For Saving Private Ryan Buffs

[Ash]

While snooping around the IMDB yesterday I found a link to a very cool website.

It's the Saving Private Ryan Online Encyclopedia.
It has pretty much anything and everything a SPR buff could ask for.
Just click on a letter of the alphabet to go through all the entries.
In most entries a factoid or more information is provided to further your WW2 knowledge.

Go check it out here

What do you think of the site they've put together?



Post Edited (07-18-04 01:05)

[Gecko Brothers]

Nice, also if you love WW II stuff get the Band of Brothers DVD set. It has a field guide about the entire Easy Company. It has rank listing, time line, dictionary, soldier list, and maps.

[Susan]

You know what's sad? Does anyone here actually have living family members who served in WWII? My grandfathers both died. One rode a tank through germany during liberation, the other served in italy and became a mild alcoholic due to some trauma he encountered there that 30 years later would still put him in tears if he ever talked about it. Now only my grandmothers are alive, one of them had a contribution to the war as she worked in a bomb factory making bombs for a short time.

It's sad to see that an entire generation who have so many stories to tell will be gone soon. I think this is one war that truly nobody talked about. Nobody really knew what went on, because the solders were expected to come back to their normal life and not discuss it. Many of them knew that we had these heroic images of war through movies and propoganda and they felt guilt and would not discuss it. They carried an immense amount of guilt and sadness and sheer horror for some of the things that they had seen. Nobody back then wanted to hear those stories so they kept it bottled up.

[Ash]

My grandfather was a civilian contractor during WW2.
He was an airplane mechanic and repaired pretty much every type of American warbird that existested at that time.

[BeyondTheGrave]

my grandfather is still alive and he was a in the navy in the pacific during WWll.  he was at the invasions of iwojima and okinawa.

"I know I know ive been exposed permeant psychoses..
at least the colors are nice"- Aeon Flux

[peter johnson]

My father -- deceased in May -- was a naval test pilot who went on active duty in the Pacific in '44.  88th Naval Air Wing -- Yorktown -- Curtiss Helldivers.
He was the youngest of 3 brothers -- his older brothers are still alive.  The eldest was on various cruisers -- straight Navy -- Altantic convoys, then Pacific Theatre -- and the middle was an Army medic/corpsman during The Bulge and the push through Germany & the occupation.
My mom worked for A.V. Roe (AVRO) and Supermarine (Spitfire) in the South of England.  Though not in uniform, she was probably shot at as much or more than the middle brother at The Bulge!!  The blitz was serious business 'round Southampton way.  Stories . . . she has stories . . .
I remember as a youngun' how she'd lock herself in her room when my father and I were watching Alan Shepard and the first Americans in space on our little black and white, all because of "that god-damned Werner von Braun".
I think the middle brother saw the worst of all of them, and while a full-fledged MD today -- retired -- will only relate staccato versions of his time in Europe.  Eg:  He doesn't hold with the Privat Ryan business of letting the German soldier go.  "Hell, we just shot 'em.  They'd slow you down . . .".  Not a "greatest generation" thing to disclose, but there you are.  I guess he's more willing to relate bad things Americans did as he was around Munich and Dachau at War's end.
peter johnson/denny crane

[Acidburn]

My grandfather was in WWII.  He had fought a little over a year before h stepped on a landmine and got both of this legs blown off.  But, He considers himself very lucky, he could have lost more than his legs.   When SPR came out, I took him the the theater to see it.  He said that the movie comes as close as any movie he has ever seen to what it was really like on thoses beaches.  But it is still nowhere near the intensity.  HE tells me stories sometimes, but it is very hard for him to go into detail, because he begins to remember all the friends that he lost there.

[Flangepart]

My dad died in 83.
He was a Navy Prop specilist in Sitka, Alaska.  Avation Mechanic.
He was luckey  to have ground duty ( Cause the flying weather was awful, and we lost lots of planes because of it ), and be in a quite theater.
He worked on lots of types. PB4Ys, P-38s, and PBYs,ect.
Told about a Canuck PBY that nosed over when it landed. The nose had gotten heavy with leakage, and it just flipped, like the one Cousteau's son Phillipe died in.
I guess thats where my intrest in Avation comes from.

When all the old timers, like my Mom, who worked in an ammo factory dureing the war, are gone, the baby boomers, like me, will be left.
And frankly, that scares me.....