 Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm just getting over a fairly bad cold so I'm probably going to be hacking for a while and I hope it doesn't disturb you too much. I have to keep clearing my throat and hopefully I'll get through this without too much problem. Again thank you very much for inviting me. This is my latest book entitled Seeing the War which is a compendium of photographs from the war with extended descriptions about what happened to the men in those images. Discovering their histories has been a hobby of mine for the last 60 or so years and as a boy growing up in the wars aftermath I was born in 41 so I was something of a child shortly thereafter but I became fascinated by that conflict of the faraway places the massive effort to attain victory and the lives of the men who fought in that war. One of the books that I read avidly was life's picture history of the war and I got to know many of the men in those photographs although vicariously but I always ask myself the question what happened to those guys? Did they survive and go home and live out their lives or were they killed or wounded? My quest to find out became something of a hobby to pursue in off hours when I wasn't writing about World War II and I've written five other books about the war. One of the first photographs that I remember was of this man on the right his name was Milford Abijah Sellars his nickname was Byge and I was always struck by how tired and rumpled he looked. I decided to find out who he was but no one knew. Byge was in the 28th division but I called the division historian and he didn't have a clue. Some years later I came across the book on the 28th division and there was his picture with a caption that gave his name and hometown. Byge was from Moorsville, Indiana and I tracked down his son Danny who told me Byge's life story. He was a carpenter, a Quaker who despite his Quaker background went off to fight and this photograph well he served in France and in Germany fought in the Hurtgen Forest. This photograph was taken during the Battle of Bulge in January 1945 and Danny his son told me that this was taken when Byge was trying to locate his unit the 28th division was really battered and he had just unsuccessfully tried to barter for a loaf of bread from a passing baker and he was frustrated and exhausted as you can see in that picture. He and his companion moved on and a few minutes after this image was taken a shell landed in the precise spot where they'd been standing. Byge did survive the war however and returned to Moorsville. He died at the age of 88 in 1997. Byge was probably in this photograph, a famous photograph of the 28th division marching down the Champs Elysees in August 1944, four days after the liberation of Paris. It's one of the more famous photographs from World War II and the basis for a 1945 commemorative stamp on the U.S. Army and it was also a victory parade of sorts. These soldiers marched right through Paris on their way to Germany past joyous Parisians and a reviewing stand of generals including Eisenhower and de Gaulle and Bradley etc. And that same evening they were in contact with the enemy. Down the Champs Elysees was the fastest route to the front and I asked the question to myself how many of these guys made it home. Many in fact were casualties. This is a shot the same shot with numbered with some of the soldiers helmets numbered. There are ten numbers here. There were about twenty that had been identified or more. I just stuck with ten here because it's easier to deal with. So we take number one. He was a medical doctor. He survived. His name was Dr. Pasquale Paschal. Number two. His name is Captain Howard Ludwig. He was killed two days after this photograph was taken. Number three. Over there. Lieutenant Ralph Spahn was killed in action in the Hurkden Forest in November 1944. Lieutenant James Ruby, number four, was wounded twice in later action. You take the rest from five through ten. Every one of them was wounded. Two of them were captured, became POWs. So if you take, if you do a little extrapolation here, you see the number of casualties in the first two rows and you realize that probably as much as fifty or seventy-five percent of the men in that photograph were either killed or wounded or became captured because there was some pretty vicious fighting later on in the war Hurkden Forest and Battle of the Bulge, the 28th Division was involved in. This is a famous photograph of Lieutenant Commander and Father Timothy Joseph O'Callaghan. He was the chaplain on the USS aircraft carrier Franklin and he's giving last rights to a dying sailor in February 1945. The Franklin was operating 50 miles off the coast of Japan when it was struck by two bombs from a Japanese bomber. American carriers had a wooden flight deck so bombs went right through them. The ship was immediately engulfed in flame and racked by explosions. Father Callaghan organized salvage teams and was instrumental in saving the ship. He then went up on the flight deck to administer last rights to some of the hundreds of wounded and dying sailors. And this, that former photograph shows him administering last rights to a seaman by the name of Robert Blanchard. That's a shot of Father, close up shot of Father O'Callaghan. