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Boom!

Shiftkitty

Shiftkitty

Registered User
When I was about 6 my mom helped out a friend of hers by watching her two sons during the day during summer while their mom worked. We used to play in the backyard, and one of the games my brothers and I and the boys would play was war. We had our toy guns and would run rampant around the backyard "shooting" each other. We had our little plastic army helmets and Mikey (one of the brothers) would always talk about how he used to have a grey helmet "with a back". We knew he was talking about German helmets and just assumed that he had a toy one at one time. That isn't what stands out in particular in my memory. It was the airplanes.

Everytime an airplane would fly over, Mikey would point up at it, his arm very stiff, and yell "Boom!" We thought it was funny at first, but my dad asked him one afternoon what he was doing. Mikey just looked at him and said "Cannons." I remember listening as they talked. Mikey said he used to have a cannon and his job was to make the airplanes go boom. Why? Because they're going to drop things.

Last night I was watching a documentary and they showed some newsreel footage of German flak cannons. I instantly thought of Mikey. Today as I saw airplanes go overhead, I pointed at one and went "Boom!"
 
Wow. Sounds like Mikey was kinda reenacting a past life as a German gunner during WWII... and you kids were too young back then to figure it out.


Not in contact with him anymore?
 
No, not since that summer so long ago. I'm sure my dad picked up what he was doing because of when he talked to him. For some reason, though, I never forgot Mikey and the airplanes. He just sort of hovered around the back of my memory until I saw the flak cannons. I had seen them before in several shows on artillery and such, but something about that night just made him pop into my mind. It would sure be interesting to talk to him today, eh?
 
It is really very interesting what Mickey can say about this now. Do you have the opportunity to contact him?
 
No. I haven't seen or heard from him for almost 4 decades now. I don't know why I remembered him so much, but his brother I can barely recall except that he wasn't paying attention once when he was eating a hotdog and his finger got into the bun... CHOMP!
 
Shiftkitty said:
but his brother I can barely recall except that he wasn't paying attention once when he was eating a hotdog and his finger got into the bun... CHOMP!
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This made me laugh! Does it mean he had an "eating problem"?


Cool memory...I like when events and memories click into place.
 
On a not dissimilar note, I have a brother fourteen years my junior. When he was barely old enough to talk, he told my mother that he had "looked after her." It came out of the blue, and in the years prior to his birth, she had been severely depressed, one might almost say suicidal. After that, she always referred to him as her "little anchor man."
 
Shiftkitty said:
That's really cool, Arrant. Did they pretty much keep up a good relationship?
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Sadly, no. It has been very fraught, as has my own relationship with her. But I don't think subsequent difficulties invalidate what he said as a young toddler.
 
It sounds like he was in an anti-aircraft battery, maybe a flak tower. I think they used teenage boys for this job near the end of the war. I wonder if the P-51 mustangs strafed flak towers. The cannon was the infamous "88". It was discovered early in the war that the 88 was also very good at destroying allied tanks when leveled and fired horizontally. Germany still has most of the flak towers. Too expensive to destroy. Some of even been converted to office buildings, etc. You can find photos of them online.
 
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