The Things Our Fathers Saw: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation (D-Day and Beyond, Volume 5) (Unabridged‪)‬

When you step off the landing craft into the sea, bullets flying at 0630, how do you react to your vision of your mother opening the telegram that you have been killed?

When your glider crashes and breaks apart, what do you when you are shot and the Germans are bearing down on you, and you know your dog tags identify you as a Jew?

“I had a vision, if you want to call it that. At my home, the mailman would walk up toward the front porch, and I saw it just as clear as if he's standing beside me - I see his blue jacket and the blue cap and the leather mailbag. Here he goes up to the house, but he doesn’t turn. He goes right up the front steps. This happened so fast, probably a matter of seconds, but the first thing that came to mind: that's the way my folks would find out what happened to me.

The next thing I know, I kind of come to, and I'm in the push-up mode. I'm half up out of the underwater depression, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened to those prone figures on the beach, and all of a sudden, I realized I'm in amongst those bodies!” (Army demolition engineer Omaha Beach, D-Day)

Dying for freedom isn’t the worst that could happen. Being forgotten is. 

“My last mission was the Bastogne mission. We were being towed, we're approaching Bastogne, and I see a cloud of flak, anti-aircraft fire. I said to myself, ‘I'm not going to make it.’ There were a couple of groups ahead of us, so now the anti-aircraft batteries are zeroing in. Every time a new group came over, they kept zeroing in. My outfit had, I think, 95 percent casualties.” (Glider pilot, D-Day and beyond)

Maybe our veterans did not volunteer to tell us their stories; perhaps we were too busy with our own lives to ask. But they opened up to a younger generation, when a history teacher taught his students to engage.

As we forge ahead as a nation, do we owe it to ourselves to become reacquainted with a generation that is fast leaving us, who asked for nothing but gave everything, to attune ourselves as Americans to a broader appreciation of what we stand for?

This is the fifth book in the masterful WWII oral history series, but you can listen to them in any order.