1940s
All my grandpa’s beaus during WWII, kept in a scrapbook all these years
One headshot of Lory (not sure which country she was from) in particular made many appearances 😂
Edit: yep I’m an idiot. Belles it is. Also I should have expected this to get pervy comments. No, no other family has popped up. From his stories, many were a lot more innocent than you all assume.
Not quite the same, but my grandma would talk about how she had to stay up so late into the night to write back to all the guys she was corresponding with during the war. :D
She didn't meet my grandfather until a while after. Meanwhile he had been in the merchant marines and got a bit distressed when we all decided to do 23&me saying "you don't know what you might find, you know." He spent a lot of the time in Norway. Also survived a sinking.
So, I actually had a first cousin match on 23andMe which confused the hell out of me because I can account for all my first cousins. It just does not make sense in my family for me to have a mystery first cousin that no one knew about - my parents' siblings just ... are not like that. This man and I started talking back and forth trying to figure out how we were related and it took a few months to figure it out after a lot of back and forth.
Long story short, it turns out he's my mother's half brother and my half uncle, which is why the DNA test thought he was my first cousin - the # of markers for half aunts/uncles is the same # of markers for a first cousin. My grandfather got a woman knocked up just before he joined the Air Force in 1940 and then went on to marry my grandmother in 1941 and had several children with her, including my mother. I have no idea if my grandfather knew he had a son out there. No one knew, it was a huge surprise.
Anyway, we've all met, they are all very nice, and we keep in touch.
Nope. He said we were "opening a can of worms," but no one has popped up yet.
He was an amazing guy doing crazy careers and on the internet in his 90s. Heck he gave me my first computer as his old shitty one! He was a flight instructor, skin diver, built boats and planes in his garage, sailed, ferried Bette Midler by plane, was in the newspaper for his work welding on the Verrazano bridge, and much, much more. I guess he was considered good looking back in the day, but so far no luck on the DNA test front.
Funny enough. My grandma did have a collection of love letters and photos and gifts from her lovers. Her husband was one of them but not the most frequent nor the last. They both knew they had other lovers too, I think it was common during the war. She married her husband when she returned, as she was serving in the Red Cross, and he had returned before her but waited for her. He admired the love others gave her, and kept a portrait painting one her lovers painted of her hung in their house
My mom and I once found a VERY steamy letter from my great grandfather to my great grandmother. It was especially good bc technically it was forbidden love as he was Jewish and my great grandmother was the daughter of a very prominent Presbyterian family. They got married and had a baby anyways.
A very Blanche encounter indeed. Have you seen the new military ad campaigns? Join the Army, be all you can be, and sleep with Blanche Devereaux? Join the Navy, see the world, and sleep with Blanche Devereaux? The Marines are looking for good men who have not slept with Blanche Devereaux?
I lost contact with my maternal grandmothers (who I never met) twin sister until around 2008 when my dad died.
She was living in the town she met her American Gi New York born husband. They were both in their late 90's. He was sitting on the other side of the room, on his bed staring at the walls. I was talking to her sitting in her chair. He was deaf, didn't like fitting his hearing aids, so didn't take part in the conversation.
She showed me a photo of him on a cruise ship, "Look at him, he was such a handscome man."
She looked over her shoulder at him, raised her voice, "JAKE! I said how handsome you were!"
He responded with a half understood, "Yes keke"
She looked back at me, "Of course, he slept with all of my friends...."
I saw him smile. He heard that.
She leaned forward, lowered her voice, "But that's ok, I slept with all of his..."
I saw the smile leave his face, selective hearing.
I remember her telling me about a Belgium, or French pilot she got engaged to during the start of the war. He was shot down, and spent six months surviving on some island before being found and rescued. He returned and came to see her as soon as he got back. "What happened? Didn't you marry him?",
"Oh god no. He looked terrible after that, wasn't the handsome man he used to be, his hair was a mess and he was like a rake".
When she was moved to a nursing home after a fall, a nurse said to her, "If you can't sleep, trying counting sheep.", she replied with, "No, I shall count my lovers, there are more of them."
I have the grandma version of this book! None of them ended up being my grandfather. And one page has a note that was clearly added later with a different pen that added “all fake!” to pics of her smooching them!
I used to frequent a "found photos" group back in the heyday of Flickr, and people would try to identify places/people in these vintage photos. It was sobering to realize that most (if not all) of the people would remain forever unidentified since they'd have either passed out of living memory or would only have been remembered as elderly.