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery. The captain of the ship said he'd never seen anybody as brave as Father O'Callaghan. However, he suffered severe lung damage from the Franklin and returned to the College of Holy Cross to teach where he taught mathematics and but suffered a series of strokes. I'm not sure whether that was because of his, because of the Franklin but he died in 1964 at the age of 61. There's a twist to this story. This is seaman Robert Blanchard taken probably 2009. He's the guy who was receiving the last rights from Father O'Callaghan. He laughed. I spoke to him probably about 10 years ago but you can see he's having a good time there. He's alive and the picture of him getting last rights there. He died in 2014, lived to be the ripe old age of 90. Another famous photograph. This is the return of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Moore to Valeska, Iowa in July 1943. I'd been away for about a year and a half and what's interesting about this photograph, the power of it is that you don't see a single face. Everybody's back is turned to the photograph but the emotion of the return is visible. You can see his wife Dorothy with her hand to her face. He is hugging his daughter Nancy whom he hadn't seen in a long time and the little boy there is, his name was Michael Croxtail. He was the nephew. This is a shot of the Moore family the same day and you can see how happy they all are. But these images beg to question what happened to the family afterwards. Those moments during those photographs are frozen in time and we don't ask or don't want to ask what happened to the rest of their lives. There was plenty of sadness and misfortune. The family drug store that Lieutenant Colonel Moore operated in civilian life failed. He and his wife Dorothy suffered from alcoholism severe enough that Nancy kept her father at arm's length when she was older and had a family. Nancy was later stricken with multiple sclerosis and died in an auto accident in 1983. As a result of her illness she had hand controls of her automobile, lost control and was killed in the accident. Dorothy died of a stroke in 1970s and Lieutenant Colonel Moore lived into his 80s. He died in the 1990s. The little boy in the photograph Michael Croxtail suffered from seizures when he was a child and growing up but nevertheless he became a doctor. He served in Vietnam with distinction but he died very early at the age of 52. He was a four-pack a day smoker and his family believed that he was also subject to Agent Orange. A very famous photograph of a musician Graham Washington Jackson. He was a well-known musician in the Atlanta area. He performed for Franklin Roosevelt who knew him well. He also later in life performed for Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and one other two presidents. This photograph was taken as FDR's body was being removed from the little White House in Warm Springs and you can see the emotion on his face. A life photographer took the shot and was by accident. He was moving around among the crowd and he tripped over Jackson's feet and as he was getting up he saw this photograph and took it. Jackson later went on. He was, as I say, was a well-known musician in Atlanta and he died in 1983. He was quite elderly. That's a shot of him later on. Happy shot. This is an interesting shot of a infantryman. His name was Sergeant Joseph Holmes. He was in the 30th Division and this photograph was taken during the Battle of the Bulge in 1945. It wasn't necessarily famous during the war but it became famous when it appeared in Stephen Ambrose's history of citizen soldiers. Holmes was from Cumberland, Maryland where he was a bartender in civilian life and he was drafted in 1944 and was in combat six months later. He won the Silver Star for heroism under fire and in this photograph he appears to be a hardened soldier. His daughter said that he hadn't slept indoors in 30 days. Shot of Holmes later on in life after the war. Life was not easy for Holmes. He suffered from what we would call today PTSD and his daughter said that he died 30 years later from the war just as if he had been killed in the war. He experienced bouts of depression, paranoia and hallucinations. He saw Germans attacking in all directions. He was hospitalized a number of times. In 1975 at the age of 61 he got out of bed in a hospital, slipped on the floor, hit his head and died two days later he was 61 or did I already say that? The army photographer who took this photograph recalled a grim picture, cold shivering infantrymen eating in the desolate Ardennes snow and it brought back to him the most desperate period of my army service. The photograph is a PFC Thomas O'Brien from Middleborough mass. He was a member of the 26th division and he's shown eating in the snow during the bulge in January 45. This is a shot of the same soldier in class A's before he went overseas. Unfortunately he was killed two weeks after this shot was taken. He was killed by a sniper while on guard duty in Germany. This photograph was well published during the war for bond drives. It shows that a deck crew on the carrier USS Saratoga removing a wounded turret gunner from an Avenger torpedo bomber after a raid on