My Grandpa Eli's WWII Experience

My grandfather moved from Poland to the United States in 1929 at the age of 6. He lived in Detroit, Michigan and suffered through the Great Depression living in horrible poverty. After he became the only one of his three siblings to graduate high school, he started to work at a Ford factory in Detroit. He decided that he wanted to become part of the war and attempted to join the cadet program in the Air Force. This program was to become a pilot, a navigator, or a bomber.  After flunking the test to become a cadet, he went back to work at Ford. In 1942, the year after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, one of his friends approached him saying that he was going to enlist in the army. Being a Jew, my grandfather decided that it was time to enlist as well, and fight against Germany who was killing the large amount of family that he left behind in Poland. He suspected that had he not enlisted then, he would have been drafted within the nest six months. He enlisted in the Army Air Force and they made him a teletype mechanic. He claims that he was horrible at the job, so they moved him and he once again attempted to join the cadet program. This time he was accepted into the program. The final test of the program was the physical, my grandfather flunked the depth perception part of the physical and once again could not become a pilot. They then sent him to gunnery school to become a gunner, where he learned how to shoot from the b29 planes, the type of plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. When it was time for his troop to invade Japan, they decided to keep him behind to be an aerial instructor in Nebraska. Towards the end of the war, they moved him to Washington state to then deploy to Japan, but right as he was about to leave, the war ended. My grandfather fought in the war to do what he could to save as many Jews as possible. He lost almost all of his family in the war.