Ears! Ears! I said Lend Me Your Ears!
Check out these audio clips from my WW2 archive
No, No, Not that kind of ears!
More years ago than I care to remember, I thought the hundreds of hours of interviews and conversations with veterans I recorded would make good books-on-tape. While that proved to be too labor intensive, along came writable CDs, and I was off to the races.
Before compact discs began their current march toward extinction, I created more than 150 individual discs and grouped them in sets — Tanker Tapes; D-Day Tapes; D-Day and the Bulge; a 17-disc set on the ambush of Lieutenant Jim Flowers’ platoon during the battle for Hill 122; a collection of tank drivers; widows and siblings of men killed in action; prisoners of war. And then I began experimenting with themed audio CDs, one- or two-CDs sets (each CD being about an hour long) with a theme: Romance; Encounters with General Patton; Jumping out of airplanes; Automobiles; Religion; Food; Booze; Premonitions; Cigarettes.
Since I launched the Substack, I’ve pretty much focused on the written word. So today I’m going to present some audio clips to illustrate what an amazing volume of stories in the veterans’ own voices I’ve recorded. A great deal more of my audio, including some full-length interviews, is available at my podcast, War As My Father’s Tank Battalion Knew It, available at Spotify, iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Tank driver George Bussell: “I always wanted to shoot a clock out of a tower bell…”:
Forrest Dixon: Going down Lookout Mountain with no brakes:
Tail gunner Sam Mastrogiacomo: “I thought about my mother getting a telegram that I had been killed…”
Ed Stuever: The song of Illinois
Helen Grottola: I showed [our daughter] a picture and said “This is what your daddy looks like.”
Jim Flowers: The turning plow
One for the road:
Bob Hamant: Captain of the Head (from “A Marine on Tinian)