WWII: who did your family fight alongside?

[Swagger7]

My paternal grandfather and his three brothers all served in WWII. My grandpa was a sailor in the US Navy aboard the USS Sumter (an amphibious transport) in the Pacific. He started off driving the landing craft, but wound up as the assistant radio operator aboard the ship. He had some neat stories. At one landing he stopped the boat to lean over the side and pluck a pack of cigarettes out of the water while some bullets splashed nearby. At Okinawa, his ship shot down a kamikaze, but he slept through the whole thing! Another time a kamikaze flew toward his ship, but veered away at the last moment and struck the ship in front of them, knocking it out of the column.

His younger brother was also in the Pacific aboard a destroyer. I believe he was a loader. He eventually got transferred to a battleship as a loader in one of the 16" gun turrets. The only story of his I remember is when a shell came loose from the conveyor system and crushed some poor guy's legs.

My grandpa's eldest brother was in the infantry in Europe. I don't know much about what he did, apart from capturing a German arms factory that used forced labor. They made Mausers there. Him and his buddies took some of the pieces off the lines and assembled them themselves. He brought home two Mausers & two MP-40s (he took those off the battlefield.) He gave my grandpa one Mauser (I have it now) and kept the rest. His son has the other Mauser now, but no one knows what happened to the MP-40s. Someone in Oklahoma's got himself a nice set of illegal MGs, I guess! My grandpa gave the Mauser stock a really nice finish, much better than it would have gotten in the factory!

His youngest brother was only able to enlist at the very end of the war & didn't make it to Europe 'til it was over. He was an MP and got to do the neatest stuff of all. He was one of the men who took possession of the sail training ship Horst Wessel. (which is now the Coast Guard academy's sail training vessel Eagle) He was also one of the guards at the Nuremburg trials, where he was actually handcuffed to Rudolf Hess to escort him to court one day. I keep trying to find him in old Nuremburg footage. So far, no luck.