CONTRIBUTED TO THE OBSERVER
ALABAMA — More than 421,000 U.S. military service members gave their lives in World War II, and sadly, the sacrifices they made are slowly fading out of Americans’ collective memories. The Stories Behind the Stars project, however, has set out to change that.
Stories Behind the Stars is a nationwide all-volunteer effort with the goal of ensuring that each of the American service men and women who lost their lives in World War II are remembered as more than just a statistic in a book or an overgrown grave marker in a local cemetery. The project is named after the gold star banners that were displayed in the windows of homes where a family member was lost in WWII.
Bob Fuerst, a NASA engineer in Huntsville, serves as director for Alabama’s Stories Behind the Stars project. He led a small team of volunteers from across the state who have recently completed researching and writing stories of all 6,539 Alabamians who lost their lives during WWII. Working from the official casualty records, as well as names on local WWII memorials, period newspaper articles, cemetery records and other references, this total is believed to be the most complete accounting of Alabama’s WWII dead. Some of the stories are being shared on a daily basis via a Facebook page named “Remembering Alabama WWII Fallen.”
The ambitious project began as one WWII history buff’s hobby to write a story a day of a fallen WWII service member on what would have been his 100th birthday. The stories were shared on the writer’s blog and later on Facebook, and it attracted a growing audience.
“I discovered his blog in 2018, and it was something I looked forward to reading every day,” recalled Fuerst.
Later that year, due to work commitments, the blogger sought volunteers to help him write some of the stories. Fuerst, an avid reader of WWII history, was one of several who answered the call, and he ended up writing hundreds of stories for the blog. By the end of 2020, the blog had received over a million views and one man’s hobby had morphed into the nationwide Stories Behind the Stars project.
So far, in a little over four years, several hundred Stories Behind the Stars volunteers, from all 50 states and a dozen other countries, have researched and written stories of almost 70,000 American WWII fallen. The volunteers come from all ages and backgrounds, Some are as young as high school age while others are retired. Some are amateur genealogists like Fuerst, while a few others are seasoned researchers with years of experience, but all the volunteers are interested in preserving history for future generations. An important aspect of this project is that all stories written for the project are being saved to a common online database so they can be easily read by anyone completely free of charge.
“No one is making money from this — there’s no advertising or clickbait,” said Fuerst of the motivation behind the project. “It’s purely being done out of just trying to honor and remember these heroes of the Greatest Generation for the sacrifices they made to keep the world free.”
Fuerst personally researched and wrote the stories of the 196 fallen from Madison County and found that they were involved in many of the key battles of World War II. One of Fuerst’s initial stories was that of Luther Isom, a Huntsville native, who served aboard the battleship USS Arizona and lost his life at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He later shared Isom’s story and several others on a Facebook page dedicated to the stories of Madison County fallen.
“Through that page, [Isom’s] niece reached out to me and thanked me for honoring her uncle, and in fact, invited me to a wreath laying ceremony on his grave on Dec. 7, 2021, which was the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor,” recounted Fuerst. “It’s gratifying to hear from a relative of a fallen that I’ve written about, especially when the story has helped bring closure for the family.”
The process for constructing these stories includes a lot of online research using resources such as ancestry.com, fold3.com and digitized newspapers, along with official military databases.
“It’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You find little bits of information in different places, and you craft a story from that,” described Fuerst.
“We want these folks to be remembered as more than just a marker at a cemetery. Every one of these fallen service members was somebody’s son or brother or father, and there was a story to their life that deserves to be honored and remembered,” he said.
Fuerst’s work has done just that in the instance of Lt. Leroy Sugg of Huntsville. Sugg was a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber pilot who completed 25 combat missions over France and Germany, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross in the process, and then returned to the U.S. to serve as a flight instructor. In 1944, Lt. Sugg sacrificed his life to save the rest of his crew when the engine of the B-29 Superfortress he was piloting caught fire and crashed in a training accident. Today, Sugg is buried under a simple headstone in Maple Hill Cemetery. You can read his story at www.fold3.com/memorial/638747992/leroy-c-sugg/stories.
“If you walk past his grave, you’d never know that he served in the war. All the headstone has is his name and his birth year and death year. There’s nothing to indicate that he served in the military, and so I now make a point of putting a flag on his grave every year for Memorial Day, because no one else would know to do that,” said Fuerst.
Stories Behind the Stars relies on volunteers, like Fuerst, to tell the stories of and give recognition to heroes like Sugg and Isom, and there are thousands of stories left to be written. Volunteers undergo an online training process, known as ‘boot camp,’ before they begin writing and then are given free access to tools such as ancestry.com and other databases to use in their research. Fuerst says volunteers are welcome to write as much or as little as they have time for. Some join just to write the story of a relative, and others contribute hundreds of stories over the course of years.
Many more volunteers are needed to complete this historic project. Anyone interested in volunteering is encouraged to begin by submitting an online form at storiesbehindthestars.org.
For those interested in reading some of the stories, all of the completed stories can be found on fold3.com and stories of Alabamians can be found on the “Remembering Alabama WWII Fallen” Facebook page.
For more information, contact Fuerst at bob.al@storiesbehindthestars.org.
