EXCERPT

Prologue

My father’s story was the first war story I heard, fifty years after he stepped from the cockpit of his P-38 fighter aircraft for the last time. He was one of sixteen million men and women who served in World War II, and like many others of his cohort, he had never shared his experience. The war was long over, the United States had moved on, and so had he. But, at my urging, together we flipped through his photo album and opened his string-tied folder of yellowed rosters to relive each assignment, each raid over North Africa and Italy, each medal earned. Throughout our discussion, he dismissed his service and his deeds as nothing remarkable, but, at the end, he smiled and rose, standing perhaps a hair taller than when we had begun.

Years later, on the cusp of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war, realizing how many stories like my father’s had not been told and would soon be lost, I began searching for veterans who would share their memories. I looked past the popular big-screen panoramas of artillery fire bursting over embattled beaches and dive bombers strafing ships at sea to discover the men and women who had served in noncombat positions, behind the lines. They were the people who had made it possible for my father and the millions of other frontline soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to carry out their duties and who helped deliver them safely home. They made up more than half of the US military forces in World War II.

The first story I found was that of Lt. Francis D. Peterson with the army’s Graves Registration Services. His moving tale of designing and building cemeteries only hours after a battle, then burying the fallen American, ally, and enemy alike, illustrated for me the enormous gap in my knowledge of the war and of the men and material that compose an army, navy, or air force. I suspected my contemporaries shared that gap in knowledge.

 Inspired, I traveled to air shows, attended veterans’ meetings, and spoke to authors of military history books and former soldiers who had written their memoirs or were willing to talk about their experience. The yearlong search brought me to nineteen veterans and their sons and daughters, most of whom thought they had nothing to say.

The nineteen veterans whose stories are told here represent a tiny fraction of the sixteen million Americans who served in uniform during World War II. The tellers of these tales did not fly through flak to escort bombers to their targets and then limp back to their base with fuel tank gauges screaming empty like my father did. They did not scramble across mine-strewn beaches, tramp through knife-edged grass in damp jungles, or fire a single shot. Like their counterparts who served on the front lines, however, they, too, rushed to enlist on hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They served just as proudly and proved every bit as instrumental in winning the war, whether they served in Europe, in North Africa, in the Pacific, or at home.

They, too, have stories to tell.