the enemy stronghold at Rebaul in the South Pacific. The wounded man's name was Kenneth Bratton, Kenny Bratton from Oxford, Mississippi. He was kind of an old boy guy and during his youth he used to hunt with William Faulkner who was also from Oxford. Bratton was hit in the lower back by fragments from a 20 millimeter cannon shell fired by a Japanese zero. The pilot commander Howard Caudwell was kind of in charge of the he was in Caudwell's plane. Caudwell was in charge of the attack and stayed aloft while the other planes went into the attack. While they were up there they were hit by the zero. The plane was badly, badly damaged. Caudwell managed to get it back to the carrier but he knew if he landed in the water Bratton wouldn't be able to get out so he crash landed on the deck. One wheel didn't come down and one wheel came up but he did a perfect landing on the carrier and when the plane came to a halt the crew got out and the crew brought him out. This fellow here always kind of intrigued me wearing that kind of medieval skull cap. His name was Julio Beskos. His nickname was Julie and he was an all-American football player at USC in the 1930s. He later coached at USC and after the war he coached again but then joined Starkist Foods where he became national sales manager. That's a shot of him many years later. He was also known as a top amateur golfer in Southern California. I interviewed him in 2005 when he was quite elderly. He died in 2009 at the age of 97. One of the great ironies from this story involves this photographer Paul Barnett. He was a Navy photographer assigned to the squadron that flew against the ball but he had never been up in a combat situation. So he asked he'd been reassigned the next day and he asked photographer Wayne Miller who had been who had seen his share of combat if he could go in his stead. Miller was assigned to a photographic group or operated or directed by the famous American photographer Edward Steichen and Steichen's group had kind of cart blanched to go anywhere they wanted with orders that could bump admirals and they their job was to photograph the Navy from the listed man's perspective. But Miller had seen a lot of combat so he said to Paul Barnett go ahead go in my stead. Barnett got into Caldwell's plane and was killed in the attack by the zero. The same attack that wounded Bratton. To me this is one of the more poignant images of the war. A wounded soldier may be dying on a distant battlefield. His name was Private Roy Humphrey. He was from Dayton, Ohio and he was in the first infantry division. He was wounded at Agata, Sicily the day after or the day of or the day after the allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. This shot was taken about a block from where the front lines were. It shows a medic administering plasma to Roy Humphrey. The photo was used extensively on the home front for blood drives and the Army wanted to find out who the soldier was. They identified him as Humphreys and once they discovered him they knew his name but no one knew if he had survived. My research showed that Humphrey died the next day of his wounds. He was from as I mentioned Toledo. His body was returned after the war and he is now entered in the Toledo area. This is a shot of Humphrey taken from a yearbook from his technical school in Toledo probably about 1940. He wanted to be a paratrooper but he washed out and became an infantryman with the first division. This shot is a very famous shot. Probably most of you have seen it. It shows Eisenhower talking with paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division the night of the evening of June 5th, 1944. D-Day was the next day and here he chats with some of the paratroopers. The tall man in today's talking to or seems to be talking to his name was Howard Strobel from Saginaw, Michigan. There he is later on in life. Strobel wasn't aware of anybody taking his photograph. He saw it a couple of weeks later, didn't realize that it was a shot. He thought it was a pretty poor shot. I was looking at and suddenly realized that the number he's wearing there, 23, was the plane he was in and so he put two and two together and realized that that's that was a shot of him. He went back to Saginaw. He survived the war on skates, went back to Saginaw, became a businessman and a banker. He died in 1999 at the age of 77 and throughout his life he had a good time telling people that that was the photograph of him in the photograph. This is the same shot. Whoops. The man right there looking at the camera. His name was Sherman Euler. He was wounded about three times in later fighting. He dropped into France, Holland and fought in the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne. One of his favorite stories is that when he was in Holland and the Germans were dropping artillery shells all around and he jumped into a ditch and landed right on top of some guy who swore at him mightily and he noticed that the guy had a correspondence patch and turned out to be Walter Cronkite. Later on Euler wrote Cronkite and said you remember that incident and Cronkite said he sure did. Euler returned to Topeka, Kansas where he was from, became a magistrate and taught history in the high school and one of his favorite things