Works by
Richard Williams
(Writer)
[1937 - ]

Reel Heroes To Real Heroes and Real Heroes to Reel Heroes (2006) by Richard Williams and S. Joy Williams
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the lives of all the men profiled in this book changed. The attack brought the country together in a way it had never seen before, or since. Recruiting offices were swamped with volunteers enlisting to avenge the sneak attack that had occurred that Sunday morning.

The enlistees included farm boys from Texas, college students from Massachusetts, laborers from Detroit, professional men from New York and movie stars from Hollywood. It included men and women from every walk of life in every state and territory. Some of the biggest movie stars of the time answered the call and they answered it not to serve as entertainers or be actors in Signal Corps training films, they sought out and found hazardous duty flying combat missions in bombers and fighters, sailing the waters of the North Atlantic and the South Pacific. They jumped out of planes behind enemy lines on D-Day. They were at the Battle of the Bulge; they ran supplies to anti-Nazi guerillas through German blockades, they hit Omaha Beach with the first wave on the morning of June 6th, 1944, and filmed the carnage of Tarawa while under intense enemy fire. And one, who became a movie star after the war, won the Congressional Medal of Honor while becoming the most decorated American soldier of World War II.

Many men left the military after the war with ambitions they wouldn't have dreamed of prior to serving, but the GI Bill availed them to opportunities that heretofore weren't a possibility. The stars who served returned to their acting careers and were joined by a whole new generation of stars for the fifties and beyond. The amazing stories of the movie stars who became war heroes and the war heroes who became movie and TV stars is what this book is all about.