Blair native releases WWII history book
A 1961 Blair High School graduate published a book inspired by his father’s service in World War II.
Author Bil Paul heard his father Harry – a rural mailman in Blair for many years – tell stories about his World War II naval service in the Aleutian Islands, but the author didn’t get serious about the subject until after his father’s death in 2008. After writing a magazine article about a sailor who served with his father, Paul got the ball rolling for his book “Awaiting the Sun: WWII Veterans Remember the Aleutians.”
The Aleutians are a thousand-mile-long chain of volcanically formed islands stretching from mainland Alaska toward the northern Japanese islands. They played a wartime role which most Americans are unaware of.
Prior to the war, they were virtually undefended, but in 1942, after Japanese forces invaded and occupied two of the outermost Aleutian islands, a large American buildup of forces began to occupy the other large islands in the chain. Eventually, the Japanese troops were either defeated in battle or left.
Paul set out to pull together a quote-intensive book where soldiers, sailors and airmen told their own stories about living and fighting in one of the worst weather theaters of the war. Beyond visiting several archives, the author listened to hundreds of online interviews with Aleutian enlisted men and officers. Approximately 300 sources were used, with the addition of numerous archival photographs and New Yorker-style cartoons from a GI newspaper on Adak Island edited by author Dashiell Hammett. Quotes from Aleutian letters sent by the author’s father are included.
The book contains several chapters about active combat, but most of the chapters offer vignettes of daily life in an area with few women, and where many GIs lived in tents year-round. Their food was often poor, with complaints about too much Spam. The GIs were usually in their late teens or early 20s and Aleutian service was often their first trip away from home. Homesickness was common and letters from girlfriends and families were good as gold.
The book is published in hardbound edition by Schiffer Publishing’s military division, located in Pennsylvania. This is Paul’s sixth non-fiction book. His last book, titled “The Train Never Stops in Dixon” is the story of a woman Pied Piper who had many in Dixon, Calif. Convinced she was going to build a $2.5 billion movie studio complex. She is now serving time.
“Awaiting the Sun: WWII Veterans Remember the Aleutians” is available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.
