They are faithful and honorable to the end. God bless them.

This may be the last survivors reunion at Pearl.

+1

All over 90 years old. There aren't many World War II vets left at all.

They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 558,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2017.

If a person was 18 in 1945, he’s 90 now. My great-uncle Howard McConnell is still alive. He joined the Army in December of 1941 and served in the Pacific through the occupation of Japan.

“If a person was 18 in 1945, he’s 90 now”

I was 13 in 1945———I remember the excitement of D-Day and V-E Day and V-J Day.

My neighbor is a D-Day vet——he was 17.

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My mother has a friend in The Villages who is a Battle of the Bulge veteran. He can’t walk every day with her, after a fall last year, but she visits him several times a week.

Good point. We lost my WW II Marine Corps uncle last Sept. at 90. He got in at the end of the war but was in the battle of Okinawa.

My Dad was in China, India and Burma. He was born in 1918 and would have been 100 next year.

All of them will probably be gone in 8-10 years and most of those will be over 100 by then.

That’s neat. You must have a lot of memories of the war.

My oldest daughter, who is now 26, interviewed my mother, my aunt, and a cousin of my father’s as part of a Girl Scouts badge regarding history. Mom was born in 1938 and Cousin David in 1939, but they were surprised by how much they remembered of the war years, once they were asked.

Yes, that’s typical of children who lived through the war.

They’d lived during the depression and were tough people and better able to cope with the war times.

Our young people of today couldn’t hold a candle to those folks..

I remember being with my dad (born 1936) in Missouri in a flood year, like late 1990s. We were looking at some underwater fields, and Dad said, “I remember paddling across that field in a boat!” His uncle Pete (uncle Howard’s older brother) said, “It was 1942.”

Nobody in the history of the world has ever had such easy live as today’s young people, but they do nothing but gripe and moan. Maybe entropy will get them!

“————who is a Battle of the Bulge veteran.”

God bless him,that was BRUTAL.

Does your Mom live in The Villages-———from what I have read it’s quite a place?

“You must have a lot of memories of the war.”

—

I do-—I was a Junior Commando.

“During World War II, the folks back home in the United States undertook a series of conservation measures which included rationing, production of food in home “Victory” gardens for one’s own use, and collections of scrap materials to be remanufactured into war materiel. The first scrap drive was for aluminum in the summer of 1941 (Schoenherr). Many different kinds of items were eventually collected, including iron, steel, rubber, copper, brass, aluminum, zinc, lead, paper, tin cans, nylon, silk, cooking fats, and rags (Utah 36). There were a number of drives in 1941 and 1942, many of which involved children, but one of the more significant events occurred in June, 1942 when Harold Gray’s popular Little Orphan Annie newspaper comic strip introduced a story line in which his plucky orphan girl decided to help the war effort by organizing children to collect scrap. For a name for her organization Annie chose “Junior Commandos.” Having had some previous military experience in single-handedly blowing up Nazi submarines(!), Annie assumed the top rank of colonel - Colonel Annie - and organized the children along military lines. Though Annie’s efforts were, of course, only in the funny pages, real groups organized in the same way were launched within a month (Houston).

Annie’s fans would have it that, “By the fall of that year, there were ‘close to 20,000 JCs enrolled and filed under localities throughout Metropolitan Boston’ alone!”

I lived in Boston.

Thanks for all that good information and thank you for doing your part in helping the war effort.

Most of our young people today couldn’t hold a candle to the young people of those days.

BTW, my mother-in-law, who lived in Newton, mentioned doing some things with other youngsters which aided the war effort. I don’t remember specifics.

I wasn’t in Newton then,I was in Boston,but I have a friend who grew up in Belmont and she was a Junior Commando also.

Newton very well could have had it.

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I knew a Battle of the Bulge vet. He said he’d wake up in the morning and take a crap in his helmet then dig a hole and dump it in and bury it. Then he’d use the helmet to shave. Then he’d wash it out and heat his breakfast c-rations in it.