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The Boys from New Jersey

by Tom Kindre

334 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0420; ISBN 1-4120-2592-3; US$25.00, C$32.00, EUR23.00, £16.00

Tales of love, fear, bravery and survival, from one of the world's most acclaimed archives of World War II.

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About the Book      About the Author      Table of Contents      Catalogue Information

About the Book

These are the dramatic stories of ordinary young men--some of them still teenagers--who were thrust into action in World War II, and of how they coped with the dangers they faced.

In New Guinea, George Boggs leaps into a shell hole to escape an artillery bombardment only to encounter a Japanese soldier leaping in at the same time. Over the North Sea, tail gunner Forrest Clark, his plane "full of spent shells and blood," is ordered to bail out. He looks down at the frigid white-capped waters and hesitates. On Okinawa, Roland Winter's lieutenant orders him to set up a machine gun in a position Winter knows is exposed to Japanese fire. Bomber pilot Bob King is parachuting from his burning B-24 over Austria when he sees an ME 109 heading directly for him. Franklyn Johnson, shot in the chest by a sniper on D-Day, tells his second in command, "Take the men back, Gardner. I'm dying." Andrew White is swimming away from his sinking ship in the English Channel when he sees his last chance for rescue--a tugboat--barreling past him. Morton Sobin, on a secret mission to neutral Sweden, is attacked by German night fighters, and with three of his five-man crew dead and the other dying, tries to nurse his crippled plane back to base.

What all have in common is that they survived those dangers and lived to tell their stories. This book relates their experiences, and those of others, through growing up and college days to the fate that took them to the far corners of the world and back--all in their own words.

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About the Author

Tom Kindre, a retired public relations executive, is a 1942 graduate of Rutgers University and a World War II veteran. Following his 50th class reunion, he conceived the idea of an oral history of the war based on interviews of Rutgers alumni and led his classmates in a drive to launch the project, which has grown into the world-renowned Rutgers Oral History Archives. He is president of the Rutgers Living History Society and an officer in the US Coast Guard Auxiliary. His previous book, Jeanie Johnston: A Voyage Against All Odds, recounts his adventure as a crew member on the transatlantic maiden voyage of the replica Irish famine ship Jeanie Johnston.

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Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

ANCESTRAL TRAILS
"My father got out of Russia by hiding under the seat of a train. When they got to the border, he just walked across."

THE STREETS AND FIELDS OF HOME
"We had no water, no electricity, the outhouse was up the hill, but we had a grand piano and Mother sang."

HARD TIMES
"My father had one job after another. We moved so many times I must have gone to ten or eleven different schools."

COLLEGE DAYS
"It was a little college. You'd meet the Dean on College Avenue and he'd say, 'How'd you do on the math exam?'"

AND ALONG CAME LOVE
"She probably didn't even know where New Jersey was, but she took me home to her mother and gave me a decent meal."

TRAINING CAMPS
"I remember seeing those guys in the stockade who wouldn't jump, and I said to myself, 'I'm gonna jump!'"

THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
"We went up this river, liberating China, and hundreds of people along the banks waved American flags to welcome us."

THE CHAOS OF COMBAT
"You shot him because he was the enemy, but when he lay there dying, he was a human being."

EPILOGUE

RUTGERS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES

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Catalogue Information

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