thanks M1! great to see the quotes from other MPs. Poor guys may not have been "popular" especially with AWOLs etc, but they did an important job & most of em did it very well.
I know my Dad's outfit got a Meritorious Unit Award for what they did at Anzio. Standing at a crossroad post, out in the open, must've been scary - but they had to keep traffic & men moving in all that Italian mud. My father's letters from France in '44 tell how bad the weather & road conditions were - from snow, snow, snow & bitter cold to mountains of slippery mud - you wonder how anybody was able to get anywhere (but they did).
As far as being an MP, my father would say that when you were in the Army - you did whatever the Army told you to do. If they said you were an MP - that's what you were.
If they said you were on Kitchen Patrol - then you were cleaning pots & pans & peeling potatoes sometimes for as long as 16 hours, getting up at 4am. If the Army made you get up at dawn & prepare for a 25 mile hike with a full pack in the cold rain - you did it, even if the men ended up sittin' around for hours waiting to go. My Dad would say tell us that you never knew where you were going or what was going to happen to you in the Army.
Interestingly, in addition to Dad's brass MP insignia, I also found brass signal corps
insignia. I think he may've been briefly assigned to the Signal Corps at the beginning
of 1942. He mentions going to "school" over at the 104th Infantry's bldg & this might explain his electrical wiring mania & telephone wire tinkering in later life.
My father kept a "diary" in '42 (mostly noting the girls he was dating. Ha!) and in it throughout the year were these mysterious notations: "Hannon gone, Hannon back, Sent out after Hannon, Hannon's gone again, Found Hannon at the Statler Hotel, Guard Hannon etc". And so it went - finally ending with: "Hannon court martialed".
I wonder who he was & what became of him.
m2