“Farming for the Front Lines”
Image description: A 1940s sepia-toned photograph of a young Harold Bud Long, a white man wearing an Army Air Corp uniform. He is smiling just off to the right of the frame.
With Harold Bud Long, Air Corps
Moving food around the globe was about more than just feeding service members and civilians.
Ep 6: Dec 9 2019
6 million men left farm life between 1940 and 1945. Some, like Air Corp Staff Sergeant Harold Bud Long, left to join the Service.
Setting out and maintaining 47 air strips across Europe, Bud took part in legendary campaigns like Omaha Beach on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and Patton’s drive through Central Europe into the Rhineland. Spending significant time with French civilians and tearing down the gates of a German concentration camp, he shares how soldiers and civilians found ways to feed each other, and which foods from home they never found abroad.
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Misti Boettiger assisted with this episode. Thank you to Jason Skinner and those involved in the Livingston County Veterans’ Monument for connecting us with Bud for this episode. They’ve recently unveiled their beautiful community monument and we suggest you check it out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We’ll be sharing more of their story in our next episode.
Behind The Episode:
Image description: A bright photograph of World War II Air Corps veteran Harold Bud Long sitting in a metal shop. He is a white man in his mid-nineties, seated a table in an orange shirt, holding up a framed certificate of his Commendation as a Knight in the Legion of Honor, looking into the camera. Behind him are dozens of large metal sculpted poppies, painted red, upturned on the ground.
Find a gallery of photos of Bud from WWII and documents relevant to this episode at ServicePodcast.org.
Learn all about the incredible community work at the Livingston County Veteran Memorial (where we met Bud) at LivingstonCounty.us
Miss the movie Saving Private Ryan we reference before the second half of the show? Read an excellent synopsis from New York Magazine.
Read and see more about The Women's Land Army of WWII at the National Archives
Farm life and Hollywood meet (with lots of fun stats to back the stories up) in this piece at History.net
Bill Ganzel's synopsis at Living History Farm of farming in the 1940s is short and fascinating
Agriculture during WWII at Plains Humanities
Image description: A black-and-white photo of U.S. Army Air Corp engineer Harold Bud Long and two other men, standing around a damaged P-47 plane. Date and location unknown. Courtesy of Harold Bud Long.