“August 1945. We drop anchor in Tokyo Bay, begin unloading equipment, and send the troops ashore in attack waves. A few weeks ago the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and just a few days ago the Emperor Hirohito went on…

“After twenty-two months in the South Pacific, I was sent back to the United States and given twenty days leave so I could visit with my wife and my first-born son, Herman Eugene Talmadge, Jr., whom I had not seen. When that leave was up I was…

“I was born and raised in Georgia. Four generations of my ancestors sleep beneath Georgia’s sod. I am a graduate of the University of Georgia. My father and my grandfather also were students at the University of Georgia, and walked those paths, and…

“V-E Day was the day that Germany signed the armistice. I was in Reims, France. Reims, France was right next door to Lucky Strike and I was in Reims that day, that night when the armistice was signed and bedlam, bedlam. Edna was in London when the…

“We were flying toward a target and I was leading the top element. Remember that’s three airplanes and I wasn’t being real close to the formation because we were not close to the target yet. And all of a sudden we heard the radio band it’s twelve…

“We heard small arm fire over the hill and then a little bit later the tanks came across. This was the 29th of April and this was Patton and he came in and he was about the second tank. Fortunately, they came in and broke the gates down and put the…

“We were grounded flyers and we had our wings, but we came up with, somebody in the camp came up with a symbol for us which was our wings with a chain and a ball attached to it. So we used our dog tag chains and the cans of food we got from red…

“We left off there at Stalag III. This was about the 7th or the 8th of June. We went down the 30th of May. This is the 7th or 8th of June and we were standing there by the loading platform and this real mean looking German guard came out hands on…

“So everybody got out and then I got out. This was my first parachute jump. I went out through the navigator’s hatch below and I said ‘Lord, help me get through this.’ I knew I only had two things. One was to get killed or do it. There was no…

“I was happy as I could be or dumb and happy shall we say until I saw the first flight coming up. Our mission was to hit the V-1 bombs. They looked like ski jumps, so we called them ski jumps. They were on the coast of France... So our first mission…