Sunshine Soldier: A WW2 Combat Infantryman’s Story

In 1944, 19 year old Harrison West was one of many replacements for the Allied soldiers lost at Normandy on D-Day. He wrote over 300 pages of letters to his family which have been preserved to this day. Like most soldiers, he rarely talked about his war experience while his six children were growing up. They knew only from the Purple Heart medal displayed in their home, and the scar on his neck, that he’d been wounded. After a long career as an aeronautical engineer with General Electric in Cincinnati, Ohio, at age 65, when the Gulf War was televised, he began to have intense flashbacks. So he dug out his original letters and spent his retirement years writing this memoir. Before he passed away in 2015 and age 89, he handed the manuscript to his wife, Nancy and said it was done. Harrison was a foot soldier in Baker Company of the 315th Regiment, 79th Division of the US Army, in the European Theater of Operations, WWII.