to do for his students was every D-day on the anniversary of D-day June 6th he would dressed he would come to class dressed in his paratrooper uniform, his combat uniform and he'd get up on his desk and jump off to show his students the proper landing procedure for a paratrooper. Okay this is a shot of Mary Doyle Keefe. She became one of the Rosie the Riveters and this is a shot of her about ten years ago and she lived in Arlington, Vermont and she was a diminutive girl of 18 and Rockwell, Norman Rockwell had a studio in the same town of Arlington. He asked Mary Doyle to sit for him, paid her five bucks an hour. She said sure she was a telephone operator at the time and this Rosie the Riveter illustration came out on May 29th 1943 on the cover of Saturday evening post and she was shocked because she was so tiny and that photograph has her so muscular and Rockwell apologized to her saying well you know we need to make our war workers look pretty sturdy and but so she became Rosie the Riveter and she later married a dentist and her last name was Keefe because of that and she lived to be a ripe old age as well she died in her 90s in 2014. This photograph is of a Lieutenant Jesse D. Franks a 24-year-old Bombardier from Columbus, Mississippi and it appeared in the American Heritage History of World War II in 1966 and to me I always looked at this photograph I was in the Army at the time but it seemed to represent the archetypical American soldier in World War II. A nice looking kid, slightly rumbled but particularly in comparison to the Germans who were always so militarily dressed. Franks left Divinity School in 1942 to join the Air Corps and became a Bombardier. He was stationed first in England and later in Benghazi. He participated in the low-level raid against the Ploesti oil fields in Romania in August 1943 and sadly he was killed on that raid. The planes went in at 50 feet to try to avoid the anti-aircraft fire. Unfortunately they ran into one hell of a lot of anti-aircraft. I think about a third of the planes were shot down the third for a third of the 170 were so badly damaged they never could fly again so only about a third of the planes actually survived. Anyway Franks was listed as missing in action and later as killed in action but his father Dr. Jesse D. Franks a Baptist minister in Columbus refused to believe that his son had been killed. This is a typical response of a family they could never truly believe that one of their loved ones had been killed. Dr. Franks never stopped badgering military and congressional officials to produce a body and in 1947 Dr. Franks moved to Switzerland to continue the hunt for his son. In Europe five years later five years after young Frank's death his body was finally identified because of his father's persistence. He was identified in an unknown group in the Ardennes Cemetery in Belgium when they went back into the coffin they realized that he one of the facts was that his name read Franks was also nicknamed red and the corpse that they found had red hair he had a lieutenant's bar and I think his teeth matched they could have found them many years before but they just didn't do that. I wrote a book about Franks and his father's five year ordeal called Safely Rest and this incredible story kept unfolding in surprising ways. I spoke to the daughter of the navigator in Franks plane who told me that Lieutenant Franks saved her father's life. Her father was seriously wounded as the B-24s flew over the oil fields and burst into flames from multiple anti-aircraft hits. The plane as I mentioned the plane attacked at 50 feet and the pilot tried to bring the plane up as high as possible so that the crew could bail out. Franks did not bail out immediately he grabbed the navigator and threw him out through the nose wheel escape hatch which is a tiny little hatch and when he went to bail out the plane was too low his chute didn't open he hit the ground it was killed instantly. Scavengers later stripped his body of identification and therefore that's why he was unidentified. This is a shot of his Dr. Franks at the grave of his son Jesse Franks, Red Franks in Ardennes cemetery in 1949 it was finally his ordeal was over. This is a shot of Marines landing on Saipan in 1944 and it became another backdrop of a postal stamp. It depicts Marines from the 2nd Armored Amphibian Battalion landing on Red Beach. The Marine looking towards the camera is identified as Wayne Twilliger who became a well-known baseball player after the war. Twilliger recognized himself because of the undone straps on his helmet and the two canteens on his belt. I've never been quite able to identify the two canteens. He said that the Marines were under fire and if you'll note the two Marines in the foreground have just been hit by fire and but Twilliger was totally unaware of the fact that anybody had been hit because they were too he and his comrades were too interested in getting ashore. Twilliger later played for the Dodgers and the Senators and was a coach for the Minnesota Twins when they were at the World Series. He later became a minor league manager and still living today probably around 91 or 92 the last time I spoke to him he was probably about 89 or 90. This is a shot I like. GI by the name