I met Adolf Galland at some sort of public speaking engagement, but I was very young and don't remember much of anything about it except that I was old enough to be thoroughly awed at meeting a famous WW2 ace. My dad had copy of Galland's book which he autographed for us, but I have no idea what ever became of it.
My father was too young and both my grandfathers too old for WW2, but five of my uncles served during the war. My father's oldest brother was a gunner's mate in the Naval Armed Guard (Navy men who served as gun crews on merchant ships) and made many Atlantic crossings; the middle brother was some sort of ground crew (don't know what exactly he did) for planes flying supplies over the Hump from Burma to China. I doubt anyone in the family had ever even heard of Burma before the war, and as far as they knew he might as well have been on the far side of the moon.
My mother's oldest brother-in-law, at that time my aunt's fiance, was an infantryman in the PTO, and for years she told me he never saw any real combat. She said he had landed on some little island in the middle of nowhere called Biak but the Japanese all ran away without really fighting, but not to ask him about it because he didn't really like to talk about the war. When I was much older I discovered that it was actually a pretty horrible battle, the Army's version of Peleliu, and he had lied about it all along, I'm guessing at first because he didn't want them worrying about him and later because he didn't want to have to explain himself or dredge up bad memories.
A number of family friends from my church were in WW2 as well. One was a tanker in the 3rd Army and another was a gunner on a B-24 that survived the Ploesti raid (Operation Tidal Wave). But of course most of them spent most or all of the war in the rear area or at home.
