The life of everyone who lived through World War II was changed by this worldwide upheaval. In some of the stories told here: a P-38 pilot looks down at one of his buddies frozen in the Alaskan ice, a German prisoner of war ends up in a Russian labor camp, an Army wife flirts with a judge to get a permit to buy a rationed tire, a USO dancer helps wounded soldiers forget their pain for a few moments, a thirteen-year-old boy, traveling alone from Czechoslovakia to California to join his father is stranded in Curacao. Here are forty-three accounts of the terror, pain, exuberance, boredom, kindness of that extraordinary time.