of Kenneth Averold from Michigan and it's in Paris during the liberation I spoke to him probably 10 or 15 years ago I have no idea whether he's alive or not. I said did you remember that woman did you ever find out who she was he said no all the girls were coming up and hugging and kissing the GIs there were just so many of them. He was with the ninth the fourth division I believe and made it all the way through the war and survived. Wasn't always interested in what happened to the men. You see huge flights of bombers making their way to Germany and you wonder how many of them made it back during the war the U.S. produced 12,692 B-17s probably the vast majority of them were either shot down or so badly damaged or worn out that they never made it back home. This is a shot of a B-17 called the We Willi when it arrived in England in 1944 in January 1944. This is a shot of We Willi in April 1945 being shot down over Berlin. It's an example of what would happen to various aircraft. Two men made it out of this the rest were killed and this is not the same crew crews were interchangeable and you know sometimes they would fly in different planes but generally speaking the same crew later on in the war did not fly in all the time together. This is a shot of the crew of the Memphis Bell B-17. This crew flew with that plane a whole time it was officially the first B-17 to make 25 missions over occupied Europe and as I mentioned her name was the Memphis Bell she became kind of famous because of a documentary made after the war during the war of a combat mission against Bremerhaven. Normally after 25 missions the crews had 25 missions earlier in the war because so many were shot down missing killed that they couldn't stand be more than 25 later on in the war I think the number of missions was up to about 35. These guys had made it all the way through on the 25th mission normally the plane would have stayed the crew would have been reassigned elsewhere they took the plane and the crew flew back to this country for war bond drives and after the war this is a shot of the Memphis Bell coming in on her last mission this is a shot of the Memphis Bell it's kind of fuzzy today at the Air Force Museum in Toledo she languished for many years in Memphis finally made it to the Air Force Museum where she has been restored I'm not sure whether she's completely restored yet but she may very well be this many many many you may know about this plane a lot was written about her 40 50 years ago it was the her name was the lady be good and she went missing after April 3rd 1943 on a raid to Naples they searched for her right after she missed went missing and after the war but was never found then in 1959 a group of oil prospectors found this plane in the Libyan Desert 440 miles inland on the mystery of what happened to the men of the lady be good only intensified the crew had vanished there was no sign of the crew the plane looked like it had made a perfect landing or piloted landing but the plane was empty somehow made a perfect pen pancake landing in the desert Air Force got involved they started calculating where the crew might have bailed out and eventually through calculations slowly worked their way back through the desert and found each member of the crew this is the crew of the lady be good just shortly before she crashed and one by one they found the the crew members one still hasn't been found but they brought them back to this country for burial this is a shot of a b-17 by the call the all-american you can see it was almost cut in two by an attack by a German fighter this is one of the reasons why they call the b-17 almost indestructible it was on a mission to Tunisia to bomb targets in Tunis base their its base was in Algeria while they were returning they were attacked by two Falkwood fighters apparently the Falkwood one of the Falkwood fighters of pilots was killed and Germans always tell a lot of one of the ways they attacked was from the front and if the pilot were killed he would have crashed right into the b-17 almost cut it in two the plane the tail of the plane was wobbling back and forth the pilot Kenneth Bragg managed to bring it back when he landed the plane literally fell apart Kenneth Bragg returned home and went to Princeton became an architect and worked in the Virgin Islands he died in 1999 at the age of 81 this is a shot that I remember growing up I'm not sure whether this appeared in 30 seconds over Tokyo or not but the American his name was Robert height he was a member of do the do little Raiders of B-25s that took off from the Hornet and the Enterprise to attack Japan in April 1942 was kind of a limited attack we didn't have the power to do much more they dropped a few bombs here and there in Japan and then over flew to China where most of them crashed a lieutenant height plane heights plane crashed in China he was picked up by the Japanese that's a picture of lieutenant height during the war and this is a picture of height stayed in the Air Force became a lieutenant colonel and he died a number of years ago no he didn't he died about two years ago he was quite elderly this is the soldier in the surf and the question was who was he and it's a famous Robert Kappa photograph taken on D-Day this soldier