Interviews with Veterans

This is one of my favorite veteran interviews. Mr. Mills responded to a notice I put out in NJ (when we lived there). He telephoned me one day and talked to me in this voice you hear on this video. He told me where he lived which was some distance away and asked if i could come to him. I said I could but I had some interview sessions set up in my town at an assisted living facility meeting room (Sparta) in the next week and if he could show up, please do. He said "Well, we need to get a move on this -- we (WWII vets) are dying like flies out here!"

 I interviewed a lot of these heroes long before the official USA push to collect interviews for the National Archives. Actually, I got started with these interviews sometime after I left the corporate world. My first few attempts were with some Tin Can sailors from a group I joined from my own military experience. Once at an annual meeting of those veterans, I heard a man speak about that day of INFAMY, December 8, 1941. My initial response was the same as most of the sailors there (poor man, he is losing is mind).

Then Mr. Otto Schwarz explained his ship the USS Houston, was the flagship for the Asiatic Fleet and THEY were in Philippine waters when the coordinated attacks occurred across the Pacific. The international date line separated their calendar day to Monday, while the middle and Eastern Pacific were still Sunday. But by chronological time order, the attacks across the Pacific occurred in the same block of time. The other thing that startled me in Mr. Schwarz's talk was his mention of "The Bridge on The RIver Kwai". The Asiatic Fleet was destroyed along with the British and Australian and Dutch fleets in the Western Pacific and many of the survivors became slave labor for the famous "Death Railway" and "the bridge".

The Asiatic Fleet fully expected an attack. They were ready. They were prepared to battle the Japanese until help arrived from Pearl Harbor. That was the plan ... before December 7, 1941. The entire multinational force of Allied fleets in the Western Pacific only lasted about 3 months before resting on the bottom of the sea.

I respectfully asked Mr. Schwarz if I could visit him and help him get his slide show transferred with narration to a VHS tape. He agreed and the next five or six years as time permitted I interviewed him and his shipmates and eventually produced a DVD which is available from buzzcreek.com . From that point on, I interviewed veterans of all kinds every chance I had. A few are sampled for just a portion of the whole interview, like this one with Mr. Mills, and are placed on my youtube channel at www.me3tv.org .

Well --- now I have hundreds of DVDs in my collection (many of them these veteran interviews and some are duplicates of those sent to the National Archives - like the one for Mr. Mills). I need to find a GEEK who will transfer ALL my DVDs - maybe a thousand or more - to a set of external hard drives for posterity. Is there a Geek out there that would volunteer to do this for the benefit of owning a copy? or maybe for a small fee like $2 per disc to transfer? I provide the external drives.

Let me know. All my contact information is at www.savethecollards.com . After having this done, I plan to donate ALL my DVDs to the UWF Panhandle Archives where they will be cared for and anyone can reference them into the future.

https://www.youtube.com/user/me3tv/search?query=mills+wwii