The Things Our Fathers Saw Vol. III - Combat, Captivity, Reunion

The Things Our Fathers Saw Vol. III - Combat, Captivity, Reunion

What do you grab to fill your pockets when you're woken in the middle of a freezing German night and forced on a death march across the country? When your buddy collapses by the side of the road, no longer recognizing you, do you keep moving to survive?

Dying for freedom isn’t the worst fate—being forgotten is.

Many veterans never volunteered to share their stories, and perhaps we were too absorbed in our own lives to ask. Yet, when a history teacher encouraged his students to listen, these ordinary men, compelled by circumstance to become heroes, finally shared their experiences with a new generation.

Quotes from the Book:

"The next day we marched almost twenty hours, so now we were coming up to a town, now everybody is falling over, but I was in a group where everybody made a pledge to watch each other. I found myself off the side of the road and I lay in the snow and I said to myself, 'Wow, this is so warm.' I was so damn cold, I didn't know my name or anything, or where I lived-I was gone!" -B-24 bombardier, shot down, taken prisoner

"We got shot down around noontime by a Messerschmitt. I was in the top turret shooting at them, and I could see [their faces] as clearly as I'm looking at you. They wiped us out completely. I'm following him with the top turret gun and you could see bits of the plane coming off his tail section, but not enough to bother him. As I'm turning, the electrical cord on my flying suit got caught underneath the swivel of the turret. I ducked down, I untangled it... now I got back into my turret. Fellas, the turret wasn't there anymore. That son-of-a-gun who had been eyeing me came in and he hit his 20mm gun, took the top of that Plexiglas and tore it right off! The fighters made another pass. They hit a couple of our engines; they made another pass and they shot away our controls! We peeled off into one of these spirals-you've seen them on television where the plane will come over on its back and just spiral into the ground. Trees are coming up at me; I had my hand on the ripcord and out I went, headfirst." -B-17 engineer

"I was standing on the train in Paris right next to an SS colonel-he had a satchel handcuffed to his arm, and a guard with a Sten gun. The train started up, and the SS colonel bumped into me. And he turned around to me and said, 'Pardonne moi.' I thought, 'Oh, my God!'" -B-17 crewman/evadee, shot down on his first mission

"What made me cry was this is a guy from Texas, and even if he didn't like blacks, or he didn't like Jews, or Catholics, or whoever, no German was going to tell him what to do-no general was pushing him around! He says, 'We are Americans in this camp, and we are all the same.' They asked him for a list of all Jews, and he said, 'You're not going to get it-if you're going to shoot them, you're going to shoot us all, because we are not going to tell you which ones to pick out.' So these are the things that make me feel damn proud to be an American!" -Lead navigator, PoW