Blood and Candles

About the Book

In the author's words, taken from the preface:
"I went on active duty on the first day of July 1943, and was discharged in March 1946. Between those dates I experienced the frightening, the pathetic, the moving, the ridiculous, the funny and the unbelievable, all to a degree I would not have thought possible.
Just short of my twenty-second birthday I entered the Army a bookish, somewhat introverted person. For what happened then, read on."

A remarkable story of courage, resourcefulness, tragedy and humor, Blood and Candles is unlike any other account of World War II that has ever been published.
The author's combat duty lasted for seven months during which he served as a runner or scout, sometimes finding himself alone behind enemy lines. Once he was even captured by the Americans and was almost shot as a German spy posing as an American. How he got out of that jam and many others will keep the reader fascinated from cover to cover.
While the climax of the book describes some of the most intense combat of the war, in which almost everyone around him was killed or seriously wounded, the author's experiences during basic training and after the War, attending the Sorbonne under the auspices of the Army, are equally fascinating.

About the Author

Edward T. Richardson, Jr. was born in Portland, Maine on August 22, 1921. His family moved to South Portland in 1925, where he has lived since that time. He is a graduate of South Portland High School and Bowdoin College. He took courses at the University of Paris while serving with the Army in 1945 and after the War he attended Northeastern University Law School on the GI Bill, graduating in 1950.

His activities as a member of the United States Army in the Second World War, including extensive combat experience, are documented in this book. He received the Combat Infantry Badge for the European Theater and North Atlantic Theater of Operations ribbons.

Mr. Richardson was admitted to the Maine Bar in 1950 and became associated with a law firm specializing in insurance company defense work. His law practice soon branched out into a variety of fields including real estate and probate law and a specialization in conservation law.

In addition to his law practice Mr. Richardson also operated an insurance photography business, taught Constitutional Law at the Portland University Law School, and was a Field Investigator for the American Bar Foundation in connection with legal representation for indigent defendants in the Maine criminal courts. He has served on both state and local boards and commissions relating to the environment. As a lawyer Mr. Richardson is most noted for his pioneering work in the formation and development of several conservation organizations, most notably The Nature Conservancy, to which he devoted thirty years as counsel, trustee and officer. He wrote Maine's first Conservation Easement statute, was a founding member and secretary of the organization that pushed through the referendum that resulted in the acquisition of the Bigelow Mountain Range as a public domain, and he is the author of a history of the Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy published in 1989.

Since his high school years Mr. Richardson has been an avid photographer and some of his wartime photographs are included in this book. He has taught and lectured in the field of nature photography and has made a particular specialty of black and white photography, developing and printing his own work since 1935. His photographs have been exhibited and published from time to time and he has received numerous awards for his photographic work.

His interests and hobbies over the years, in addition to photography, have included hiking, camping and mountain climbing. Throughout his life he has had a passionate interest in classical music and he has a substantial record collection.