STORIES BEHIND THE STARS: Honoring those who sacrificed it all in WWII

Over 421,000 American military service members gave their lives in World War II, and sadly the sacrifices they made for us are slowly fading out of our collective memories. However, the Stories Behind the Stars project has set out to change that.

Stories behind the Stars is a nationwide all-volunteer effort with the goal of ensuring that each and every one of the over 421,000 American service men and women who lost their lives in World War II are remembered as more than just a statistic in a book or an overgrown grave marker in a local cemetery. The project is named after the gold star banner that families of an American service member lost in WWII displayed in their window.

Bob Fuerst, a NASA engineer by day, serves as the Alabama State Director for the Stories Behind the Stars project and led a small team of volunteers from across the state who have recently completed researching and writing stories of all 6,426 Alabamians who lost their lives during WWII. Working from the official casualty records, as well as names on local WWII memorials, period newspaper articles, cemetery records, and other references, this total is believed to be the most complete accounting of Alabama’s WWII dead. The stories are being shared on a daily basis via a Facebook page named “Remembering Alabama WWII Fallen”.

The ambitious project began as one WWII history buff’s hobby to write a story a day of a fallen WWII service member on what would have been their one hundredth birthday. The stories were shared on the writer’s blog and later on Facebook, and attracted a growing audience.

“I discovered his blog in 2018. It was something I looked forward to reading every day,” recalled Fuerst. In late 2018, due to work commitments, the blogger sought volunteers to help write some of the stories. Fuerst, an avid reader of WWII history, was one of several who answered the call, and ended up writing around one hundred stories for the blog. By the end of 2020, the blog had received over a million views and one man’s hobby eventually morphed into the Stories Behind the Stars project.

So far, in a little over four years, several hundred Stories Behind the Stars volunteers, from all 50 states and a dozen other countries, have researched and written stories of over 65,000 American WWII fallen. The volunteers come from all ages and backgrounds; some are as young as high school age while others are retired. Some are amateur genealogists like Fuerst or seasoned researchers with years of research experience, but most are not. An important aspect of this project is that all stories written for the project are being saved to a common online database so they can be easily read by anyone completely free of charge.

“No one is making money from this, there’s no advertising or clickbait. It’s purely being done out of just trying to honor and remember these heroes of the greatest generation for the sacrifices they made to keep the world free,” said Fuerst of the motivation behind the project.

Fuerst personally researched and wrote the stories of the 196 fallen from Madison County, and found that they were involved in many of the key battles of World War II. One of Fuerst’s initial stories was that of Luther Isom, a Huntsville native, who served aboard the battleship USS Arizona and lost his life at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He later shared Isom’s story and several others on a Facebook page dedicated to the stories of Madison County fallen.

“Through that page, his niece reached out to me and thanked me for honoring her uncle, and in fact, invited me to a wreath laying ceremony on his grave on December 7, 2021, which was the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor,” recounted Fuerst. “It’s gratifying to hear from a relative of a fallen that I’ve written about, especially when the story has helped bring closure for the family”.

The process for constructing these stories includes a lot of online research using resources such as ancestry.com, fold3.com, and digitized newspapers along with official military databases.

“It’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You find little bits of information in different places and you craft a story from that,” described Fuerst.

“We want these folks to be remembered as more than just a marker at a cemetery. Every one of these fallen service members was somebody’s son or brother or father and there was a story to their life that deserves to be honored and remembered,” Fuerst said.

Fuerst’s work has done just that in the instance of Lieutenant Leroy Sugg of Huntsville. Sugg was a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber pilot who completed 25 combat missions over France and Germany, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross in the process, and then returned to the States to serve as a flight instructor. In 1944, Lt Sugg sacrificed his life to save the rest of his crew when the engine of the B-29 Superfortress he was piloting caught fire and crashed in a training accident. Today, Sugg is buried under a simple headstone in Maple Hill Cemetery.

“If you walk past his grave, you’d never know that. All the headstone has is his name and his birth year and death year. There’s nothing to indicate that he served in the military, and so I now make a point of putting a flag on his grave every year for Memorial Day because no one else would know to do that,” said Fuerst.

Stories Behind the Stars relies on volunteers, like Fuerst, to tell the stories of and give recognition to heroes like Sugg and Isom, and there are thousands of stories left to be written. Volunteers undergo an online training process, known as ‘boot camp’, before they begin writing and then are given free access to tools such as ancestry.com and other databases to use in their research. Fuerst says volunteers are welcome to write as much or as little as they have time for. Some join just to write the story of a relative and others contribute hundreds of stories over the course of years.

Many more volunteers are needed to complete this historic project. Anyone interested in volunteering is encouraged to begin by submitting an online form at storiesbehindthestars.org.

For those interested in reading some of the stories, all of the completed stories can be found on fold3.com and Fuerst’s stories of Madison Countians can be found on the “WWII Fallen of Madison County, Alabama” Facebook page.

For more information, you can contact Fuerst at bob.al@storiesbehindthestars.org.