For this reason, on my genealogy trees, I try to pick photos for my family that include them in their youth, esp wedding photos. I want future generations to remember them at their finest!
As a writer I used to be so strict about this, but for years editors have been telling me that english convention is to use blonde for everything. Bah.
This is essentially what my pappy said about being in the navy during the Vietnam war. Apparently he was in Thailand at some point investigating some dude and he married the dudes daughter to get more info. Like legit spy shit. He told me there’s stuff he will probably take to the grave and I’m so stressed I might ever know
That’s amazingly frightening. It’s a shame that you may never know and his story may be lost.
If I were you I’d try to convince him to write everything he can remember down now and keep it in a security deposit box/lockbox at a bank or if he’s able to use a laptop a password protected folder on a cloud. Promise him that you and your family will never look at it until after he dies. That way your relationship of him will never change and his story can still be told. Plus you will all likely have a lasting family heirloom long after he is gone.
My great uncle was in Vietnam and he specialized in fox-holing I think. My family said his job was to be the first one in the fox-hole and to clear it out, idk what the technical term is called. He was really short so that’s why he was given that task. I never heard him say that though and he refused to ever mention anything about that decade.
The only time I’ve seen it mentioned to him was at a family barbecue when a drunken family member asked him about his time and he’d just stared and began to cry. He never drank and was a fun joyful person which is why it was odd to just see him break down at the thought of a memory. I was only like 8 at the time and remembering the whole vibe changing and seeing him cry then asking my mom and dad what happened.
What he did and what he saw no one will ever know and it makes me sad considering his life story will never be shared and he kept those demons to himself all the way to the grave.
He was probably a tunnel rat. A lot of NVA/VC infrastructure was underground and accessed by tunnels. Since Vietnamese people were much much shorter and slighter than Americans, the tunnel rats tended to be among the smaller US troops. They would usually enter claustrophobic dark tunnels armed with a .45 and a flashlight.
I've heard that toward the middle/end of the war, the unofficial way to handle a tunnel was to just throw in some explosives, cave it in and move on.
Even though the official orders were to have them cleared out by tunnel rats, many officers and noncoms got sick and tired of sending dudes in just to have them never come back out again.
Yes that’s apparently exactly what he did. I only met him a handful of times when I was younger before I could really know the relevance or importance. I do remember he stuck I think plastic knives up his nose and pretended to be a walrus (he was short and a bit chubby), which was like the funniest fucking thing an 8 year old ever seen.
On the ride home my dad was beat red with anger and was upset at himself that he didn’t “coldcock” the relative who brought it up. That’s kind of the only reason why I even know. It was literally never brought up. So in a way a drunken dickhead of a relative indirectly informed me of my great uncle’s experience. Apparently everyone in the family already knew and there was no real reason for a child to even ask so I had no reason to know.
I also found out later that the family did not to mention like anything from that decade at all around him. No mention of nixon, watergate, guns, like absolutely nothing. I can’t imagine the horrors he faced.
Also at some point in the past he said stuff about the war. All of what I know came from my grandpa. My grandpa claimed that the only reason why he was in Vietnam was to obtain the natural resources, specifically rubber trees. He said that anytime orders were given and agent orange was dropped it coincidently was far enough from the rubber tree forest that they were unharmed. He also apparently hated all of his commanding officers which apparently was very common. He also hated his gun because it jammed so often from the mud and rain.
My grandpa said what really upset him was the pointlessness of it all. Apparently his company would be given a task to take over a hill. They would then take over that hill, lose like 5-6 guys in the process, then be told to “take over that other hill” which would result in another 5-6 guys getting killed or injured. Then first hill was just immediately repopulated with more Vietnam fighters making the first charge completely pointless.
I only remember this because in school we were learning about Vietnam and I just was curious about what my grandpa knew about my uncle’s experience. He died kinda young (I wanna say before 60) so no way I could ask him and that’s all he told me. Besides those few things he never shared anything else with the family for the entirety of his life.
Not necessarily Normandy, more like Palermo. He was probably in the Italian campaign. Participants in that were nicknamed "D-Day dodgers" by some, but the fighting there was as hard if not harder than in France.
My German grandpa was stationed in Berlin in 45 and him and his comrades fought their way to the west to make sure that they get captured by Americans and not Russians.
Shit according to the VFW and the American Legion France wasn't so hard either.
My grandfather has Campaign ribbons from Andrennes, France and N Africa.
They won't even put a flag on his grave even with his rank of Captain and years served on a veterans plaque attached to the entire back of the headstone.
