Elson, Aaron

Aaron Elson attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion in 1987, seven years after the death of his father, a veteran of the battalion. He was so moved by the stories he heard that he returned with a tape recorder. He's been preserving veterans' stories ever since, with an archive of more than 600 hours of interviews. He has written several books of oral history and produced a unique line of oral history audiobooks in the veterans' own voices. His work has been used as source material in more than two dozen popular books about World War II and a dozen documentaries, including "The Color of