Interesting Find

[Gray Ghost]

I was going through a few of my father's things and found a little black memo book that had some addresses of some of the people he met in training and overseas. There were a lot of young ladies listed. Seem like one from each town. In the back he had the following list:

1 Khaki shirt
1 white towel
1 brown towel
2 fatigue caps
2 brown shorts
5 khaki pants
2 white wool socks
2 brown khaki socks
1 pillow case
1 sheet
_____________
18 pieces

I thought this was very interesting. I noticed only one khaki shirt but 5 khaki pants. This may be a list of new items that he needed to complete out his uniform and linen supplies, because he does not list his Class A uniform in this list. Only one khaki shirt does not make much sense to me. There is no date on this page. It could be just before he went overseas or sometime later while overseas in the Pacific. On the next page it shows a list done, apparently at 3 separate times due to different writing utensils, the following list:

Bahamia Island
Cuba
Panama
New Caledonia
New Hebrides
Solomans
New Guinea
Phillipines

He used pencil then ink and then pencil again. The first entry would have been in 1943 and the last sometime during 1945. Kinda sheds a little more light on my father's war years with the Army Air Force.

=GG=

 

[Sgt Brown]

I agree that it might be a replacement list. I'll bet they wore trousers out a lot faster than shirts. What was his job?

Tom

 

[Gray Ghost]

He was orginally trained as a gunner on B-24s but after an accident he was grounded from flying due to injuries to his ear drum while still in the states. He then became a maintenance tech on the B-24 and when he went over seas, he was sent to a fighter squadron. Army does strange things. While he was waiting for a spot on the flight line he did some driving in the transportation section, jeeps and trucks, and that is where he remained. He was a sheet metal worker and did some work on P-38s that had bullet holes in it. He pretty much did a little of everything. He was not even supposed to be a driver but that became his main job. He was just waiting for his actual assignment to come open and they forgot about him. He could have shoveled latrines the entire war and I would still be proud of him.

=GG=

 

[cco23i]

Cool stuff!