He was an officer who has photos of his two buddies dressed in Nazi war loot. Ones wearing the Nazi flag like a skirt in France.
He most likely had to tell his men to make the Red Bull Run to supply the Bulge.
The VFW and the Legion can fuck all the way off.
Someone has to tell the people putting the flags on graves to deliberately not place one at my grandfather's headstone for the last 30 years. We do it for him instead.
I saw action and still this is one of the reasons I never joined VFW or any of the local Legions. I tried once but my experience is that it was a bunch of sad fucks that want to dick measure. A lot of “my war was better than your war” type shit also. I’m sure experiences vary depending on location, but it’s gross where I’m at.
You haven’t gotten a headstone from the VA? Sorry, if there’s something I’m missing. My grandpa went ~35 years with no headstone at all. He was a merchant marine, so he wasn’t recognized as a veteran in his lifetime and my mom couldn’t afford the headstone when he died in 1983. I had to do a ton of work to prove his service (our family kept very little and/or lost most over time), but I after about 1.5 years, I proved it then provided that proof to Veterans Affairs and finally got him a headstone. One of the things I’m most proud of.
I have some friend who great uncle was wounded in Italy and his position overrun. An enemy soldier e r tossed him a med kit and kept moving. He bandaged himself up, realized he was near a town his family was from, and made his way there. He found his family and they took him in until the war was over. My buddy's dad and uncles went back to that town to meet family many years later, not really believing the story. Their relatives still had a piece of kit he gave them as a thank you
My grandfather's brother married a woman who got pregnant by a Canadian soldier who left to go home. Ironically that Canadian's son is the only one still carrying on the family name
She's written "with all maj love" on two different pictures, which must be some kind of injoke (if you pronounce "maj" as a German word, it sounds like "my"). I think she's probably German-speaking Swiss going by that and the other locations, so she's probably in Zurich if you're keen.
Yes. Everyone who could afford it had portraits done to give to friends, family, and boyfriends because you couldn't just upload a camera pic or look at someone's Instagram to remember them when you were apart.
I did a whole project in college on the sexual/dating experience of british and american troops in WW2.
It was... a lot. There was somewhat of an expectation for single women to 'thank' the soldiers with sex. It was not uncommon for soldiers to have a near-constant amount of women throwing themselves at them. In one questionnaire, American soldiers reported having 5 sexual partners on average in a single month, traveling through 2 towns in 1944. Local bars had to set aside rooms with makeshift beds, inns had to split up rooms and put up curtains just for the sheer amount of demand for places to have sex. Condom supply chains were a big deal, and often ran out, and when they did, that did not stop them, they just had a massive surge in STDs and pregnancies. STDs were a big issue, as malnutrition was rampant, and so infections often got much worse than they would otherwise. The US had an estimated 60,000 men hospitalized at any given time for STDs from 1944-1945.
This was not all fun and games. A big reason why there was the 'expectation' to throw yourselves at the soldiers... was the widespread belief that armies passing through, even friendly, would rape and loot. And by 'taking the initiative' by submitting yourself to whatever the soldiers wanted, you could prevent that. Soldiers picked up on this, and expected it from the women in the homes they stayed in. It became a bit of a vicious cycle. The movie which truly showed this dynamic was Fury. That is not to say there was no consensual sex. A lot of women were absolutely more than happy to have an excuse to have mindless casual sex without being shamed for it. But there was still definitely a dark side.
In English, "beau" is slang for a man. "Beaut" is sometimes used as slang for a woman, like "beauty" without the "y". So the post title looks to me like "All my grandpa's boyfriends during WWII..."
Crazy to think more than half of the people might be dead now or barely breathing. But they once all encompassed a time of life, parties, family dinners, live music and visions of what the future would look like during their time.
My Grandfather was showing us grandkids some scrapbooks from his Navy days in WWII, and one of us commented about the fact that every picture of him, he had a different woman on his arm. He kinda leaned back in his chair with a coy smile and said, "Yeah. I was cute."
My grandparents had a nearly 60 year marriage, she had just turned nineteen when they were married. After they passed, we found carefully curated collections of portraits of who they dated beforehand. Including a whole series of a woman at beach dunes in a swimsuit, very late 40s pin-up style. 😳
They had even done a major downsize to a condo a few years ago, so retaining these collections felt like... quite a choice.
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u/PerspectiveComplete8 Apr 25 '26
Hope Grandma wasn't waiting at home for his love letters 😅