The Project

I am the eldest of five children, and when we were growing up the story of how our parents met and married during World War II was family folklore.

“Daddy’s plane ‘Liberty Lady’ crash landed in Sweden on the day of the first daylight bombing over Berlin. He went to work for the OSS (the ‘oh-so-secret-society’ and precursor to the CIA) where he met a beautiful secretary who worked there too. They fell in love and got married in Stockholm …”

After our Mother died in 2007, I was working at their home, cleaning up and clearing out, and I brought home boxes filled with files, articles, letters, and photographs. I began to realize that we had to preserve our parents’ history and put it all together in a book.

The title of the book will be “Liberty Lady”, the name of the B-17 that crashed and in which our Dad was the bombardier.

My goal is that by writing this blog, others who are also interested in preserving wartime histories will find it and help me fill in the empty spaces.

My Dad is Herman F. Allen
My Mom, Hedvig Elizabeth Johnson Allen (“Hedy”)

Herman lives in a wonderful Assisting Living apartment in Columbia, SC. He is 94 years old, and he is doing fine. His memory of the war is gone, however, so we have had to search for other people who were there and who might remember.

I’m searching for clues …