This troper's grandfather on his dad's side flew in a B-17 Flying Fortress during WWII. He was the underbelly Ball Turret gunner, one of the most dangerous spots on the plane. Once, his turret was shot out from under him, and he had to hold on to a metal beam hanging in open air until one of his buddies, going to check on the rear turret gunner, saw him and pulled him up. If his buddy had not come by within another minute, I would not be here today.

This Troper's best friend's father fought in WWII. He was an engineer in the Polish army and passed away January of this year. Reading this page made me infinitely more proud to have met someone like him.

This Troper is a history buff with emphasis on WWII while both of his grandfathers fought in different theaters.

Why young boy let me tell you bout this ol world war second, we were fightin that ol Adolf Hitler and his ol nazi soldiers, why we put up quite a fight in thosse ol bunkers, now keep in mind we didn't have thesse newfangled guns and flying machines to help us, Oh no it was quite difficult with thosse ol guns of ours, but our men were in fightin spirits with 'ol George Lincoln fighting along our sides.

Grandpa, you were a chef in the navy.

There are some facinating stories out there about what some chefs did in various wars, don't know them.

This troper's great uncles on her dad's side both fought in the war, one in the Pacific and one in Europe. Both survived.

All three of this troper's great-uncles were [=USAAF=] veterans.

My grandfather was in WWII...sort of. He actually landed the day ''after'' V-E Day, promptly tripped over a tent peg and injured his foot, and got a Purple Heart for it. I couldn't make this up if I tried.

This troper had ancestors on both sides of the war. On his father's side, his grandmother's older brother was part of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and survived the war, passing away in 1995. On his mother's side, his grandmother's older brother was a sailor on the cruiser Myoukou and died of wounds received in an American air attack, and his grandfather was a military policeman in Korea who was kicked out for insubordination. The grandfather was transferred to a munitions factory in Manchuria, got captured by the Soviets in the last days of the war, and spent three years in a Siberian prison camp before returning to Japan. Sadly, he died when my mom was in high school, so I never got to meet him.

I had a granduncle who survived Corregidor, The Baatan Death March, spent a few months in a Japanese POW camp, and escaped to become a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese for the rest of the war. My dad was taught Japanese when they took over the Philippines. He remembers the particular piece of Japanese propaganda that went, "Asia for Asians".

This troper's grandfather was an officer in the US Navy during the war, serving aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

This Canadian troper's great-uncle was a member of the Waffen-SS, and was killed in action on the Eastern Front in 1944.

My mother had two uncles who served in World War II. One was stationed in Australia (I don't know which branch of the U. S. Military he served in, though). The other uncle was stationed in Europe with the Army, and his unit helped liberate two concentration camps--he came back an incredibly nervous man and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his life.

This (Canadian) Troper's grandfather as a paratrooper during the war. From what we've been told, he took part in several secret missions (we know this largely from the fact that he only knew bits and pieces of what he was doing / where he was going, etc.), and it's been strongly hinted that he took part in Operation Market-Garden. He never liked to talk about it much, so nobody hounded him for details. My other grandfather also served as a reserve soldier in the RCAF.

At least three of this troper's ancestors served in World War II. My maternal grandfather was a medic in Europe under Patton. My paternal grandfather disarmed bombs for the Navy - including booby traps on captured Japanese warships. He collected the fuses (and one clock from a destroyer). And his brother (my great-uncle) was in the Marines and won the Silver Star for bravery.

Both of this troper's grandfathers served in World War II for the Allies, but for different nations-her maternal grandfather was an infantryman for the Soviet Union who saw the liberation of Berlin, and her paternal grandfather saw Japan from the bombsight of an American bomber. Both of her Russian great-uncles also served, but one died at Stalingrad and the other in Germany a few days before the attack on Berlin itself began.

This American troper always gets rather uncomfortable in "should we have dropped the bomb" arguments, because her Granddad was to be in the invasion of Japan and she would almost surely not exist right now had the bomb not been dropped.

