My GrandPa!!
SOPHOMORE RETURNS FROM YEAR IN FINLAND, FRANCEVeteran of Allied Armies Took Trip Through Germany
Published On Wednesday, September 25, 1940 12:00 AM
By NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED
After ten months fighting with the Finish army and the French Foreign Legion and serving the Czech, Norwegian, and French civil governments, this year may well seem a bit tame for John Crane-Baker ‘43.
Caught in France last fall when the war began, Crane-Baker, who would have been a Sophomore had he returned to college then, began immediately to serve the Allies in any capacity which he could fill. His jobs ranged from machine gunner in a Finish bombing plane to translator in the French bureau of North American Propaganda, and he ended his year’s career with an amazing Odyssey which carried him through Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and German-occupied France before he arrived at Lisbon and the Atlantic Clipper.
A love of France gained during a half-lifetime of residence in the country as well as a dislike of the Axis governments prompted him to join up with the French Foreign Legion at the outset of the struggle, but as an American citizen he encountered difficulties which made it impossible for him to enlist. Balked in this first attempt to serve, he spent five months in Paris first working under Andre Morize, professor of Romance Languages, in the Propaganda Bureau, and then working for the Czech National Committee.
Read the rest at the Harvard Crimson
UPDATE: My Mom just called me a snake in the grass for not attributing her as the source for this article. Technically she just emailed the article to me and I posted it to my non comercial blog which probably gets about 2 hits a day (including myself and my mom) so I don’t think that qualifies as 100% snakish.. Now if she had posted it to the net and I could have attributed the source and didn’t, that would be snake in the grassish. I notice her new tumble blog has a distinct resemblance to mine… hmmmm http://beatricedelperugia.tumblr.com/