Pierced baby ears seem fairly common among Latinos and Italian Americans around here.

So it was pretty late in the war by the time it was verified.

Well I guess we have to figure in the rate and amount of communication back then. Today it'd be more like

h4nuk41920: Dewd hav U s33n GodFriend1337???
t0r4hguy240: I herd he gaWt gr4bb3d by N4zi's!!!
h4nuk41920: Oh Sh1t!!11 C4ll 0th3r C0untr13s Fast!!!

That said instant messenger won't ever really reach any such standard of reliability.
edit: not to be confused for a haulocaust joke... that ain't cool

Babies with pierced ears do not seem unusual to me, but I can't place exactly where I've lived that they would have been common.

Back to the wars and dead people

That barely counted, since it was actually leaning more towards your admittedly adorable daughter talk, but thank you.

Alibelle--how do I vote for your friends? if you give me a number, I'll call it.

Just so we're clear, everyone, Robin is by far my favorite of all of you. Hands down, no contest. I don't know if the phone lines are still open, but Alec and Josies's number is: 1 (800) 868-3402. You get six votes per phone line tonight, and I was having tons of trouble logging into the voting online thing at ABC.com, so I don't even know if that's worth a shot.

ETA:

In Miami, it was very common for Cubans to pierce their babies ears.

Well, that is where I spent my babyhood. So that probably explains my ears.

The U.S.does have some responsibilty for WWII. The whole world stood by while Mussolini took Ethiopia. There was the civil war in Spain where Hitler and Mussolini intervened massively while the U.S. and Europe honored what was supposed to be a universal arms embargo, and the then Soviet Union gave some aid, but not as much as it could have. Spain in particular was where Hitler might have been contained or at least delayed at a low cost - simply by selling as many arms to the Loyalists as they were willing to buy -even just as many as they had actual cash for.

Just been reading over the last couple of hundred poosts. Sometimes, Ireland kind of sucks. We have no abortion, stayed neutral in WWII (although I still think that was the right thing to so), oh, but let a load of Nazis in after the war while turning away Jewish refugees. Lovely country I have myself here.

Though the genealogy/war conversation reminded me that my great-grandparents were tortured to death by the Japanese for leading the Malaysian guerrilla movement (according to family lore, anyway), which is cool and also tragic.

Ooh! And I just found a wiki page on my great-uncle, Uncle Don.

[link]

All I know about my father's WWII service is that he worked on the big cannons used in bombardments in the Pacific, and I have seen several pictures of him (so shockingly young -- he was born in 1917) in South Pacific-like locales. He was Army, so it was probably Papua-New Guinea or along that path. Will have to talk to my brother who has done more research....

I'm pretty sure my great-grandfather was in the German military in WWI, and my grandfather was a US airplane mechanic in WWII. Which makes me really angry when I think about the Japanese-American internment. They didn't let my grandfather serve in Europe (which is why my father spent a bunch of his childhood in Hawaii), but they didn't lock him up either.

I haven't had nearly enough coffee to discuss WWII coherently at this hour of the morning, so instead I will just say (apropos of yesterday's Natter) that this morning on my way to the subway, I saw a girl with a whale-tail-tramp-stamp. (Which is to say, a tattoo in the shape of a thong peeking out of the top of her jeans. For all those times when you just want to look trashy without the bother of actually putting on underwear?)

My grandfather, being a Cajun, spoke French, so they sent him to France to teach pilots.