Stories tagged "1944-1945": 142
Stories
Reporting for Duty
“Well, you live in the barracks. A lot of people. And basic training means you learn all army. You have the drilling — everything. You dress for army dress and what you would be doing in the army. And it’s just a lot of stuff you’re not used to. But…
Enlisting in the Army
“Well — I heard a lot of talk about it and I saw a lot of it in the movies, and I was too dissatisfied with my job in the defense plants — it was a dirty job and we had several bosses that I didn’t care for at all — to me they didn’t know any more…
Living and Surviving
“Sometimes it was just — in the middle of the day they shut everything down. And then at night a lot of the times it would be no lights at all. And that was the bad part, at night when there was no lights, ‘cause everything was dark.”“When I went to…
Dirty Jobs
“We made piston rings…some of them went to companies that made ship motors and some of them was just like a finger ring.”“You just had a certain time to come in. And you had a certain time for lunch, and to leave, and you didn’t have no spare time.…
Moving Out
“When I got older, I found a job in restaurants ‘cause I was cooking at home and they knew, so I got a job as a pie baker in a city restaurant.”“I met Miss Cline and her husband, who worked in some kind of a factory in Baltimore.”“They gave me room…
World War II Work
“Well, I was in the recruiting duty when I was in the Wac’s. I did public relations; I tried to recruit other Wacs. And I think perhaps there that it was an asset, being able to speak easily like I do. I suppose that might have had something to do…
Netherlands Liberation
“Oh man, the people were really pleased that it was finally over. And also around the same time, the Red Cross got permission to start dropping food while we were still officially occupied, but people were dying on the street. The situation was…
Letter from a Father
“Well the one thing with this letter here also, the whole page is about food. That’s the only thing you were living for, you know. I remember my father saying, looking at a poster in the bakery, 'that’s what bread used to look like.' That was…
Liberation
“I weighed 135 pounds when I was captured, and when I was released from prison I weighed 87 pounds. Just a bag of bones covered with skin.”
Slave Labor
“If you were not in the mines, you would take and unload coal off the ships onto railroad cars. We would work every morning about 4:00 am and you did not know where you were going to be, whether in the mine or on the ship or where. Then the next day…