After a plan to enlist in the Canadian Army fell through, Walt Disney signed up with the American Ambulance Corps, a division of the Red Cross, by lying about his age.
In 1918, sixteen-year-old Walt Disney was eager to take part in the war in Europe but was too young to join the military. After a plan to enlist in the Canadian Army fell through, Walt signed up with the American Ambulance Corps, a division of the Red Cross, by lying about his age. In November of 1918, after the war had ended, Disney's outfit was shipped across the Atlantic to France.
Walt Disney was assigned to an evacuation hospital in Paris, where he drove trucks and ambulances and ferried military officers from place to place. In February of 1919, Walt and another driver were selected to transport a load of beans and sugar from Paris to Soissons, but their truck broke down in the French countryside during freezing mid-February weather.
The legend about Walt Disney's dishonorable discharge seems to have begun with the notion that he hung his release from the Red Cross upside-down behind his desk.
Why people believe that Disney would have been proud of a dishonorable discharge is rather puzzling. In the closest thing Walt left to an autobiography , he spoke only positively of his time in France:"The things I did during those eleven months I was overseas added up to a lifetime of experience. It was such a valuable experience that I feel that if we have to send our boys into the Army we should send them even younger than we do.
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