I’m still working on the history of my parents’ courtship and marriage in the middle of World War II.
Every day, information seems to be falling out of the sky on me. I’d reached the point in the book when I had my father’s feet sticking through the hole in the bottom of a Lancaster over German Occupied France in mid-August 1944, I stopped writing to research. Now I can’t stop researching… or at least accepting the gifts that come my way.
This month alone I’ve been in contact with the 88-year-old radio operator who jumped with my father as well as the son of the French army officer who was the third member of the team, code name Alexander.
I’ve made contact with a British historian who sent me my father’s personal file for with the time he was with the Jedburghs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburghs a group formed by the O.S.S., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_o….
I just located a man in France who has written on Team Alexander. He sent me a picture of my father standing behind the wife of the French Resistance Officer in the Maquis,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(…, a man named Rac who my father revered and wrote about years later in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
All of these people seem so touched and honored that I’ve found them, that we are connecting. My father died 37 years ago, but we knew him at different times in his life. They knew him before I was born. I knew him long after they had lost touch. We are putting together the jigsaw puzzle of one man’s life: the soldier in World War II and the journalist during the years of the Cold War.
I feel oddly consoled to have found these fellow travelers as I try to retrace his footsteps winding back from this century to the middle of the last.
