The Cramsie Diary

Those who have read First To Fall realize that the diary entries written in the hand of Bill Cramsie were constructed from events, not copied from an actual diary. Ned Burr, who is the president of the alumni of the class of June 1943 and is himself mentioned in the book, wrote about the diaries in a recent correspondence: "I found [them] so realistic that it took me a while to realize that they were yours, not his." The evolution of the Cramsie diary is something that may be worth explaining. My initial drafts of First To Fall were written in a style not unlike most histories and biographies, very matter of fact. Though I was quite satisfied with the detail that was presented, the narrative lacked the emotion that I felt the story deserved. After much deliberation, I decided to hire a "Ghost Writer" to help me structure the story a bit differently. I won't go into the process here, but I was led by providence to a web site through which I met Alice McVeigh. Almost immediately, I knew that Alice was the right person to help me with the problem I was having. Little did I know that she was the granddaughter of General Maxwell D. Taylor, a West Point graduate, a West Point Superintendant and a figure who played prominently in the Normandy invasion of 1944 not to mention his extraordinary service for the following 20 years. That discovery left me with goose bumps.

Alice was the one who first suggested doing the book as a Cramsie diary. Because there is so much technical detail, I felt that sort of presentation might not work in all cases. What I ultimately decided to do was to have Alice take the personal aspects of my narrative and convert them to diary format. I then interleaved them with the technical aspects that were written from my perspective. The bulk of the diary entries were based on actual events that were gleaned from military records at West Point and at the Air Force Historical Research Agency. Thus, the story was able to be unfolded factually in both a personal and technical atmosphere. The use of different fonts for the two "voices" of Bill Cramsie and myself made the separation clear and actually helped to develop a "then and now" aspect that was an unexpected bonus.