Aaron Elson began recording the stories of World War II veterans in 1987 when he attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which his father served.

    He launched World War II Oral History @ tankbooks.com in 1997 to promote "Tanks for the Memories," a book about the battalion. Soon, however, the site took on a life of its own. It now makes veterans' firsthand accounts available to thousands of readers.

    Since that first reunion, Elson has done more than 600 hours of interviews with veterans. It is the goal of tankbooks.com to  keep the stories of these veterans alive and available to the public for free.

    This is important work, but while he is preserving a small portion of the history of a very large event, the real reason he began recording these stories, Elson says, is not because they were historic, but because they were great stories, plain and simple, stories of ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things under the most adverse circumstances.

    When Elson launched tankbooks.com, it was his hope that "Tanks for the Memories" would become an Internet bestseller, and that the veterans of the 712th Tank Battalion would be invited to appear on Good Morning America and all sorts of neat stuff like that. It hasn't happened, but the book is in an expanded second printing, and the material on the web site has been used by many high school and middle school students. And because the veterans whose stories appear on the site are real people, Elson has brought dozens of people together. When then-15-year-old Lisa Keithley of Vancouver, Wash., for example, inherited her great-grandfather's uniform and war memorabilia, she discovered two of his stories on tankbooks.com. Elson was able to put her in touch with her great-grandfather's lieutenant, Dale Albee, and the two of them got together (see photo above).

    Elson is currently teaching journalism as a visiting professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He can be contacted by email at aelson@syr.edu or by calling (201) 373-0021.