six years old when the war started, but he remembers in great detail most all aspects of WWII.

He remembers in early '44 getting a letter from Lee who had spent Christmas Day in a muddy foxhole in, of all places, Christmas Island.

And the push on Berlin, "Good evening America, this is Lowell Thomas with the news. Today, the allies advanced 19 miles. Berlin: 121 miles." Obviously Lowell Thomas was on the radio because there were no TVs in those days.

He remembers these headlines:

"Russians and Americans Meet Berlin"

"Hitler Dead!" which was as large and black and the newspaper could make them. He was in the second grade, sitting in a restaurant in the small town he lived in and saw a man sitting at the counter reading the Johnstown Tribune with HITLER DEAD in five-inch letters.

He remembers the meat rationing, the sugar rationing, the shoe rationing, tire rationing. His dad sold farm equipment and sold tractors with steel wheels because you couldn't get rubber-tired tractors in those days.

He remembers listening to neighbors talking about who had gotten killed. He says it was a terrifying time.

His little town even had air raid drills where all the lights went out in the town and the Boy Scouts and older men patroled the town. The little city was working on the city heating system for the downtown businesses and an alley was dug up and one of the Boy Scouts patrolling, a young boy, in the dark fell into one of the ditches and was scaleded to death from the steam heat they pumped around the downtown area.

Hope this helps in some way.

When my grandfather was 59 years old, WWII broke out. He was working as an engineer at a mine in the northern Philippines. He walked for two weeks through the jungle to get to Manila so he could sign up. The Marines (he served with them from 1912-1924) would not take him, he was too old they said. So, he walked over to the Army headquarters (he served with them from 1903-1912) and MacArthur himself approved grandpa's commission as a Captain. Grandpa had served under the General, establishing artilery positions on Bataan in 1907. After surviving the Bataan Death March at age 60, grandpa went on to survive three more years at Cabanatuan and Bilibid prison camps.

On Feb 7, 1945 he, my grandmother, and their son and one of their daughters were reunited. Grandpa died April 2, 1957.

I just hope it helps her with her report in some way. I went to several government websites looking for info for her with no luck (I got sidetracked on some census information and may even visit my local government office on Saturday so it was really a blessing in disguise).

My only knowledge about WWII is that my uncle was a flight instructor and flew P-38s in North Africa and crashed and died there. Mom tells of him coming home from his initial training in California and telling her how they flew so low over the land they could see the big black/brown bears standing up on their hind legs and snarling and waving their paws at the noisy airplanes.

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