A cousin of my father, Benjamin Philipson grew up in Utica, New York and was a chemistry major at St. Lawrence University. Ben enlisted in the U.S. Navy after graduation, bringing with him an advantageous gift: night vision sharp enough to judge the distance between two ships in the dark. This skill almost certainly factored into his selection as a navigator aboard Landing Ship, Tank (LST)—one of the flat-bottomed vessels built to run troops, tanks, and equipment straight onto hostile beaches. In particular, LST is the ship Churchill reportedly called "the ship that won the war." Sure enough, on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, Officer Benjamin Philipson brought his ship into Omaha Beach as part of the largest amphibious assault in history. He wasn't yet thirty years old at the time.

Like so many veterans of his generation, Ben came home in 1945 and almost never spoke of it. What survives isn't a memoir but Ben's US Navy Midshipman Yearbook from Notre Dame University (located in this collection) and a handful of artifacts pieced together by his son, my cousin Elliot: naval records revealing a Mississippi River crossing he never once mentioned, a shard of shrapnel taken from his leg, and the long black Navy coat Ben wore across the English Channel in 1944—the same coat his son would wear crossing the Channel as a tourist thirty years later.