The entry below ia being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The War Diaries of Simon Robert Gordon by Constance Gordon Kean is a daughter’s loving tribute to her father’s and mother’s 1940’s romance against the backdrop of a world war. Her father, a sergeant stationed for three years in the Middle East, kept a daily journal, sharing life behind the front lines supporting combat troops with supplies and materiel, providing transportation and mail service, and carrying out drill exercises for troops under his supervision.

Kean curates her father’s journal entries to capture chronologically the initial defeats and then, increasingly, victories of the Allies, interspersing samples of her parents’ wartime love letters and livening the story line with photos that Bob regularly sent to Kean’s mother, Lenora. (Full disclosure: Kean is a dear friend, married to my husband’s cousin.)

Like so many soldiers, Bob Gordon had never been out of his hometown, in southern Ohio, when he was drafted in March, 1942. He was sent to Ft. Thomas, Kentucky for training, and from there, in August, the Army sent him to Charleston, South Carolina.  In Charleston, he and Lenora met at a USO Club dance. They had little more than a month together when he shipped out.

They were obviously drawn together, and their letters became increasingly amorous, always clad in the innocent language not heard since the 1950’s. On the home front, Lenora worked days as a Chief Clerk and volunteered both in the service lounge of the USO and visiting wounded soldiers shipped stateside for medical care. For his part, Bob was moved from Asmara, Ethiopia to Cairo, Egypt.  He was also able to make visits to Palestine, where he had relatives to look up, and enjoy furloughs in Alexandria, Egypt and Cyprus, before spending time in Naples, Italy before being shipped home.

One of his most interesting assignments was to provide support services for President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, General Chiang Kai-shek and several high-level US military officers meeting at the Mena House in Cairo for a conference in November, 1943. While the proceedings were kept secret, Bob’s role was task-specific: deliver supplies and letters, escort vehicles, secure the help of an electrician, retrieve a wounded soldier from Jerusalem.  His journal captures the everyday life of a non-commissioned officer, to whom fall many of the non-combat, non-diplomatic functions, often unheralded but vital to the cause.

During Bob’s war years, he enjoyed access through local Jewish residents, synagogues and service organizations to holiday services and home dinners with supportive Jewish families.

Throughout the three years until the war ended, their letters continued. Bob returned home on June 18, 1945, and he and Lenora were wed on July 10. After Bob’s honorable discharge in October, 1945, they settled in Hillsboro, Ohio. As his daughter recalls, “they never again left the hills of southern Ohio.

The letters are pictorially represented in clear handwriting, and the reader becomes aware of how much first-hand history is lost in an age that now relies on text messages and emails.

My Father’s War: Finding Meaning in my Father’s World War II Military Service by Helaine Hartman Cohen is a deep dive into her father, Roland Hartman’s, experience as part of the 417^th regiment of the 76^th Infantry Division in Europe from November, 1944 until the end of the war.  Hartman was reluctant ever to talk about what happened to him, as one of just a handful of survivors of what he described as a suicide mission to cross the Sauer and Our Rivers eastward to penetrate the Germans’ Siegfried Line, an effort General George Patton called “a Homeric feat.” Nor would Roland Hartman say much about his subsequent months as a POW in legendary Barracks 23 of Stalag 1X-B in Bad Orb in Germany. There, prisoners faced brutal interrogations, hunger, rampant disease, vermin, inadequate clothing, beds and heating, a range of deprivations in violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention.

All Helaine knew was that her father had earned two Purple Hearts and, notably, a Silver Star (awarded for gallantry in action), but he would not say what had earned him that medal. What he would say was that he hated General Patton with passion. As with every subject Helaine researched, she wrote pages about Patton, hated by some for his harshness toward his men and unnecessary risk taking, sometimes against orders. Yet she makes clear there were others who revered Patton, and Cohen leaves the reader certain only that Patton was a complex man.

Hartman Cohen believed she could only begin to understand her father’s experience under Patton by analyzing how it fit into the overall Allied strategy and the leadership of Generals Dwight Eisenhower, along with Generals Omar Bradley, Basil Perry and the Brits’ Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery.  In the process, she got a Master’s Degree in World War II studies. She applied her passion for numbers and her skills as a Certified Public Accountant to unearth details of every aspect of that part of the European Theater.

She traveled to retrace her father’s footsteps, describing in detail the terrain. She studied existing maps and created maps of her own. She scrupulously studied weather patterns and how they influenced military operations.  She learned all about the fortifications in that part of the Siegfried Line, built by Hitler in the 1930’s. She wasn’t content to learn about the infantry but described the roles of artillery, armored units, chemical and signal units, engineers and medics. I was particularly interested in the combat medics, doctors who went onto active battlefields to sweep up injured soldiers and get them to medical care. That was the role played by my father-in-law, Dr. Joseph Barron, a role he, too, was reluctant to talk about.

She goes into voluminous detail about weaponry, organization of military personnel, chess-like moves on the vast landscape of armed engagements. Hartman Cohen’s application of her skills in taxes and accounting evolves into a forensic analysis of this part of the war. Readers who want the story but not as many numbers may grow impatient with the amount of detail. They may also admire the scope and depth of her work, spurred by wanting a more comprehensive understanding of how these events shaped her father’s life and what he would become.

A stark contrast to the previous book, but worthy in its own right.

Pantelis Christos Karatasakis’s Diary of a Soldier in the Asia Minor Campaign 1919-1921, with an introduction by his son Alec P. Karys, is another in this same genre, but a different war – an ordinary soldier’s perspective on a larger historical event. Pantelis was drafted into the Greek Army from his small village in the Peloponnese in 1919 to fight in his homeland’s disastrous war against the Turks, the Asia-Minor Campaign. In 2000, his son Alec came into possession of Pantelis’s wartime diaries.

The father’s poignant stories of wartime hardships are interspersed with poems that take a deep dive into the soldier’s innermost feelings. Son Alec amplifies the personal narrative with the historical context for the war. The book presents Pantelis’s Greek on the left page, the English translation on the right, and the pictures of the actual handwritten diary at the end.  An interesting read for a Hellenophile like my husband.

These privately published memoirs seem edited primarily to preserve family legacies but also remind us on this Memorial Day of how government decisions, for better or worse, have life-changing impacts on millions of ordinary lives.