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.

This is the story of Col. Max F. Schneider, one of the original U.S. Ranger officers from the time they were formed until after the Allied invasion of the Normandy Coast where he commanded his own battalion of Rangers. The book follows his life through the post-war years leading to his tragic death in Korea in 1959.

* Winner: International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Book Award 2016 * “My father was born into war,” begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth-century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded, and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. This book is for Anthropology and Sociology courses in qualitative methods, ethnography, violence, migration, and ethnicity.

Derek's lifelong work is about to be sold to pornographers for a lot of money. His wife has left him, for that and other reasons, and he's having a hard time keeping existential focus. Into this maelstrom, flies a package from his mother that contains his father's account of his experiences in the European theater of World War II. As he reads about his father's war, while struggling with the business deal and its ramifications for his idea of himself, he begins to expand his understanding not only of who his father was and the character of his country, but also of the ebb and flow of the seemingly conscious force of war. All of which comes into focused during one terrifying night of the rape of a girl.

The author draws on her father's account of the war and her extensive interviews with other veterans of the 92nd Division to describe the experiences of a naive southern white officer and his segregated unit on an intimate level. During the war, the protocol that required the assignment of southern white officers to command black units, both in Europe and in the Pacific theater, was often problematic, but Johnston seemed more successful than most, earning the trust and respect of his men at the same time that he learned to trust and respect them. Gene Johnston and the African American soldiers were transformed by the war and upon their return helped transform the nation. The 92nd Division of the Fifth Army was the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during 1944 and 1945, suffering more than 3,200 casualties. Members of this unit, known as Buffalo Soldiers, endured racial violence on the home front and experienced racism abroad. Engaged in combat for nine months, they were under the command of southern white infantry officers like their captain, Eugene E. Johnston.

A powerful and unique portrait of generational strife and changing styles of masculinity as seen through the stories of ten World War II veterans and their baby boomer sons. It is fair to say that Tom Mathews’s relations with his father, a veteran of World War II’s fabled 10th Mountain Division, were terrible. He came back from the war to a young son he’d barely met and proceeded to bully and browbeat him—for his own good, he thought. In the course of puzzling out almost fifty years of intermittent conflict, Mathews came to understand that their problems were not simply personal, they were generational—and widely shared by millions of other baby boomer sons. And so, to write this powerful book, which traces the kinetic effect of the war on the men who fought it, their sons, and their grandsons, Mathews has uncovered nine other dramatic and telling father-son tales of veterans in some ways missing in action and how internal war wounds shaped their lives as fathers. These include a combat infantryman whose life was saved by the fabled Audie Murphy, and a black member of the storied Tuskegee Airmen corps. In a moving final chapter, he and his father return together to Italy to revisit scenes from the war—and attempt, at long last, to forge their own separate peace. In a very real sense, Our Fathers’ War tells the secret history of World War II and its echoes down the years and generations. In the course of doing so, it offers a portrait of evolving styles of American manhood that many, many fathers and sons have been needing and awaiting.

In 1944-45, Capt. G.H. Davies served with the hard-fighting 53rd Welsh Division. He was an artillery officer in command of a battery of 25-pdr field guns and saw action from Normandy to the final surrender of Nazi Germany. Capt. Davies was present at the Normandy battles, the fierce fighting for s'Hertogenbosch and the Battle of Arnhem.During the course of the war, Capt. Davies kept a diary and also snatched a few photographs on his treasured camera. When the opportunity arose Capt. Davies liberated a camera from a fallen SS officer and, after the war, had the film developed. The film contained graphic images of the war from the German side of the line.Seventy years on from the events, the wartime diary, the photographs of the guns and the photographs taken by the dead SS officer were the inspiration for the son of Capt. Davies, television producer and writer Gwilym Davies, to undertake an emotional return to the battlefields, which his father had described in his diary.The result of that pilgrimage is an important new book which builds upon the wartime diary and the photographs to produce a powerful record of one man's war service with the guns of the 53rd Welsh Division. The book also contrasts the experience of Capt. Davies with those of the Germans on the other side of the line. Gwilym Davies is himself an accomplished photographer and his photographs of the 70th anniversary celebrations and the memorials provide a poignant counterpoint to the events of 1944.

In this intimate memoir, Yigal Allon shares recollections of his father, a proud pioneer-farmer in Kfar Tavor in the 1920s-30s who retired in Ginosar, the kibbutz co-founded by his son Yigal, and how his father’s personality and life in Jewish settlements in the Galilee before the establishment of the State of Israel shaped his own life. “The father thought to name the son ‘Yigael,’ which means ‘He will be redeemed,’ but decided that was too passive a name, and chose instead ‘Yigal,’ which means ‘He will redeem.’ The Russian‐Jewish farmer’s son became a watchman, a British policeman, member of a kibbutz, a leader of the ragtag 1948 liberation war, a scholar, a major general and Israel’s deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs. This book, Yigal Allon’s act of homage to his father, shows a public man turning inward. He has no political argument to make, unless the word of his father about Mount Tabor makes a declaration of intention about the land of Israel: ‘Maybe there are others more beautiful, but none is just as beautiful.’... a memoir, both discreet and revealing, by an important public man.” — Herbert Gold, The New York Times