World War II

About the Book

America was still in the throes of the “great” depression when the nation entered World War II. The nation was divided between isolationists and activists with the isolationists outnumbering the activists. That was changed overnight by Pearl Harbor. Everyone remembers were they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news of Pearl Harbor. The citizenry was enraged and totally committed to an all-out war effort. The ex-servicemen whose stories are in the Anthology were, as noted by Stephen Ambrose, “citizen soldiers.” Fred’s brother, Jesse Grant, was the nearest to what one would call a “professional soldier.” He joined the National Guard at 18, was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant after ROTC, and served in World War II. At war’s end, he stayed on in the Army Reserves and was called up during the Korean War. By the time of his retirement he accrued 28 years of service. The remainder were students, workers, farmers, and ordinary citizens. The majority enlisted voluntarily without being drafted and were able to enter their preferred branch of service. One became a navy radioman but served on merchant ships supplying the Allied forces from Murmansk to Casablanca in the Atlantic Ocean and Guam in the Pacific. Another young man, who had to have his father sign for him to enlist in the Navy because he was too young, was captured and executed by the Japanese. His younger brother wrote his story for this Anthology. A farm boy from Tennessee gives a graphic description of being in the first wave ashore in Normandy, including his thoughts going into battle. Four contributors were in the Air Corps. One was in a B-25 that was shot down by enemy ground forces. He was a POW in several Nazi prisons, the last being Stalag XVII-B. Two writers tell about the war coming to their homelands. One of the two was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. In 2004, approximately three-fourths of World War II veterans are deceased and over 1000 of our comrades die each day. Their stories die with them. Some of us who remain have accepted the challenge to record our wartime experiences. A few years ago, the compiler of the Anthology, Fred Grant, started urging several of his family and friends to undertake the often-painful task of writing about their memories of wartime service. He has collected those stories in this anthology.

About the Author

Betty Grant was born in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky. Her parents, Sam and Dinksie Robinson, were of mountain heritage with roots in North Carolina and Virginia. Betty’s first eight years of schooling were in rural two-room schools. She learned to love poetry from her mother who had been a schoolteacher. Her mother recited and read poetry to Betty from her earliest age, instilling in the little mountain girl a love of poetry. This led to a lifelong activity of collecting poems. Poems that caught her interest were copied or cut from the source, usually a newspaper or magazine. The poems in this book are from that collection. Betty and her husband, Fred Grant, now live in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.