was pushing his equipment in front of him you can see his foot back there the GIs are being shot at he was wounded slightly as he was making his way to shore no one knew who he was but he was later identified as a Houston Riley from Mercer Island Washington but his mother identified him immediately because of his chiseled chin and he later Riley's recollection was that he was that there was the where he was fits the description of that photograph and he also remembers being pulled from the surf by three men one of them was a photographer and of course Robert Kappa took that photograph that's a picture of Houston Riley about five years ago or more than that he died in 2012 I often wonder what happened German soldiers and this is a young Luftwaffe soldier 16 years old name was Hans Gorg Henke and he was taken in 1945 as Germany was Germany was collapsing and there's some confusion as to where the photograph was taken Henke states that he served on the eastern front was captured by the Russians the photo however is owned by Life magazine and their claim is that Henke was photographed in the West having been taken prisoner by the Americans regardless of what where he was captured he was released and sent back to eastern Germany where he lived out his life and died at the age of 69 in 1967 six yes 1997 excuse me who would have thought that this GI Joseph Demler from Port Washington Wisconsin would live into ripe old age and as far as I know he is still living I spoke to him probably a year or so ago he was with the 35th division and he went into the army in June 1944 he was captured in December 1944 after four days in combat and captivity he suffered from illnesses and malnutrition and when this photograph was taken doctors gave him about three days to live they packed them off to hospitals slowly brought him back and the fellow next to him died that day he returned to Port Washington where he became a postmaster this is a shot of him a couple of years ago I spoke to him probably a year ago two years ago and he's full of life has no problems with having experienced what he experienced he says you know thankful for every new day that he has as far as I know he's still alive Europe yeah he was captured in Belgium this is not a famous face but one that was involved in a famous incident his man's name is Charles Kuhl he was a private he was from South Bend Indiana he served with the 1st Infantry Division in Sicily and medics sent him back to an evac hospital because he was ill somehow he was ill he wasn't quite sure what the problem was while he was in the evac hospital general Patton came to visit and saw that Kuhl had no visible wounds asked him what the problem was and Kuhl responded by saying I guess I can't take it Patton pulled him out of his bed slapped him across the face kicked him and told doctors to get him back to his unit he was that was there was another GI his name was Paul G Bennett who had a similar experience and Kuhl was later found to have been suffering from excuse me what am I doing here suffering from malaria so he was really sick and he was sent back to his unit he was pulled out of his unit and put on a plane flown to North Africa and taken in the general Patton's office where Patton profusely apologized to him this photograph taken on Okinawa in April 1945 has become something of a logo for the Marine Corps it depicts PFC Paul Eisen racing to cross what the Marines called Death Valley on Okinawa and a fire swept area where a number of Marines had been killed Eisen was on a mission to deliver explosives to the front to destroy a Japanese pillbox he made it on this run he made it and he had tried several times during the war to enlist but because of his age he was 28 years old he had three or a couple of kids they wouldn't take him but he eventually worked his way in joined the Marines and expected to be in a rear area but he became infantrymen and this is shot of him on Okinawa that's a shot of him later on in life very distinguished looking fellow he died in 2001 at the age of 84 this is a very sad scene of a 10-year-old Polish girl weeping over the body of her sister the two were scrounging for potatoes in a field on the outskirts of Warsaw shortly after the German invasion in September 1939 when a German bomber swept over the field firing its machine guns Kazimira's sister her name was Kazimira Mika her sister was killed instantly and this is a shot taken by an American photographer who remained in Warsaw and he said that Kazimira had never experienced death and couldn't understand why her sister wasn't responding that's a shot of Kazimira Mika in 2009 as far as I know she's still living this is a shot of it's been on my mind for years and the question I've always asked whatever happened to George Lott this guy's name was George Lott he was on the cover of Life magazine in January 1945 and he was representing kind of the American soldiers who were wounded badly enough to be brought back from to the United States they follow a life photographer followed Lott from the time he was wounded in a frontline aid station there he is just after he'd been brought back brought into the aid station and this is a shot of him in England on his way back to the States and it shows him being fit