A Call to Duty

The greatest conflict in human history started brothers Ray F. and John B. Lewis on a journey that they never imagined as farm boys picking cotton in the dusty fields of West Texas during the Great Depression. World War II took them across the Atlantic to places they had only read about in books or seen on movie screens when they could afford theater tickets. By the time they returned to the States, they had lost their country-boy naivete.

In To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores the wartime exploits of his uncle Ray and his father John. Ray saw combat in the 552nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, but John never heard a shot fired in anger while a merchant mariner at the end of the conflict.

To War and Back is the sequel to Cotton-Picking Folks: Eulogy for a Texas Depression Era Farm Family. Enthralled by his family's stories of West Texas life in the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather’s five daughters and two sons. Fascinated by his uncle's and father's accounts of World War II, he extracted them from those oral histories and added background and context on their European adventures, some sad, many poignant and others humorous.

Ray and John were both bit players in the events of the war, although John rides to the rescue of a downed Women Airforce Service Pilot as an anonymous cowboy in several books on female aviation history. Even though they played minor roles in the war, their stories provide a glimpse into tough times by men committed to serving their country.

The 44,000-word memoir provides a poignant glimpse into the lives of two brothers of the Greatest Generation. With only an estimated 300,000 WWII veterans remaining in the United States, the living memory of World War II is gradually fading away. To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys saves for posterity the stories of these two young men who grew to maturity during the troubled war years.