Booze saved my uncles life three times during world war 2

[Swede]

My uncle Tony told these stories to me and my brother,he had started off by saying booze had saved his life 3 times.

1. On the day of the Normandy Invasion just before my uncle's ship approached France the British sailors brought out tubs full of rum for
the guys to drink before the landing. My uncle said he started scooping up rum with his tin cup. Next thing he remembers he's laying in the sand on the beach. He's made it to France,and he doesn't remember how he go there.

2.In a small town in France the boys find several kegs of wine. They proceed to drink it. Everyone who drank the wine became very ill,they later find out the Germans had poisoned the wine. While my uncle was laid up,his unit was in a fierce battle with many killed. He survives again.

3. The uncle and another soldier are in a city in Holland,sneaking from roof to roof looking for a sniper that had killed a couple officers. Crash,the two of them fell through a skylight,they find themselves in a deserted bar. They proceed to get shit-faced. His unit gets ambushed and took heavy casualties. Again he survived.

Uncle Tony was in the thick of things,he killed men with his bare hands. He shot,stabbed and strangled men,"they looked just like us" he'd say in a soft voice. His squads scout "the big Indian" took them behind enemy lines many times to capture Germans cause they got beer and days off when they caught prisoners. With tears in his eyes he said "I left 8 of my best buddies in the mud of Holland."

But I just loved those three amazing stories,not of a super human hero,just an ordinary guy trying to survive.

[JohnKleeb]

1. Was he in the 101?

being that the Airborne divisions to my knowledge were the only ones who saw Holland. Sad stories, but be lucky your uncle made it out ok. Most of my relatives in the war did too but two didnt, one was a boy of my age actually who was a Slovenian civilian, the Germans just shot the kid, :(, and the other was if you dont know, Sgt Mike Strank, a flagraiser of Iwo Jima.

[Swede]

2. No he was in the Canadian army.

Sorry I can't remember his unit.

[JohnKleeb]

3. Oh my mistake

BTW that kid I mentioned who died, well his family I think became Partisans. Bastard Germans really ravanged Yugoslavia pretty bad :(. I had an uncle on my dad's side who was a chaplain.

[Swede]

4. I read somewhere that the war in Yugoslavia

was as savage as the Russo-German war just on a smaller scale so it rarely gets mentioned

[JohnKleeb]

5. It was pretty bad I hear

[burrowowl]

6. I knew a fellow

who had malaria so bad they left him behind to be picked up by the medics, who were several days late. But they left him the case of scotch because they couldn't take it with them. He polished off a few bottles, it was the only calories he could keep down. He was in lousy shape but he survived.
Another good story was when they were courtmarshalling a soldier for getting syphillis. The soldier was asked why he didn't use his condoms. He said he used all 3 of them, but he wanted to do it again so he turned the last one inside out and put it on.

[sweetheart]

7. what luck

My grandfather in law was captured in stalingrad by the russians and spent 10 years in a russian prison camp before returning to Germany. On coming home, the first thing he did was beat the crap out of his son who had never seen him before.

He believed hitler was a good man doing the right thing for germany up until his recent death. He was an ordinary guy trying to survive...

[DemoTex]

8. My dad, an artillary Captain, ran in to his much older brother in WW2 ...

Bud, the almost 20-year-older brother was a buck-private, cleaning cigarette butts from the make-shift officers' club in a secure part of southern Italy. It was very embarrassing for both of them. Uncle Bud was a drunk. He died a painful drunk death in the early 1960s.

Also, as Dad was working his way up Italy in heavy combat, he was wounded and recovered, returning to the front lines as an Arty FO. He was then captured by the Germans, only to escape when a P-51 straffed the POW march.

When things calmed near Rome and they were able to go out for a beer on the local economy, an American fly-boy had all the girls mesmerized with his "handys" ( use of hands to depict aircraft attitude, as in "there I was flat on my back with a ME-109 on my tail"). They were drinking on a mezzinine. Dad claims he went over, grabbed the fly-boy by the scruff of the neck and seat of the pants, and through him over the balcony rail saying, "Fly now, you asshole!". That is one of my Dad's war stories that I cannot believe. He wouldn't do it. But he did hate "fly-boys'. Ironic, I guess, that I should end up flying 250+ combat missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.