As I have noted before, every now and then I get a piece of fan mail that touches me. This one arrived a few days ago. I would proudly go hike with this fellow (for you readers that are not ham radio operators, CQ is an amateur radio magazine):

Sorry about not keeping my wonderful
readers up to date. So much has happened since my last posting in
late August, it seems like a lifetime ago.

Jane and I covered 13 countries in all
and since the last posting we were in France, Luxembourg, Belgium,
Germany and The Netherlands. Our original intention was to leave from
Copenhagen, Denmark, by ship, on October first. Things progressed
quicker than planned and we found we had a few weeks to kill before
the ship sailed. Jane was anxious to return home and wanted to fly, I
preferred the ship. Finally, it came down to a coin toss and I
lost—we flew out of Amsterdam.

As many of my readers know, I’ve been
working on a book about our hike of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
I’ve decided to put it on the back burner because something much more
urgent has come up.

My father, Ernest R. Blanchard, was in
the 82^nd Airborne Paratrooper Division in World War II.
Unbeknownst to me, he has a story that needs to be told. He fought in
North Africa, and then parachuted into Sicily, Italy, Normandy,
France and then Nijmegen, Holland. Additionally, he was transported
by truck to fight in the Battle of the Bulge at La Gleize, Belgium.

As we traveled around Europe, I learned
so much about him and the battles he was involved in that I just had
to tell his story. He would have been 100 years old this year, but
passed away in 1983. He was the recipient of three Purple Heart
Medals, the Silver Star, Bronze Star and a host of other medals. He
never talked about it.

I started researching his story before
I left on our five-and-a-half-month journey, but never realized what
I was getting into. I knew that when he parachuted in Ste Mère
Eglise he had landed in a tree, but the story was much more complex
than that. He and another fellow, Pvt. Blankenship, both landed about
the same time, Blankenship was killed immediately by machine gun fire
coming from the church steeple. They couldn’t see my father that
well, and he managed to cut his parachute cords and drop 25 feet to
the ground and got away, all the time carrying 85 pounds of
equipment. Miraculously, he didn’t get hurt or break his legs. He did
cut off a good portion of his thumb when he cut the chute lines.

Of the fourteen men that jumped from
his plane, only four lived through the night. The most famous of them
was Pvt. John Steele, he ended up hanging from the church steeple.
The town hangs a parachute and simulated paratrooper from the steeple
each year in his honor. Another trooper, Sgt. John Ray, landed next
to the church and a German soldier came around the corner and shot
Ray in the stomach, and then turned to shoot both Steele, and another
trooper hanging on the other end of the church, Pvt. Ken Russell.
Before he could fire, Sgt. Ray managed to pull his pistol and shoot
the German soldier. Ray then died. Russell cut his parachute lines
and escaped and Steele was captured later.

I started researching this story in
greater detail and discovered so much more about that night…too
much to cover here. Let me just tell you that it is quite a story.
While in Ste Mère Eglise we were looking through books that might
turn up something about my father’s story. Jane found a book,
American Paratrooper Helmets, by Michel de Trez, that had a photo of
my father’s helmet on pgs. 106-107, plus photos of him that I had
never seen before. The helmet was in a museum in La Gleize, Belgium,
so once we finished our business in France, we headed for Belgium. We
met with Michel, he runs the museum, December
44, and he invited us to have a look at the helmet and other
items he had related to my father. National Belgian Television sent
out a team to film the event and you can see a video of it on the web
page: WhereDadDroppedIn.com.
The book about my father is titled Where Dad Dropped In; An 82^nd
Airborne Troopers Story. The photo on the page shows my father just
before they left for the drop in Normandy on D-Day.

There is so much more to tell, but this
is already long enough. Check the book’s web site often for more
information as I add to it. I won’t be able to post as often as I
would like here (or there) since I really need to be writing the
book. My plan is to have it ready for March, 2014. That will be the
70^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion and would be an
appropriate time to have it ready. Stay tuned.