for a cast and you can see the pain that he's experiencing they couldn't sedate him completely because they put the cast on too tight it would be dangerous he was wounded in both arms they eventually had to amputate one of his arms a life did a follow-up story in 1947 when Lott was still in the hospital recovering from his wounds then once he was out he kind of disappeared people would put on questions on the web whatever happened to George Lott trolling the web one I tried to find him for about ten years and trolling the web one day I came across a website of the law firm of a law firm in Denver that specializes in settling estates and George Lott was featured I contacted the firm and they gave me the name of an attorney in Albany New York who administered Lott's estate he was managed to accumulate it in a state of about six hundred thousand dollars I also eventually found an article on him in 1961 from the Albany Times Union that spoke of the quiet life that he led he used to he loved to fish and he lived quietly with his cat his attorney said that he was a very quiet man who would sit on his front porch and sip a beer or two and when you asked him a question he was likely to answer yes or no he died in 1995 at the age of 75 in Albany I'm still researching this story because I'd like to know more about George Lott whoops to me this photo reflects the cost of war all the thousands of covered graves in the open graves waiting for new arrivals at the Henri Chapelle cemetery in Belgium treatment of the dead it was not very reverent during the war the dead were loaded like cordwood into the backs of two and a half ton trucks and carted to the closest cemetery where they were buried in mattress covers this shot shows the burial of PFC Patsy Calliando from Brooklyn New York he was killed in action in March 1945 prayer is said in Calliando's body is committed to the grave with no one loved ones around just a priest and some grave diggers Calliando was 29 years old and after the war his body body was brought back to the United States in 1947 in the first shipment of some two hundred thousand remains that were brought back to this country this is the family grave in Queens New York you can see Patsy Calliando November 25 1916 March 1st 1945 if any of you have ever visited Bastogne you would have seen this tank called the Barracuda in the town square it was attached to the 11th armored division and had arrived in Europe on December 20th and went into action on December 30th during the Battle of Bulge it sat for three years in a pond where it had been hit outside of Bastogne the farmer didn't want to remove it because he thought he would pollute his pond but it was eventually hauled off to Bastogne as a war monument and the process was started to try to find out who had manned the tank the search eventually led to a PFC or a man by the Ivan Goldstein who was then living in Israel but Goldstein was skeptical that that was his tank they brought Goldstein to Bastogne and took him out to the site where the tank had been hit and he still wasn't convinced and while he was there a man came up to him and said you know after the war I was a child and I used to play in that tank and before they removed it and and so the man said to Goldstein why were so many candy wrappers plastered against the inside of the tank and that convinced Goldstein that that was his tank because he had a box next to him of his various items including a lot of candy and when they bailed out of the tank the tank eventually exploded and all the his he's supposed that the candy was when the explosion took off took place that all the candy was plastered against the inside of the tank so he knew that that was his tank it was the barracuda there you see the the neat little shell hole in the side of the tank where an 88 shell had gone right through the armor that's Staff Sergeant Wallace he was he died as a result of his wounds that's Ivan Goldstein and he wrote this book called surviving the Reich this is a shot that spans two wars I wasn't planning to put it in but I thought it was interesting the man on his knees was Colonel Francis Fenton he was a Marine this shot takes place on Okinawa he is praying over the the body of his son Mike Fenton who was a PFC and killed on Okinawa and this is a shot of Francis Fenton Captain Francis Fenton five years later he was the Colonel's son and the brother of Mike Fenton who was killed this is a shot a famous shot by David Douglas Duncan the photographer and shows how weary Ike Fenton his nickname was Ike Fenton was when being told that they no longer had any ammunition and they were being seriously attacked by the Chinese he became a Colonel like his father and died in the age of 77 sometime in the 2000s I don't remember exactly when this is the final shot man by the name of Ferris Tui private Ferris Tui a Marine he was 19 years old his shot was taken after fighting on Anjabi Island in the Inawaya talk at all and the troops are having these three men are having coffee on a Coast Guard vessel the men appear exhausted and blackened Tui said that this is just what happens they were on a sand island but everybody comes back totally blackened they were also terribly sunburned he didn't know who took the photograph