Primary Sources: Oral History Project

Ria Gonzalez was born while her town – located on the Frisian island of Texel in Holland –  was occupied by Germany during WWII. Bombing by the Allies and occupiers was a constant, especially during the last two years of the war. The trauma she experienced stayed with her for decades. Her home...

Esio “Big Joe” Bertoncini fought in the European front and was wounded three times in action – the last time with a near fatal wound that shattered his jaw. What follows are excerpts from a chronological account of Joe’s wartime service that he dictated in the 1980s. Read a sampling of his many...

An 18-year-old from Erie, Pa., Richard “Dick” Koeck was an unlikely candidate to fill out the U.S. Army’s pioneering 10th Mountain Division, which fought the decisive “Fire in the Mountain” battle of Mt. Belvedere and Riva Ridge, taking key German strongholds in the Apennines. Not a skier or much...

John Kriz served in the Air Force prior to and during the Korean War, volunteering for a duty most people would flatly refuse: typhoon tracker. John and his crewmates chased typhoons around the Pacific, actually flying into the center of storms to collect their data. “[O]nce you got into the...

Velma Gunselman entered the Navy as a nurse and was stationed in Philadelphia’s massive naval hospital before being sent to a “little fishing village” in Solomons, Md. There, Velma treated sailors who became ill or were injured while working on the Navy’s “top secret” mine testing. She remembers...