Wwii Letters Of Three Brothers And Their Sister

FIRST, there is an error. Chapter I title should be FAMILY not BOOT CAMP IN SAN DIEGO. My mother, unknown to me, kept my several hundred letters home during WWII as well as those of my two brothers and sister and when I found them thought them worth publishing. We were what was known as a Blue Star Family of Four. The Gold Stars were for those killed in action. While I don´t have the figures I doubt there was a large number of families with four on active duty during WW II. We were a very patriotic family. First, my elder brother, Sam, joined in January, 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. I followed in June of that year, my sister entered the Waves in 1943 and my younger brother the Army Air Force in 1944. We all wrote many letters, however, most here in are mine as I have access only to those my siblings wrote to me. The Navy is viewed primarily through my letters as I was transferred first to San Diego, California for Boot Camp. Subsequently orders sent me to Lakehurst, New Jersey for training in Aerology, i.e. weather forecasting. Upon graduation I was assigned to duty in Houma, Louisiana which was a LTA base whose airships scouted the gulf for German submarines. Later I was ordered to officers training, became an Ensign and served on the U.S.S. Tanner, a hydrographic survey ship. Brother Sam served in the pacific between New Calidonia and Australia. Sister Jane became a Link Trainer, i.e. she trained pilots and was stationed in Atlanta, Georgia. Brother John became a pilot, but the war being over he saw no active duty. However, he decided to make a career in the military and saw more than enough action in Viet Nam to satisfy even him. Following is the first letter I wrote home from Boot Camp in San Diego.

CHOICE 1999 Outstanding Academic Title While other collections of letters and memoirs from World War II have dealt with upper-class individuals, officers, or college-educated people, Home Front Soldier is the first to explore the life of an ordinary, working-class, first-generation American. This gripping story of a young soldier, Philip L. Aquila, and his Italian American family during the Second World War includes a detailed introduction, providing historical context to the more than 500 letters that this sergeant wrote to his family back home in Buffalo, New York. Like an epistolary novel, the letters offer an intimate personal history of how a large immigrant family with four sons in the military coped with the daily traumas of World War II. Each of the major and minor plots relates to larger questions in American social history of the 1930s and 1940s, offering fresh insights about family history, gender relations, ethnic and immigration history, and everyday life on the home front. The book also fills a gap in military history by providing detailed information about soldiers stationed in the United States during the war.

Local writing on the subject of old age had tended to a fairly uniform approach, focusing on empirical studies of old age as a social problem using census and survey-type data. Little attention had been paid to theory development. Originally published in 1981, this book provides an in-depth study of how old age was experienced in contemporary Australian society at the time. It was the first major piece of original research on aging to be published in Australia and in several important senses represented a clear departure from the mainstream of Australian gerontology. The Aging Experience links original in-depth data to a broad theoretical framework. Working from the premise that old age is a devalued status it examines the implications of this for the personal experience and interpersonal relations of elderly people. Through detailed case studies of elderly Australians their interaction with family, age peers and welfare services are described. The analysis concentrates less on the overt characteristics of these relationships and their material functions than on their symbolic content and meaning for the participants. Thus, the study moves beyond conventional statistical documentation of the problems of old age to a sharper delineation of aging as a lived experience. It is an approach which offers new perspectives, and challenges many of the assumptions underlying previous research.

More than 150,000 American Jews served in the air war during World War II. Despite acts of heroism and commendations, they were subject to bigotry and scorn by their fellow servicemen. Jews were sometimes characterized as disloyal and cowardly, malingering in the slanderous (and non-existent) "Jewish Quartermaster Corps" or sitting out the war in easy assignments. Based on interviews with more than 100 Jewish air veterans, this oral history features the recollections of pilots, crew members and support personnel in all theaters of combat and all branches of the service, including Jewish women of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The subjects recall their combat experiences, lives as POWs, and anti-Semitism in the ranks, as well as human interest anecdotes such as encounters with the Tuskegee Airmen.

Two Jewish families, the Langs and the Ottenheimers, settled in the two separate parts of Suessen, District Goeppingen, in 1902. The Langs established a cattle business in Gross-Suessen, the Ottenheimers established a branch of their weaving business, headquartered in Goeppingen, in Klein-Suessen. Based primarily on archival sources, the study gives an insight into everyday rural Jewish life, persecution and deportation during the Holocaust, an American soldier's World War II experience, experiences of liberation from concentration camps, the reparations process and life after 1945.

An illustrated history of Loredo, Texas, paired with histories of the local companies.