This troper's paternal grandfather was a radar specialist with the air force. He was almost shot down on a couple missions. Two of my maternal grandmother's younger brothers were with the army. The older of the two fought in the Pacific. During a battle in Okinawa, he was hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. The infection killed him three months later, just before the war ended. The younger one fought in Europe. He was in the battle of the Bulge. We also suspect he saw the concentration camps, but since he won't talk about it, and no one can get his service records until he dies, we don't know for sure.

One of this troper's grandfathers fought in the war and it is the only reason he is a US citizen (He's Indian American)

This troper's parternal grandfather was on a destroyer named the USS Belknap during the war, and between 1940 and 1944, he was at least partially responsible for sinking three German U-Boats in his career. He was later transferred to the Pacific theater where he claims to have participated in the Battles for the Phillippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. His destroyer was crippled in an earlier battle by a Kamikaze attack and thus, during Okinawa, he was transferred to crew an LVT instead. He claims that American ships were so crowded together during the last battle that the Japanese didn't even ''try'' to aim their torpedoes.

This troper had relatives on both sides of the war. He had a great grandfather and a great uncle who were at D-Day, and the uncle was killed in action. He also had a great uncle on his father's side who was in the Wermacht, and fought during the Fall Gelb, and at Normandy as well. The amazing thing is that both my American great grandfather and my German uncle met once a couple years ago and actually became good friends despite being on opposite sides of the war, and even fighting in the same battles against each other.

This troper's grandfather was a German Jew. Yep. After risking his life to save his friends and family, he headed off to Scotland, met my grandmother, had my father and his six siblings. My father went to England for university, met my mum who'd moved from Wales to got to university. Then they graduated, got married, had me, moved Wales had my brother and that is my life.

This troper's maternal grandmother lived in Poland, and after it got invaded by the Nazis and the Soviets, got deported to Siberia eith her family because her mother was a foreign language teacher. Then after the Nazis attacked the Soviets, they released her and her family, who then made their way down through central Asia to Iran, met my grandfather, stayed a few years becasue both of their parents were teachers and were teaching at the school for Polish refugees, and then near the end of the war made their way to Britain and started a new life in Oxford. My grandfather then immediatly tried to join up with the army, but was rejected because the war with Germany was nearly over. He was dissapointed, to say the least, because he had assumed that the Allies would start a war with the Soviet Union because they were obviously the bad guys.

My grandfather worked at an airbase during World War 2. He was stationed in Nova Scotia, where he would help repair and reload bombers coming in from France.

My father was drafted (with six kids!) and was actually put in a job that he fit. He and my grandfather ran the local post office, and he was in the Army Postal Service, on Guam. Two of my mother's brothers were in the US Navy, one on a mine layer, one on a mine sweeper. At least the were in different theaters. They all made it home.

This troper's Grandfather was apparently on a train, to get to a plane, when the war ended. Some good luck there.

{{Smerf}}: my grandfather and his best friend waited until the end of football season, then joined lied about their ages adn the Navy at 16. They both got stationed in Alaska, where they did everything they could (up to and including stealing their commander's Jeep) to get set to the actual fighting. Their commander was GenreAware and kept them in Alaska.

I also had a patient while an intern that was a member of the German army. Her entire class of medical school got drafted and she was sent to the Eastern Front, where her unit was the last medical unit to leave the area. Nice lady, still very pissed at Hitler: she never got a chance to finish med school.

This troper's paternal grandfather fought as a guerilla against the Japanese in his native land of China. This troper's paternal grandmother fled from Manchuria to Beijing to Nanjing (she left something like three hours before the Rape of Nanjing due to the fact that her father spoke fluent Japanese and was therefore able to pass himself and his family off as such and could hear the screams coming from the city as she drove off...) to Shanghai, where she eventually took refuge at the US Embassy, met the aforementioned grandfather, and got married. Her maternal grandfather was also a guerilla fighter, only in the south, and her maternal grandmother was part of the not-really-defined home front helping the guerillas. Take one guess how they met.

This troper (being from Sweden) has no relatives who fought in the war, but has two friends whose (Norwegian) grandfathers did. One helped blow up the Nazi heavy-water factory in the Telemark, the other got shot at Leningrad and got an Iron Cross.

This troper's grand-uncle claims to be the 13th US serviceman to set foot in Japan. He was the radio operator on the plane that ferried the first team of negotiators to Japan to set up the surrender talks after Nagasaki. He recalls that there were thirteen on the plane; as the lowest-ranking man, he was last to step off.

