My Father and My Uncles: One Family's Call to Service in World War II

My Father and My Uncles: One Family's Call to Service in World War II, a simple tale of one man's family who served in the Second World War. From the author's father to four of his uncles, plus one man considered a member of the family, the author takes the reader on a journey through multiple theaters of war and multiple service branches.

These six young men came from modest financial upbringings, and none of them had really been anywhere. They were soon to be spread out across the globe. Combined, they were on six of the earth's seven continents. Each man was a small cog in a large, sweeping piece of history.

His family served in the United States Army, the Army Air Corps (predecessor to the Air Force), and the United States Marine Corps. Along the way the author describes a number of unique coincidences. He supplements his own narrative with quotes from conversations and correspondence with his relatives.

The author ends the family's story with brief information about what happened to each man, along with a brief discussion of the author's own military service after the Korean War in the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, at the border of North Korea and South Korea.

Included is a carefully transcribed and photographic reproduction of his father's handwritten World War II Mission Journal, detailing many of his missions flying across Europe for the Army Air Corps. His father ran bomb runs from Italy to Romania, France, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.

Also included is an essay by one of his uncles that was written to honor Colonel Hank Mucci at his passing, memorializing Mucci's formation of an Army Ranger unit from a pack-mule artillery team.

Jim Hodge is a veteran who served in the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean peninsula in 1966 as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army, 2nd Infantry Division. He later served as an assistant instructor at the Army's Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit where he met his beautiful wife Sue. Jim is also the author of the novel, When Troubles Rain. The home front scenes of his novel are set in the environs of Stoughton, Wisconsin. The military scenes in When Troubles Rain are set in the austere Korean peninsula where Jim learned to appreciate a desperately poor people's struggle to remain free. The Hodges live northwest of Detroit. They have two adult children and three amazing grand-children. Jim is a member of the Military Writers Society of America.