Finding Your Father S War

A guide to learning more about your relatives’ experience serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. In this fully revised edition of Finding Your Father’s War, military historian Jonathan Gawne has written an easily accessible handbook for anyone seeking greater knowledge of their relatives’ experience in World War II, or indeed anyone seeking a better understanding of the U.S. Army during World War II. With over 470 photographs, charts, and an engaging narrative with many rare insights into wartime service, this book is an invaluable tool for understanding our “citizen soldiers,” who once rose as a generation to fight the greatest war in American history. “Jonathan's Gawne’s book is a 5-star blueprint, well-written and beautifully illustrated, to deciphering a loved one’s WW2 U.S. Army service.” —The Commander’s Voice “A great read not only for genealogists wishing to research an ancestor, but also for those who simply have an interest in the United States Army during World War II . . . written so that anyone, even those with no military background, can understand, yet also includes more advanced information . . . detail is phenomenal . . . a must read reference book for any professional genealogist or military historian.” —APG Quarterly

Charley Valeras own father had spent almost 4 years fighting during WWII and lived out the rest of his life without a story to tell. To share stories that hadnt been discussed in decades, Valera conducted heartfelt interviews using video to pen and chronicled them in a way to bring the reader into the battlefield, aircraft or destroyer. A combination between The Greatest Generation and Saving Private Ryan.

"There's a bit of everyone's family in this moving and heartwarming journey. I know that Janet has been hungering to write this story her whole life, and I'm happy to report: she done good!" -Paul Reiser, Actor, Author, and Comedian "Seemingly ordinary, yet eloquent love letters sent to a GI's future wife during wartime, proved to be a never-imagined godsend for their yet-to-be-born daughter. Not only did they lead Jan on a quest to bond with the father she lost at a young age, but they offer us a deeper insight into every soldier's struggle amidst the chaos of war to hold on to his dream of returning to the life and loves he left behind. It's a story that captured my heart... a marvelous work." -Captain Louis Matjasko, USN Retired; Executive Director, Circle of Change Veterans Dog Program "Identity and memory are the universal themes that bind human experience and fuel the quest to understand the past from a very personal perspective. Being able to touch actual artifacts that are precious family heirlooms, gives meaning to our very existence as daughters and sons, as witnesses to history, and as human beings. They give us unexpected road maps that reveal not just the greater geographical world around us, but the hidden chambers within our own hearts. A box of letters inspired Krulick-Belin to bravely embark upon this journey of longing. Using her keen curatorial eye and art historian's sleuthing abilities, she discovered the father she barely knew, and in turn, her own place in the world. We are privileged to travel alongside her on this odyssey she so generously shares." -Marissa Roth, Pulitzer Prize winning Photojournalist, Documentary Photographer (One Person Crying: Women and War), and Writer. "Krulick-Belin does an impressive job of placing her father's experiences in North Africa, a theatre of WWII that is little known or understood, in historical perspective. In addition, she helps shine a spotlight on her father's Jewish identity as a U.S. soldier serving in North Africa and the Mediterranean, his contacts with the local Jewish populations, and his desire to enlist in the struggle against Nazi Germany despite his age. An interesting work about a daughter's discovery of both her father as well as her own heritage." -Lawrence Bell, Executive Director, Arizona Jewish Historical Society "Jan researched the history, culture, and religions of North Africa, while looking through a very personal lens to rediscover her father. She tells a compelling story particularly for those interested in the North African campaign of World War II, and those interested in the Moroccan Jewish community." -Robert J. Silverman, U.S. Director of Muslim-Jewish Relations, American Jewish Committee; Former Senior Foreign Service Officer, U.S. Department of State

Both history and memoir, The Flight tells the story of Richard W. “Dick” Bridges’s heroic service in World War II. Bridges survived a German attack on his plane, the Fascinatin’ Witch, by parachuting out of the exploding B-24. He escaped detection in Austria, became the first American prisoner of war in Hungary, was sent to Yugoslavia, escaped from his POW camp there, was sheltered by the Partisans one step ahead of the Germans, and was finally airlifted to safety in Italy by the British. Bridges’s story, which seems almost too astonishing to be true, went untold until after his death in 2003, when his son, Tyler Bridges, pieced it together. The younger Bridges’s odyssey in search of his father’s wartime experiences connected him with the families of other crew members aboard the Fascinatin’ Witch and led him to retrace his father’s footsteps through Austria, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia. With his findings, Bridges has woven a story not only about World War II and the bravery of this unique group of soldiers, but also about fathers and sons, what can get lost in the gulf between generations, and how patience and understanding can bridge that gap.

A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. “An accomplished, clear-eyed, and affecting memoir about a man who is at once ordinary and extraordinary.”—Forward Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage. In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father’s—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.

Born in Holland after the war, a son grows up an outsider in his family and in the world, and endure the brutal military training his father puts him through, and wonders about the hardships the family has suffered. Years later, the son begins a quest into his family's past and the origins of his father's brutality.

The other two, Guadalcanal and Peleliu, are legendary.

Philip Gambone, a gay man, never told his father the reason why he was rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. In turn, his father never talked about his participation in World War II. Father and son were enigmas to each other. Gambone, an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer, spent seven years uncovering who the man his quiet, taciturn father had been, by retracing his father's journey through WW II. As Far As I Can Tell not only reconstructs what Gambone's father endured, it also chronicles his own emotional odyssey as he followed his father's route from Liverpool to the Elbe River. A journey that challenged the author's thinking about war, about European history, and about "civilization." Praise for As Far As I Can Tell "In retracing his father's World War II army service across the U.S. and Europe, Phil Gambone ingeniously uses public records to plumb private mysteries: Who was this "impossibly foreign" man, and what did he have in common with his son, who dodged the Vietnam draft by being gay? This is a travel book unlike any other: across continents but also into the past and toward self-forgiveness." Richly researched and written with unerring grace, Gambone's journey is an act of witness, of belated connection, and, ultimately, of courage that does justice to his father's." - Michael Lowenthal, author of Paternity Test "Philip Gambone weaves a moving memoir of his family, a vivid portrayal of his travels through the locales of WWII, and a powerful description of what that war was like to the men who fought it on the ground into a seamless and eloquent narrative." - Hon. Barney Frank, former Congressman, Massachusetts "A single question pulses through As Far As I Can Tell: why didn't my father talk about his time in the war? With meticulous research, Philip Gambone puts sound to silence, offering us a book-length love letter, not just to his father, but to anyone whose life has been hemmed in by obligation, obedience, and the brutality of the system. It's also a coming to terms with the unknown in others, which is its own hard grace. A vital, dynamic read." - Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World "As Far As I Can Tell is a fascinating mix of autobiography, travelogue, and historical research that not only takes us on a great adventure in search of what World War Two was like for those who fought in the European theater but probes that most difficult of all subjects, the relationship between a father and a son -- in this case, a gay son. Extensively researched, highly literate and profoundly thoughtful, the story Gambone tells uses not only soldiers' memoirs but writers as disparate as Samuel Johnson and James Lord to make this a reader's delight."- Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance