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Letters Home - A Grunt Fasinated with Airplanes
My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a soldier in WWI. Only recently have I been able to get relatives to tell me of the few stories he told about the Great War - mostly of the airplanes.
In doing so I was given a copy of a letter, one of nearly a dozen, that he wrote home to family. In a letter dated 1918:
"...You ought to see them flying they have all kinds big little and all shapes. Those little ones get up so you just can see them, then fall end over end upside down everyway the just about a thousand feet up they catch and fly off. They have one here that makes a hundred and seventy five miles and hour [suspect Spad XIII in a dive] can see only a blue streak...
He was a truck driver in the army, he drove supplies and ammunition to near the front as they could to off load - then they would load his truck up with the dead as the ambulances were for the wounded. Thus he talked little of the war to my family - except he would always be fascinated with airplanes for the rest of his life.
On the morning of November 11, 1918 he was pulled from his truck, ordered in line with a fresh unit about five miles behind the lines, given a riffle and they where off marching towards the front - a big push was about to happen, he'd seen results of it before. At the 11th hour they where halted about one mile before reaching the first of trenches - the war was over!
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7 June 2008, 05:03 PM
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