Monday, May 23, 2011

"If you don't preserve the stories, then history is lost"

It was 1945 and Crawford, an 87-year-old Franklin Army veteran, was fighting in the Ruhy Valley in western Germany. His sergeant sent him to an old lumberyard up on a hill to see if there was any salvageable lumber. Instead, he found two German soldiers. 
"I pointed my gun at them and they stood with their guns pointed at me," Crawford recalled Tuesday. "It felt like 30 minutes but it was probably only a minute." 
The Germans, demoralized from losing the war, gave up. On the way back to his unit, Crawford realized his gun was unloaded when he attempted to shoot a rabbit for its meat and nothing came out of the gun. 
While many stories like this are forgotten when veterans die, Crawford's tales of serving in the U.S. Army's 548th Field Artillery will be saved for future generations thanks to Regis Schratz, a Franklin teenager who interviewed Crawford and is making a video of his stories to be preserved in the Library of Congress.

Read more: http://www.milforddailynews.com/features/x1078554324/History-revived-in-Franklin#ixzz1NAUUW7Gj


Related post about bringing WWII veterans to the WWII Memorial in WDC 


Franklin, MA

No comments:

Post a Comment