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Acknowledgments
- University Press of New England
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ix Acknowledgments Chancesare,mostofuswhoremember theeventsofDecember7, 1941—and remember what we did during the next four years— won’t be here a decade from now. Prompted by that realization, seven of us in the Kendal at Hanover retirement community (where we live among some 400 friends) decided to gather and publish the memoirs presented in this book. At a meeting with prospective authors in February 2010, it became apparent that our book should include not only combat stories but also recollections of stateside service, life on the home front, and experiences while growing up in wartime Europe. Throughout the past year and a half our contributors worked with us to polish their essays and search old albums for wartime photos. We also learned of Kendalites who had died in recent years but who had left written or recorded stories of wartime service. Their families went to great lengths to find the recordings and photos needed. Cooperation in this endeavor has come from many sources. First of all, we express deep gratitude to our 56 authors and their families who contributed the memoirs. Next, we acknowledge, with special thanks, what we learned from the editors of a similar work, Our Great War, published in the fall of 2008 by residents of the Wake Robin retirement community in Shelburne , Vermont. In fact, it was after we learned of their book that we decided to produce one of our own. Our interest led Clint Gardner, early in 2010, to get in touch with Wake Robin resident Louise Ransom, the instigator of Our Great War, who told him just how they had gone about it, from recording memoirs when authors were not comfortable with writing, to ensuring stylistic consistency. For example, is this a book about WW II or WWII? We chose the first. Recently a third New England retirement community, RiverWoods at Exeter, New Hampshire, published The War We Knew, their own collection of wartime memoirs, much like Wake Robin’s Our Great War. This fine book includes maps and timelines, features which we ourselves had been planning for the present work—as the reader will soon see. x World War II Remembered We also extend our thanks to several particular members of our Kendal community. Edie Gieg’s recordings of oral histories told by Bill Hotaling and Ed Scheu resulted in lively stories. Corinne Johnson and Augusta Prince, two other Kendalites, were good enough to type up memoirs submitted as recordings or longhand manuscripts. Dick Powell, as President of the Kendal at Hanover Residents Association last year, invited us to present our plans for the book to a meeting of the Association’s Council. With his enthusiastic backing, the Council agreed that the Association would become the book’s publisher. We also offer our thanks to long-time memoir-writing instructor Joe Medlicott, for generously contributing our Introduction. We regret that the book’s ground rules—only Kendalites as authors—prevented us from inviting him to contribute a story about his own European combat service, as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. While most of the photographs appearing in these pages were contributed by the authors themselves, a number of them came from other sources. The cover photo, for example, is from the United States National Archives. Other photos and maps are attributed below the image itself. The History Place web site (www.historyplace.com) helped us not only withtheirfinemapofthePacificTheaterbutalsowithfactsforourTimeline . Similarly, the Matterhorn Travel web site (www.matterhorntravel. com) provided excellent maps for D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Finally, we express our gratitude to the book’s designer, Linnea Spelman. Patiently and with a sure eye, she has guided us through the production tasks so effectively as to enable us to bring out the book some weeks before its formal publication date of December 7, 2011— the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It would delight us if our book, and similar collections, encouraged others of our generational peers to preserve their stories of WW II, as we have done here. All too soon the War will have no survivors. —The Editors ...