“I felt absolutely ecstatic. I’ll try not to be self-appreciating, but I have one of the sexiest pictures of me you ever saw in your life of me in a helmet and goggles. It was absolutely fabulous.  I love it.  It is a beauty, it really is. I mean…

“They put us on the midnight shift and you had, it was at the shipyard and we weren’t close to the shipyard and we had to ride one bus and change buses in the middle of town and everything was blacked out. There was not a sight of light anywhere and…

"The final day of school they took everyone in our class and sent them to the amphibious forces in Camp Bradford, Virginia. Now, instead of having the nice Navy blues and so forth, they gave me an out of draft uniform, 30-30 rifle, combat shoes,…

"And then they sent me up to electrician’s school, and the most complex thing I had ever done electrically was to screw in a lightbulb, so why in the world they would pick me to go to electrician’s school, I have no idea. At any rate, that was a…

"Well, life on the base there, it was pretty good. The duty was light; we were just waiting for the ships, and they weren’t there. So we played cards. We went into town. There was very little else to do. There was a problem that I had, and again…

“At any rate, I joined the Navy when I was 17, went to boot camp at Sampson, New York. Very cold up there. Why I joined the Navy? I have no idea. I had never even seen the ocean before. But I went to boot camp."

“During the war Carl was classified as a conscientious objector and was assigned to a special troop division. These were troops used to hold a line while other troops were pulled back. He fought outside of Stalingrad and his position was overrun; he…

Editor's Note: When the war intensified, the Nazi regime sent school kids into the countryside, and Eugene began to live away from his family. Eugene lived with a group of boys near the Polish border. “We were housed in a youth hostel in the village…

“We had a lot of troubles with the Hitler Youth leaders since we were considered Americans. I did get into a lot of fights, until my father paid them a visit… The German law required all children to enter the organized German Youth, or Deutsche…

"I started out really as a photographer at an air base squadron at Tuskegee, Alabama. And incidentally at Tuskegee it was the training for black pilots. About 1,000 were actually given wings at this institution. It really was not at Tuskegee…