Comments by "Colonel K" (@Paladin1873) on "American Veterans Center" channel.

My Mom's boyfriend, Fred, was assigned to Patton's staff after his Sherman was destroyed and he was wounded. He said Patton never bothered the enlisted men, but often cursed out the more senior officers. Fred was a sergeant, so he was safe.
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They were giants and always will be.
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@eddiemccullough7502 When Fred was on Patton's staff he spoke about how Patton treated the enlisted members there. He never mentioned how Patton behaved in the field, probably because Fred did not accompany him into the field.
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@krbailess You are very welcome. I only wish Fred was still alive to comment. Since he's not, I'll leave you with a Patton quote I found long ago and kept on my desk. As a career staff officer myself, I can attest to the fact he was wrong about reproducing. "The typical staff officer is a man past middle life, spare, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, noncommittal, with eyes like a codfish, polite in contact, but at the same time unresponsive, cool, calm and as damnably composed as a concrete post or plaster of Paris cast; a human petrification with a heart of feldspar and without charm or the friendly germ; minus bowels, passions or a sense of humor. "Happily they never reproduce and all of them finally go to hell." P.S. If we do go to Hell, then it can only mean he'll be there to greet us.
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Maybe he was the only Navy flier to score kills in Europe and the Pacific, but the USAAF had three pilots who shot down German, Italian, and Japanese aircraft. And the most extraordinary of them was Louis E. Curdes whose tenth kill was an American transport he purposely downed without killing anyone. He did this to save them from mistakenly landing on a Japanese airfield. Even more extraordinary was one of the passengers on this flight was a nurse he'd met a few nights before. They ended up getting married after the war. Oh, and the reason Curdes was transferred to the Pacific was that he had been shot down in Italy, captured, and later escaped to British lines. The policy was not to return escaped POWs to the same theater out of fear that if they were again captured they might reveal details of their escape that would endanger anyone who helped them. Truth is so much stranger than fiction.
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@krbailess Have a very merry Christmas and offer a toast to your Uncle Carl and all the other absent family and friends. We're free today thanks to the sacrifices they made.
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Yes, he acquired them and the ivory grips before the war. One was a Colt SAA and the other was a S&W Registered 357 Magnum.
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My grandfather was from Breslau. In 1923 he met my grandmother, who was an American, while she was visiting family in Berlin. They married and settled in Germany for the next few years before coming to America where my Dad was born. In 1937 they returned to Germany for six weeks to help coordinate the emigration of their extended families before the Nazis completely cut off any chance of escape. One of my ambitions is to someday visit Breslau and try to locate his ancestral home.
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