Thought I Would Write and Tell You: A Soldier's Story of World War II

On June 6, 1944, a young artillery officer from Norman, Oklahoma waded onto the beaches of Normandy.He wasn't a general. He wasn't famous. He was a husband, a father of a toddler son, and a former college student who had been greener than spring peas about the army just two years before.Thought I Would Write and Tell You is his story, told entirely in his own words - a letter written to family on June 24, 1945, just weeks after the war in Europe ended. It begins with the chaos of officer training at Fort Sill, follows him across the freezing North Atlantic, through the quiet English countryside where he awaited the invasion, and onto Utah Beach on D-Day itself.What makes this account extraordinary is its voice. He describes machine gun fire and watching men die with the same steady, matter-of-fact clarity he brings to getting lost in the New York City subway or complaining about Florida's sour oranges. He doesn't dramatize. He just tells you what happened - and that honesty makes it devastating.He fought hedge to hedge through the Norman bocage for days, calling in artillery fire while snipers took shots at him, sleeping in ditches under straw with a grenade at his side, until a German 88 shell ended his war on June 14th.This is the kind of history that disappears when a generation passes. One family made sure it didn't.

Pagina's: 129, Paperback, Independently published