Additional information
by Aaron Elson (Author)
Dale Albee enlisted in the horse cavalry in 1938. Three years later, as a sergeant, he helped turn a trainload of 500 raw recruits, some of whom only saw a horse in the front of a milk wagon as they stumbled home from a bar, into skilled horsemen who could roll a Bull Durham cigarette at a gallop, or at least could come close. A year later the 11th Cavalry was sent to Fort Benning and mechanized as part of the 10th Armored Division. In 1943, the independent 712th Tank Battalion was broken out of the 10th Armored. The 712th landed in Normandy three weeks after D-Day and spent the next 311 days fighting alongside the 90th Infantry Division through Northern France, the Battle of the Bulge, the Siegfried Line, and into Czechoslovakia, along the way earning a reputation as the armored fist of the 90th. Albee, in a "light" 17-ton M5 Stuart tank, was with the battalion all the way, starting out as a platoon sergeant and earning a battlefield commission, along with two Purple Hearts. This blow-by-blow account of his combat across Europe was recorded by oral historian Aaron Elson, whose father, 2nd Lt. Maurice Elson, served in a different company of the 712th. Aaron attended a reunion of the battalion in 1987 and spent the next 20 years recording the stories of its veterans.
Author Biography
Aaron Elson attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion in 1987, seven years after the death of his father, a veteran of the battalion. He was so moved by the stories he heard that he returned with a tape recorder. He's been preserving veterans' stories ever since, with an archive of more than 600 hours of interviews. He has written several books of oral history and produced a unique line of oral history audiobooks in the veterans' own voices. His work has been used as source material in more than two dozen popular books about World War II and a dozen documentaries, including "The Color of War" and "Patton 360," both of which have been shown on the History Channel. He is currently working on a book about the life of Marine Sgt. Mathew Caruso, a chaplain's assistant who sacrificed his life to save the chaplain during the Chosin Reservoir campaign in the Korean War. The Mathew Caruso Memorial Chapel in Camp Pendleton is named in his honor.
