Reel Heroes to Real Heroes & Real Heroes to Reel Heroes

About the Book

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the lives of all the men profiled in this book changed. The attack brought the country together in a way it had never seen before, or since. Recruiting offices were swamped with volunteers enlisting to avenge the sneak attack that had occurred that Sunday morning.

The enlistees included farm boys from Texas, college students from Massachusetts, laborers from Detroit, professional men from New York and movie stars from Hollywood. It included men and women from every walk of life in every state and territory. Some of the biggest movie stars of the time answered the call and they answered it not to serve as entertainers or be actors in Signal Corps training films, they sought out and found hazardous duty flying combat missions in bombers and fighters, sailing the waters of the North Atlantic and the South Pacific. They jumped out of planes behind enemy lines on D-Day. They were at the Battle of the Bulge; they ran supplies to anti-Nazi guerillas through German blockades, they hit Omaha Beach with the first wave on the morning of June 6th, 1944, and filmed the carnage of Tarawa while under intense enemy fire. And one, who became a movie star after the war, won the Congressional Medal of Honor while becoming the most decorated American soldier of World War II.

Many men left the military after the war with ambitions they wouldn't have dreamed of prior to serving, but the GI Bill availed them to opportunities that heretofore weren't a possibility. The stars who served returned to their acting careers and were joined by a whole new generation of stars for the fifties and beyond. The amazing stories of the movie stars who became war heroes and the war heroes who became movie and TV stars is what this book is all about.

About the Author

Richard Williams was born in Fort William, Ontario, Canada, in 1937. His family moved to Inglewood, California, in 1952, for his father's health. Richard served with the United States Air Force from 1956 to 1958 as a camera repairman at Misawa Air Force base in Japan. He received a hardship discharge in 1958, at his mother's request following the death of his father.

He attended Woodbury College in Los Angeles, earning a degree in Accounting and spent the next forty years working in the financial field for companies like Rockwell, Int., Hughes Aircraft Co., Raytheon and Precision Therapeutics Inc.

He currently lives in retirement on Whidbey Island, Washington, spending his time writing, composing songs and playing Internet poker.