My Grandfather, John R. Stiles, left his farm home in Ohio, crossed to Canada and joined the Canadian Army and served for three years in France and Belgium in World War 1. He returned at the end of the war, had difficulties getting back into America due to his serving in the Canadian Army and while waiting to sort out the papers, he fell in love with a lovely English lass, Mildred Maude Victoria Blake, who had just come over to Canada a few years before from Great Yarmouth. They were married, moved back to Ohio and raised 11 children, among which was my mom.

My father, William C Todd lied about his age and joined the Army Air Corps, and flew 32 missions in WW2 as a tail gunner on a B17 stationed in Diss in Norfolk. Actually the first few missions he was a ball turret gunner but then he put on a little weight and ballooned up to 165 with the good English grub and beer and alas was relegated to the tailgunner. Ball turret gunners had to be rather small.

My uncle Fred Stiles, was also stationed in Norfolk but flew B 24s. He was shot down on Easter Sunday 1945 over Bremerhoven, his plane crashed in a small town in Denmark. A young lad saw the plane come down and rode his bicycle out to the wreck, helped the two survivors to a haystack where he hid them out for a day from the Germans, and then arranged for the Danish underground to rescue them and get them to Norway to safety a few days later. My Uncle was not one of the survivors. He was buried in Denmark as an unknown American soldier for several years until his remains were identified and he, along with the remains of another airman are now buried in Arlington Cemetary in a single grave. I was able to go to Denmark a few years ago to meet the elderly gentleman who as a young boy had rescued the 2 airman from my uncle's plane. We went to the crash site, then to the cemetary where we placed flowers, an American flag and a Danish flag on the mass grave that remains there to this day.