Biography

2. Dedication Remembering when I was a young boy, I see my father looking at the toy models that I had built. How was I to comprehend that these toy airplanes and tanks would at one time, try to destroy him. I now try to put myself in his place and have come to realize what it must have been like for him and thousands and thousands of young men just like him. My father grew up on a farm in central Nebraska during the depression and at the outbreak of World War II, was called to join in the struggle to end that conflict. My father was a "Tanker" and served with the 1st Armored division initially and then the 753 rd Tank Battalion and eventually fought through seven campaigns. He fought through the same battles as would the most decorated soldier of the war, "Audey Murphy". He landed at Oran in Algeria, fought in Tunisia and fought Rommel's Afrika Korps at the famous Kasserine Pass. With the 753 rd Tank Battalion he invaded and captured the Island of Sicily. From the Island of Sicily they landed at the southern port of the Italian peninsula "Salerno". Fighting up the what Winston Churchill called the "soft underbelly" of Europe he fought for the one of the most contested mountains of the war "Monte Cassino". From there he joined in the landing at "Anzio" and then on to Rome. The war then took him to the landings in the South of France and eventually into Southern Germany. I now realize how the war, described in the stories he told me, knowing what he had seen and done, I now know how this affected him, and many others that also experienced war. In some small way I would like to think that the idea and motivation for this project came from him. The personal accounts that he conveyed to me of what he went through has been a giant reservoir that I have had to draw on. This project in its entirety is dedicated to my father.