My father, Kenneth Crouch, served with the Navy in World War II. As the youngest son of a farm family, he was a late enlistment; he didn’t enter service until August of 1944. By that time, the Allies had taken Italy, and the Normandy landing was just two months prior. Hitler was still fighting back hard, and the war in the Pacific still raged. After training camp in Great Lakes, Michigan, my father went to Solomons, Maryland, for amphibious warfare training.
Later, there was the long train ride across country to Portland, Oregon, and then on to Seattle, Washington, where they waited for their ship to carry them out to sea and battle. During that time, my father contracted a severe respiratory infection that put him in the infirmary. The ship sailed without him, and he was sent to the Naval Hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, for recovery. I am thankful for that infection. Otherwise, I might not be here today.
My father spoke of his time in the Navy often, and I loved hearing his stories. When I went to Italy the first time, my dad, who never traveled outside the country, said if he could go anywhere it would be Italy. He had a friend who “fell in Italy” during the war and his body was never brought home.
The reality of a trip at that point was too much for him, but when my husband and I returned to Italy on a later trip, we decided to explore some of the World War II sites. We talked with my husband’s uncle, Clark Farley, who also served in Italy and was on the trail from Sicily to Salerno to Cassino and on to Rome.
On that trip, we made time for the Anzio Cemetery, the American burial site for all the soldiers who died in the Italian Campaign, except for the nearly forty percent who were returned home for burial by their families.
The peaceful rows of white crosses against the verdant green grass was a visual that stuck with me when I wrote Grounded. I included a character, Ephraim, who was long dead but had served in World War II, falling at Anzio. I couldn’t get this character out of my head, and even though he wasn’t an active character in my first book, I knew there was more to his story that had to be told in Guarded.
I also knew that I wanted to tell Ephraim’s story through letters. By God’s divine providence, I was at a dinner party when the subject of my next book came up. When I shared my plans to research this era and write letters, Dr. Brian Ellis said he had a great-uncle who wrote letters home from the North Africa/Italy campaign during World War II—and would I like to borrow them? This great-uncle was from a Kentucky farm family, just like my character.
Reading those letters from Samuel Baker, who left his farm in Lewisport, Kentucky, to serve our country in a land far away filled me with the language and thoughts such a boy would have. He often comforted and assured his mother of his eventual return. He sometimes spoke of his current life. Mostly he talked of the farm and peppered the letters with questions of what was going on back home. In some cases, I used the exact language of those letters in order to give readers a sense of what he felt and thought.
The plotline of Ephraim falling in love with Elena, the shopkeeper’s daughter, is entirely fictional, as is the character of Ephraim. Samuel Baker survived the war and was able to return home to his beloved farm; he was tragically killed in a car accident by a drunk driver not many years later.
I am very grateful to Dr. Brian and Laurie Ellis, along with his mother, Sue, who had a similar relationship with her uncle that I imagined Beulah and Ephraim to have. The cover of Guarded shows “Annie” holding letters sent home from Samuel Baker.
Before writing this book, I was completely naïve to all the “G.I. babies” that were left on foreign soil by American soldiers. Some soldiers, like Ephraim, were killed and never knew a child existed. Some moved on to other points of battle and may have never known they left children behind. Sadly, some were simply abandoned. There are websites dedicated to reunited fathers with children, although the overlap between the Internet’s accessibility and the advancing age of the fathers made for a small window of opportunity. There are success stories, and I cried many tears reading them.
Another outstanding resource for my writing was Audie Murphy’s autobiography, To Hell and Back, which details America’s most decorated soldier’s account of the Italian Campaign. The fictional letter from Arnie Mason was written in the style of Audie Murphy. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about the Italian Campaign from someone who lived it.
In early 2014, my husband and I returned to Italy to do the on-the-ground research. We started in Morocco, North Africa, then moved to Sicily and then up the coast of Italy, retracing the path as much as we could. All of this was not necessary to the writing, but while reading To Hell and Back, I wanted to have a greater understanding of what these brave troops endured and risked. We stood on the banks of the Volturno River and saw what a terrible advantage the Germans had, and then even more up the road at Monte Cassino. We traveled back to Anzio and this time toured the museum and beachhead where the Allies landed and were stalled for several deadly months. Like so many of our boys, this is where Ephraim’s journey ended.
We visited again the cemetery at Anzio and the white crosses stretching over green grass. There I found the name of my father’s friend, but it was not on a cross. It was on a wall inside a memorial for those whose bodies were never found. Strangely enough, we were there on the 70th anniversary of the Anzio landings.
My father’s voice is silent now, like most of our World War II veterans, but I would like to think he would be especially proud of this book.