Military Monday: Lowell’s Army Buddies (Part 3): Around Camp

This photo appears to be of a military camp of some sort. I have no idea what the long white thing is in the middle. Two ideas that occurred to me were a huge Thanksgiving table or a raised roadway. That should give you some notion of how clueless I am about this picture.

As I have already written in the first and second installments of this short series on my great-Uncle Lowell’s army photos, Lowell Brosius enlisted on 10 Nov 1943, started service on 1 Dec 1943, and was released from service 18 Apr 1946. He served with the Military Police for at least a portion of that time.

This time around I am posting some pictures that appear to have been taken around camp. Whether it is basic training camp, a camp where he served somewhere in Europe, some combination of both, or something else, I have no idea. Perhaps research will eventually answer some of those questions.

I can generally recognize Lowell when he appears in a photo, but most if not all of the pictures this week are unmarked, and I do not know who the other people are. Once again, I will do my best to guess at identities based upon the few marked pictures in Lowell’s collection, but many in this group of pictures are particularly poorly focused and I don’t foresee my success rate as being very good this week.

In this picture, for instance, I wouldn’t dare try to guess the identities of the men. I imagine that if I had been there and known them personally the figures in this photograph would be sufficient for identification, but that is not the case. The buildings are reasonably clear, though, and it is interesting to imagine what life was like in those wooden-skeletoned tents.

The only identified person in any of Lowell’s pictures who remotely resembles this man is Wynn Tingey, but I am not convinced that this is he. Whoever he is, note that he is displaying something in his hands. I think it may be a pistol, but it was evidently moved during the shutter exposure. I also enjoy the fact that he is photographed against a background of clean laundry.

Here are two more men against the same background of clean laundry. Note that the man on the left is holding a pistol. I could not find anyone in Lowell’s marked pictures who resembled either of these men enough to merit hazarding a guess at their identities.

I rather like this one. It is set against the same backdrop of clean laundry, but in this picture the subject is also photographing the photographer. I think the man may be the same one who was holding the pistol above, but that picture is too blurry to make a very good comparison.

There certainly seems to have been a lot of posing going on in front of that clean laundry that day. I would say that the man pictured on the left is the same one who was aiming a camera at the photographer in the picture just above, and the man on the right is the same one who I thought somewhat resembled Wynn Tingey.

I would guess that this photo was taken within seconds of the one above. The man on the left is almost certainly the same man in the photograph above (as well as the photograph above that), but the man on the right appears to be a different person than in the picture above. I would guess him to be Melvin Chrisman, although he also somewhat resembles Albert Matkovich and S. J. Marquis.

Whew! It is exhausting examining every face and comparing it to every face in every other photograph. I think that at this point I am ready to turn down the level of ambition just a bit. We appear to remain in the laundry day photo session, but only for a short time longer.

 

And now we shall move toward a different area of the camp (if, indeed, it is the same camp), away from the living area toward what appears to be (judging from my experiences watching old movies—I claim absolutely no firsthand knowledge of army camps) the motor pool.

This is perhaps one of my favorite pictures in this series, and not only because there is a puppy in it. It is also one of my favorites because you can see Lowell’s reaction to the puppy. He was a dog-lover, too, and you can see it in his face. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Lowell is the man on the right. While the other man is posing for the picture and trying to show the puppy to the camera, Lowell’s focus is on the puppy.

Here is one last picture, which appears to have been taken in the same general area:

Sources:

National Archives and Records Administration, "U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946," database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 24 Aug 2015), entry for Lowell A Brosius; citing Electronic Army Serial Number Merged File, 1938-1946 [Archival Database]; ARC: 1263923. World War II Army Enlistment Records; Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 64; National Archives at College Park. College Park, Maryland, U.S.A.

National Cemetery Administration, "U.S. Veterans Gravesites, ca.1775-2006," database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 Aug 2015), entry for Lowell Brosius, Willamette National Cemetery; citing National Cemetery Administration. Nationwide Gravesite Locator.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, "U.S., Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS [Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem] Death File, 1850-2010," database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 Aug 2015), entry for Lowell Brosius; citing Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.