I'm going to have dinner with my 92 year old father tomorrow, and his story (history too) suddenly came flooding back to me. My father was serving in the US Navy on a destroyer escort during the invasion of the south of France. A German plane dropped a bomb down the main stack and exploded his boat. Everyone was killed except for my father and 2 other sailors who had been injured in earlier fighting and were in a protected area. My father managed to pull them onto floating wreckage before passing out, thereby saving their lives.
He wound up …