If you are on this page, you are looking at the entire library.

Eleven books.

Over a million words. Over 3600 pages of reading.

Sixteen pounds. Large Print option, 22 pounds! 

UPDATE 12.12.24: 

 LARGE PRINT BACKORDERED and Arriving Dec 20, 2024 - Jan 6, 2025, ships when stock arrives.

USE THE DROPDOWN MENU TO CHOOSE FROM PAPERBACKS*, HARDCOVERS,  UNSIGNED, OR AUTHOR AUTOGRAPHED, FROM THE DROPDOWN MENU...

*NEW! ALSO LARGE PRINT EDITIONS! 

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Here you will find THE ENTIRE LIBRARY of NARRATIVE ORAL HISTORY AT ITS FINEST written to date by Matthew Rozell. 

Contains VOLS. 1-10 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® Series Book Collection, AND A Train Near Magdeburg, Adult edition (11 books total), paperback or hardcover. Read the reviews on the individual book pages.

This collection is packaged with a collector's bookmark listing titles to date. Each book collection is available in PAPERBACK or collector's HARDCOVER with embossed spine and glossy color dust jacket. Choose your option in the dropdown menu.

Volume 1 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series begins in an upstate NY community, which LOOK Magazine designated as Hometown, USA for a 6-issue patriotic spread in 1944, a microcosm of every other small-town community in the country.

It starts with my quest for a young sailor's body, killed at Pearl Harbor, and follows our young men and women across the Pacific.

Over thirty survivors who fought from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay give firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no American community unscathed. Includes maps, photos, and never-before-seen portraits. Here are the real stories that LOOK Magazine could not tell.

307 PAGES.

Volume 2 in the series deal with the Air War in the European Theater of the war.

Featuring eight American veterans of the heavy bombers in the air war over Europe during World War II, explaining what it was like to grow up during the Great Depression as the clouds of war gathered, going off to the service, and into the skies over Europe, sharing stories of both funny and heartbreaking, and all riveting and intense. Includes photos and never before seen portraits.

It actually begins with my quest to learn more about a 20-year-old relative's death in the skies over Germany. I was told the entire crew perished on July 29, 1944. I could not be more wrong...

316 PAGES.

Volume 3 is about the Air War again, and this time I have some of my friends who were fighter pilots, including a Tuskegee Airman who had to deal with racism back home, on top of defeating fascism in Europe.

Fighter pilots, and bomber crews talk about being shot down, the prisoner of war experience, and being reunited again after 60 years, in their own words.

Volume 4 in this series will take you from the deserts of North Africa to the mountains of Italy with the men and women veterans of the Italian campaign who open up about a war that was so brutal, news of it was downplayed at home.

The war in the Mediterranean, and particularly the Italian Campaign, is one that for many Americans is shrouded in mystery and murkiness. Yet it was here that the United States launched its first offensive in the west on enemy soil, and it was here that Allied forces would be slogging it out with a tenacious enemy fighting for its life in the longest single American Campaign of World War II. 

296 PAGES.

Volume 5 in this series is really the book I had in mind to write as I began to collect and process WWII interviews after being inspired at our veterans' return to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

From the bloody beach at Omaha through the hedgerow country of Normandy and beyond, American veterans of World War II—Army engineers and infantrymen, Coast Guardsmen and Navy sailors, tank gunners and glider pilots—sit down with you across the kitchen table and talk about what they saw and experienced, tales they may have never told anyone before.

363 PAGES.

Volume 6 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series

In THE BULGE AND BEYOND, you will be with the soldiers going into the heart of the bloodiest single battle fought by the US Army in American history, the so-called 'Battle of the Bulge'.

19,000 American GIs never saw their mothers again.

— “Hell came in like a freight train. I heard an explosion and went back to where my friend was. His legs were blown off-he bled to death in my arms.”

In Volume 6 in this series, ‘THE BULGE AND BEYOND’, you will be among the columns of young, tired men slogging it out in the malevolent forest, cold, dark, and medieval. You will walk the with the scout to his targeted outpost. You will lay in a freezing minefield by day, hoping to elude the sniper’s bullet, and forever experience the complete inability to ever again feel warm. Nineteen thousand American GIs never saw their mothers again; tens of thousands more were wounded or taken prisoner in Hitler’s last great counter-offensive that shocked the world. In ‘THE BULGE AND BEYOND’, our veterans sit down and speak to you directly about what they experienced. 

It's time to listen to them. REMEMBER how a generation of young Americans truly saved the world. 

309 PAGES

In ‘Across The Rhine’, you will begin to liberate a continent with our veterans as they scale the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc overlooking Omaha Beach. You will jump with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment to capture bridgeheads in the Netherlands, and re-group to slug it out in the freezing Ardennes Forest in the winter of 1944-45. The mission will then push you over the Siegfried Line and all the way to Germany’s most formidable western natural defense, the swift and swollen quarter-mile wide Rhine River. As spring 1945 arrives, you will be with our GIs as they arrive at the gates of Dachau and have their very souls shaken as they become eyewitnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world—the Holocaust; the Nuremberg War Crimes trials will then bring you face to face with the architects of terror, the most notorious war criminals of the twentieth century. 

358 PAGES

In VOLUME 8 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, you will return to the Pacific with our veterans as they recall the chaos in the aftermath at Pearl Harbor, the first challenges on land at Guadalcanal, island hopping with the Marines, Navy, and Army at the Marshalls, Marianas, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. You will witness the most horrific bonzai charges of the war, accompany airmen on their B-29 missions over Japan, and lean over navy corpsmen as they work to save the wounded.  374 PAGES.

*****

In VOLUME 9 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, ‘Homefront/Women At War’, we will take an often-overlooked view of the story of World War II. You will visit with the people on the homefront, from schoolkids navigating growing up during the Great Depression and the War, to the women on the factory floor and the armed services, newly independent but having to fight for their rights and later, their jobs, laying the seeds of societal change for the future. You will meet war brides on the ships' decks over the Atlantic, and follow the challenges they faced growing up in a Europe at war, meeting their GIs, and then starting new families in a new environment. Lastly, you will sit down with the displaced children of World War II who struggled to survive as totalitarian thugs marched into and upended their worlds for years to come, but who survived to tell their personal tales of suffering, and express their gratitude, to young Americans who took the time to listen to them.

"If it had not been for the women going out the door, there would have been no spring in 1944."

280 PAGES

*****

In VOLUME 10 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, ‘Over The Hump/China, Burma, India’, we will visit with the veterans of most overlooked theater of World War II as they prepare to fly over and march through the most inhospitable terrain on the planet, from the Himalaya Mountains to the jungles and mountains of Burma, battling elite Japanese forces, sickness and tropical disease. Ride with the cargo pilots as they are buffeted by 200 MPH+ winds over some of the highest mountains in the world; join fighter pilots taking to the skies to attack Japanese bombers and other aircraft as the enemy tries to disrupt the flow of supplies from India to China. Accompany the long range American penetration forces as they go deep into the heart of enemy held territory to stem the Japanese onslaught. Gain a better understanding of why these forgotten men need to be remembered and celebrated today.

364 PAGES.

*****

SOON TO BE AN EPIC MINI-SERIES!

A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust and the reuniting of the survivors and liberators, 70 years on [2016]

In the last days of World War II, American soldiers freed a trainload of Jewish prisoners heading to certain death at Nazi hands. Rich with eyewitness testimony, this gripping narrative follows both the survivors and their liberators in vivid detail, from the Holocaust experience throughout Europe, to emotional reunions decades later, all made possible by a history teacher.

501 PAGES.