My grandfather escaped from Hungary in the 30's, got to America, joined up, shipped off to the pacific, and brought back the rifle of a Japanese soldier with 6 notches on it.

One of my great-uncles was in the Battle of the Bulge. Due to a ''really'' nasty infection he got there, he was a mean old man for the rest of his life. A different one also fought in France somewhere (his story is rather vague, given how long ago he died); he was hiding behind a pile of logs with his unit when a bunch of Germans showed up with machine guns. His entire squad was killed and he was pretty much cut in half by machine gun fire, but, holding his insides in with one hand, he nonetheless got up and managed to kill eight Germans. He survived and came back, somehow. I wish I knew more about the man.

One of this troper's distant relatives belonged to Wernher von Braun's security staff. Does that count?

This Australian troper's (deceased since before he was born) Australian grandfather served in the Janitor}} engineering corps at the World}} Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea against the forces of ImperialJapan. Notably, he apparently (this is what my mother told me) tried to stop an United States Marine from looting one of the enemy dead's gold teeth.

The only thing I know about my grandfather's involvement in the war was told to me by my mother when I was six or seven: "Honey, your grandpa was in WWII. Never mention it to him. It upsets him." To this day, I don't even know what branch he was in.

This troper's maternal grandfather was at Dunkirk. Their paternal grandmother was Italian while their paternal grandfather was English and served in the RAF. They met when he was stationed near Naples. It is rather strange to realize that you owe your existance to a war.

Apparently their paternal grandfather never talked about the war, so all of the stories on that side of the family are from their nan. The two most memorable ones were the Germans stealing her sister's rabbits when they retreated from the area, and a plane crashing into Vesuvius.

This troper had three great uncles, one maternal, two paternal who served in said war, the first in the Marines and the latter two in the Army. One was killed at the Bulge, another didn't actually make it to Europe until a few days before the ending (but, man, does he have some stories about being an incredibly dark Jewish/African American MP in occupied Berlin!). The other one fought his way across various islands and was designated for beach landing in Japan when the bomb went down. His paternal grandfather was too young to fight in said war, his stories being during Korea, and his maternal grandfather considered too critical to the home-front war effort.

This (Israeli) troper's grandmother came to Israel from Poland before the war, but her family stayed in Poland. However, they were in the part of Poland that was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, so from '39 to '41 they were still somewhatly okay. We have letters exchanged between my grandmother and her sister from that time period - including one last {{Tear Jerker}} letter from 1941 right after the Germans conquered the rest of Poland.

My grandfather told me a story once about how, during the war, his unit was stuck behind enemy lines and was forced to use stolen German guns to hunt wild venison for food. After said grandfather died, we discovered a lot of war decorations he never told anyone about.

This troper's great-grandmother (mother's maternal grandmother) worked for the Canadian Air Force near her home town during the war. I also had two great-granduncles (great-grandparents' siblings) who fought in the war. One was killed around Dunkirk, while the other is still around. I also had a greatuncle (paternal side) who fought in Europe during WWII, and he nearly got married to a German girl after the war. The thing is, she dumped my great-uncle at the train station in Winnipeg so that she could go to New York to live with relatives there. My great-uncle then proceeded to get very drunk, go home, and pass out in front of my great-grandmother.

This Troper's maternal grandfather was a Communist Guerrilla in the Second Sino-Japanese War. According to my mother, he and his unit were being chased up a small mountain by Imperial forces. He jumped off the mountain and broke his legs. My paternal grandmother happened to be a village girl. She had her village burned down numerous times by the Japanese. Even then, she still found it in herself to provide cover for guerrillas from the Japanese.

This troper's paternal grandpa fought in the Army. On the other hand, she recently discovered that her great-grandmother saved the newspapers published when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

2 of this troper's grandfathers fought in the war and one of this troper's grandmothers worked in the navy

This troper's grandfather was a first lieutenant in the army. He fought in the pacific in Guadalcanal and the Solomon islands. He recieved the bronze star for drawing fire away from his troops and two purple hearts for receiving head injuries from a grenade and a bullet.

