Moonshine making during WW2?

[p51]

I have all those other named books but that TN maneuver one looks interesting.
My Dad saw the entire 101st AB pass over the valley they grew up in, C-47s with troops and also towing gliders, going that direction. This would have been, I think, 1943.

 

[EngProf]

I have all those other named books but that TN maneuver one looks interesting.
My Dad saw the entire 101st AB pass over the valley they grew up in, C-47s with troops and also towing gliders, going that direction. This would have been, I think, 1943.

By coincidence, I was at the Tennessee Military Collectors Association show a couple of years and ago and the author of the TN Maneuvers book was there selling books. I was talking to him and an old guy walked up and started looking at the book.
There is a picture in there of the 101st parachuting into the Lebanon/Gallatin TN area (~30 miles east of Nashville). He said he was about 10 years old and saw the jump first-hand, just like in the picture.
We talked about some of the other stuff he saw and I was fascinated. He wasn't going to buy a copy (fixed-income?), so I bought a copy for him and insisted that he take it.
Your dad and that guy may have been neighbors.

Some other book suggestions:
"Never a Shot in Anger" by Col. Barney Oldfield (Press/PR Officer SHAEF) - has some great stories of the coverage of the TN and LA Maneuvers (Some great local stuff for us Tennesseans)
"Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City" - Also has information about coverage of the Maneuvers and wartime radio entertainment

I'll add one more, not related to military activities, but definitely Home Front: "Miss America, 1945 - Bess Myerson's Own Story" - A lot of it is hard to read due to the anti-Semitism she had to endure.

 

[p51]

There is a picture in there of the 101st parachuting into the Lebanon/Gallatin TN area (~30 miles east of Nashville). He said he was about 10 years old and saw the jump first-hand, just like in the picture.


Some other book suggestions:
"Never a Shot in Anger" by Col. Barney Oldfield (Press/PR Officer SHAEF) - has some great stories of the coverage of the TN and LA Maneuvers (Some great local stuff for us Tennesseans)

Dad and Mom both grew up just East of Elizabethton. He never saw the jump, just the formation passing overhead.

I have that book as I have most of the good books dealing with war correspondents.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

In the '80s I knew an elderly history professor who, during WWII, had been a member of the local draft board in a southern Appalachian county. At that time, the draft wasn't about coercing reluctant men into service. It was mainly a way of straightening out the manpower problem. In essence, when young men came of military age, they volunteered for service, meaning they volunteered to be called up in the next draft. This man was shocked at how many willing young men they were forced to reject for reasons of health, and in almost every case it was because of inadequate or downright absence of medical care during the Depression. He was still outraged that the nation had lost so much first-class manpower because the Depression congress had been unwilling to extend even basic, cheap health care to its poorest region. The nation paid the price in the 1941-45 period.

 

[newsman]

Does anyone have any idea how strong the efforts were to bust up moonshine stills in the US during the war? Did the Feds just put that on the backburner for the duration to focus on more important stuff?
I can't find any historical references to moonshining between the end of the depression and the 50s.

In the book, "You only blow yourself up once," the author talks about his still on various islands. He was in the very early days of bomb disposal. One day a high ranking officer stopped by their shack and began to rant about the set up and the still and asked who the guys were attached to.

When the author said bomb disposal....the officer promptly told them to carry on and left never to be seen again. If memory serves me these guys were on Guada.

The book is dedicated to a Scottish guy who started the trade...well...the memory of him. He blew himself up....once.

 

[p51]

Moonshining by servicemen during WW2, especially in the Pacific, is well known (an uncle of mine had a still in Burma, put together only from memory of seeing a busted-up one as a kid), but I was referring to moonshine making stateside during the war.
As it's been pointed out, I suppose that the 'fixins' for 'shine were hard to get in those days, though, which might explain why you never hear much about moonshine from 1942-45...

 

[Stanley Doble]

About the only thing used to make liquor that was hard to get would be copper and you only needed a small amount to make a still, which could be reused indefinitely. The main ingredients were corn or other grain, and yeast. Sugar was not used in good liquor, 'sugar moon' aka 'rotgut' or 'old popskull' was a low quality abomination, made purely to sell by moonshiners who put profit ahead of pride in their product.

 

[BlueTrain]

There are lots of stories about the history of World War II that haven't been told because they aren't interesting, they didn't happen here and they didn't involve Americans. There are also some that did and they haven't been told, either, probably just because nobody want to hear them.

For instance, my father was a POW for a year in Germany during the war but I've never read anything about the prisoners' experiences after they were "liberated," just about the only word that was ever used. Somehow they had to get back to the states in some orderly fashion. They were also still in the army. Another footnote of the war is the large scale dislocation of civilians by the end of the war. The term used was "displaced persons" and some were still displaced twenty years after the war, mainly because of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

There was a newspaper article a few years ago about Germans who had been POWs somewhere in the United States. Their stories about their treatment and their attitude towards their captors sounded exactly like the stories my father had told about his experience as a POW in Germany, which, coincidentally, was not far from where I was stationed when I was in Germany in the army. According to what I've read about the camp, which was in Moosberg, north of Munich, Americans were in the minority in the camp and some had been prisoners there since 1940.

I am from West Virginia, though my father was from Virginia, and I never heard anyone talking about moonshine when I was a boy in the 1950s. However, I remember a funny line from a 1930s Three Stooges short, which went like this:

"You know, gasoline doesn't taste as good since prohibition ended. But it still isn't bad."

 

[newsman]

About the only thing used to make liquor that was hard to get would be copper and you only needed a small amount to make a still, which could be reused indefinitely. The main ingredients were corn or other grain, and yeast. Sugar was not used in good liquor, 'sugar moon' aka 'rotgut' or 'old popskull' was a low quality abomination, made purely to sell by moonshiners who put profit ahead of pride in their product.

My grandad made his share. He used sugarcane for some of it. A lot of this stuff was not really good and healthy to drink. A little Scotch now and then is a good thing. Some of the stuff made back then could be a toxic mix of things.

You really need to know your source.