but his mother spotted it and it was enlarged and displayed it somewhere in his hometown I had a fun time with Tui because with a name like Ferris Tui you know you put it in the web and it comes up but the Tui survived the war but the two men with him did not man in the foreground his name was Steve Grubowski he was killed on Guam by friendly fire the other man the other man's name Jack Delaney was killed on Okinawa and Ferris Tui fought both of these battles and saw survived as he said with a scratch he worked in business after the war and now lives in Columbus Ohio I had a fun time trying to find him as I said I would just put the name Ferris Tui in and up it came I found him about 10 years ago in Florida and we started you know having a community sending letters back and forth he doesn't use the web this is a shot of Ferris Tui probably 10 years ago and I decided I would try to get in touch with him and I knew the book was going to be published so I called his Florida number and it was no longer good so I googled Ferris Tui and sure enough up comes Ferris Tui he lives in Columbus Ohio and was near his son and I called him and he remembered me even after 10 years he said I bet you thought I was dead and but what he's 91 years old and I said we were talked about getting old and he said the biggest problem he had in in recent times was his son recently came up to him and said dad I'm retiring and Ferris said you're too young to retire and he said dad I'm 65 years old but he's still I spoke to him probably I communicate by letter and I got a letter from him about two months ago he's still doing fine he end with a poem that I thought was very apropos that he wrote to me I don't know whether he'd written it before but I think it sums up the way a lot of veterans feel and this is from Ferris Tui when I was young and in those far off killing times companions lost to the enemy were easier to accept then now when here in the steep downhill of a long and lucky life as their faces fade and their names are almost gone I mourn them every day thank you there any questions I'd be glad to several of those guys there are several who who are said to be that you mean the guy in Times Square kissing the nurse he died I'm pretty sure and also the nurse died I have to I didn't put some of these in because I know like Iwo Jima they're so well known that you know people recognize them immediately and probably if many of them know what happened as far as I know he does live locally okay well I didn't know that I know that the nurse died recently and I know that there are at least one other couple who is believed to have been the subject of that photograph because if you look around you can see several photographs similar photographs taken on that that VE day or VJ day it was but it you say he's local I'll have to get his name after yeah I'd be interested to know the guy with the skin and bones was a German prisoner of war he was an American prisoner of war yes he in Germany yeah you know it's hard to say I've talked to a number of them and I think the biggest problem was they didn't have any food and if anybody has ever read Kurt Vonnegut's slaughterhouse five I knew Vonnegut's friend who he was captured with he was a district attorney and a lawyer in eastern Pennsylvania where I live and so I would talk to him about it he died about 20 years ago and I would talk to him about it and he said that the problem was they were hungry he said they used to dream about food and they did not that they were poorly treated but I think they were so malnour out malnourished on the other hand you you know some of these prisoners of certainly British prisoners and American prisoners at the beginning of the war had lived for three or four years so I guess it depended to a certain extent on them where you were a prisoner I think the Air Force the Air Force guys were imprisoned by Luftwaffe and that you know American flyers they were shot down they were I think they were told to find the nearest Luftwaffe person to surrender to because then they would be sent to a Luftwaffe base I've also talked to other prisoners who talk about the lack of food so I'm not sure exactly how some of them or all of them were treated but yeah I think to a certain extent some of them were well treated okay oh okay yes and others must be researching as you have done has there been a catalog set up for access to the general public oh yeah yeah go to National Archives if not not all of them are visible they do have a number of photographs that are visible that you can see on the on the web but if you have if you have a photograph you're looking for describe it and send it to the National Archives they'll come up with it and particularly if you know what the photograph is there are thousands of photographs that you can you know in various magazines on the web but life life magazine which is now I forget who tends their photographs but they have many many photographs AP and if you know what photo the the biggest repository is the National Archives because those are photographs taken by military photographers and they're they're open to the public you don't you know you don't need to pay anybody to use them there there's no copyright on them okay thank you very much