He also sold a jeep for a bunch of chickens to feed his platoon, despite having no authority to do so. Apparently, It's much funnier when he tells the story, but I never met him, so I wouldn't know.

This troper's other grandfather was a chief boatsman on USS Pasadena.

Its all Hitler and Stalin's fault that this troper was born in America and not Armenia. To make a long story short, Armenia was a part of the Soviet Union and my grandfather was drafted to fight in World War II. He was captured by the Germans and placed in a POW camp, and after the war ended he was unable to return to the Soviet Union because former prisoners who returned were sent straight to the gulag (and he'd already been through that once before, and actually escaped). So he stayed in Germany for a time, got married, and moved his new family to America, spending the rest of his life basically in exile.

This troper's grandfather fought for the Polish Army. I've seen his medal from the Battle of Monte Cassino, and he and his family moved to the UK after the war, where my father was born, before coming to the United States. It makes me extremely proud that he fought as a free man against the Nazis and survived to live as a free man in the U.S. Unfortunately, he passed away before I was born.

The father of this troper's maternal grandmother was stationed along the Swedish/Norwegian border. According to him, they cut down trees, painted them black and placed them in a position that made them look like actual artillery, as the Swedish army had almost no real ones. Also, there were those strange trains passing over the border that they were ordered to pretend never existed.. All in all, not everyone has a glorious past.

This troper's male line great-grandfather was in the Dutch resistance (above the Rhine) during most of the war. He was captured and deported in the last months of the war. While his train was underway, the concentration camp he was to be sent to was captured, but the train stopped and moved back and forth along the tracks to avoid capture. He and countless others died just days before the train was finally captures. While my great grandfather was still in the resistance, my grandfather and his mother went into hiding in the Frisian countryside, where he met my grandmother to be. So if it weren't for WorldWarTwo, this troper wouldn't exist.

This Australian Troper's Grandfather was a sapper during the war who designed minefields. He served in North Africa, at Tobruk, and in the South Pacific. He ended the war in Borneo and his unit was waiting on the docks for the ship to take them back home when it hit a mine and blew up coming into port. He had to wait for another boat to come and get him.

One troper, two examples:

My maternal grandfather was a Marine Corps drill instructor during that time.

I sing in a community choir. I once sat next to a WWII veteran in the bass section; he said that the only German he learned during his time as a POW was cursing, so singing German (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) was a new experience for him. Rest in peace, Ed.

This Troper had a relative that served in world war II. I'm posting this even though no one but myself cares, but it will be accepted because everyone else wants to post how special and unique they are (You aren't by the way).

This tropers grandfather fought in the battle of the bulge and his brothers (my granduncles) fought in the Pacific Campaign.

This troper's family is full of such stories, told over and over again to her. Her paternal grandmother had 17 cousins who all served in WWII. Even more amazing? All 17 ''survived the war and came home.'' On her paternal grandfather's side, there were his older brothers. One had a position that was very hush-hush. After the war, it came to light he was the one who knew almost every secret code the army was using at the time, which made him the man the Germans most wanted to capture. He had two guys following him around constantly to make sure he stayed safe, or if worst came to worst, to shoot him so that he wouldn't be forced to talk. The other served in a tank. Back then, they personalized them with names painted on the sides and such He came home after being wounded and was watching a newsreel at the movies with his girlfriend, later wife, when his tank appeared on the screen. He stood up shouting, "That's my tank!".....just in time to watch a shell hit it and turn it into a piece of scrap metal. He sank back down in shock, thinking all his buddies were dead. Don't worry though. As it later turned out, all the guys inside, by some miracle of God, were all fine.

This troper's grandfather (R.I.P) was born in 1911. His parents died when he was 3 and he lived in an orphanage until he was 13, after which he ran away. I never learned the details of what he did later, but as you can see, he lived through BOTH world wars. In WWII, he brought Polish women into Israel (then Palestine) by marrying them, coming with them to Israel and then divorcing them, repeating this cycle several times for several women. At one point, he found his true love and swore to come back for her. When he did, she was already taken by the Nazis. After the war, he married my grandmother, and was married to her until he passed away. in 2007. He was 96. And he was stronger than me the whole time I knew him. R.I.P grandpa.