[My grandfather on the Mall in Washington, D.C., before he shipped out for England in 1943] I think today is the perfect day to start posting on this blog. Sixty-three years ago today, my grandfather, PFC William F. Grabow, landed on the beaches of Normandy as part of the Allied invasion of Europe during the Second World War. The actually invasion began on the morning of June 6, 1944, and my grandfather was one of the tens-of-thousands of troops who followed after them.
This is probably a strange thing for someone of my generation to say, but the Second World War has always been with me. Some of my earliest memories are sitting in my grandparents' kitchen in Oak Park, Illinois, listening to my grandfather tell stories about growing up in Chicago and the war. The war stories were pretty innocent in the beginning, funny stories mostly. As I grew older, the stories progressively became more candid and gruesome.
When I was about 17 years old, I finally had the presence of mind to start writing down notes about my grandfather's stories. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to write them all down before he died a couple of years later. After he died, I decided that I needed to write down everything I could remember about his war experiences before I forgot them. Also, it appears that I am the only one in our family who has heard some of these stories. If I don't write them down, I'm afraid they will be lost.
The short version of the evolution of this project is this: what started as transcribing family stories grew into a research project on the 808 Tank Destroyer Battalion, anti-tank warfare, and the European theater of the War. My hope is this project may culminate in a book, but, incase I never reach that far shore, at least these stories will be preserved and shared in some fashion.
