In search of “the best America there ever was,” bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene finds it in a small Nebraska town few people pass through today—a town where Greene discovers the echoes of the most touching love story imaginable: a love story between a country and its sons. During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North … North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains en route to their ultimate destinations in Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town, wanting to offer the servicemen warmth and support, transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen.
Every day of the year, every day of the war, the Canteen—staffed and funded entirely by local volunteers—was open from five a.m. until the last troop train of the day pulled away after midnight. Astonishingly, this remote plains community of only 12,000 people provided welcoming words, friendship, and baskets of food and treats to more than six million GIs by the time the war ended.
In this poignant and heartwarming eyewitness history, based on interviews with North Platte residents and the soldiers who once passed through, Bob Greene tells a classic, lost-in-the-mists-of-time American story of a grateful country honoring its brave and dedicated sons.
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If you want to read a book that will inspire you, will lift your heart, will give you hope and faith in the goodness of mankind, read this book. It’s a true story of a small town in Nebraska which, from Christmas Day 1941 through the end of WWII and several months beyond, made it a mission to greet every single troop train (as many as 23 a day) …
This is a true story about a town of 12,000 people and those in surrounding towns, who, with their own funds and food rations, supplied 6,000,000 soldiers (that is correct six million!) whose trains stopped in North Platte on their way to serve in Europe or in the Pacific. They served food and coffee to these soldiers every day for over five …
Happy tears
I am grateful to have read this book. In 1925, my father Roger Allen Dungan was born in North Plate. He moved to Denver w/ his single mother and older sister, joining the Navy upon graduating high school in 1943. Did he pass through North Platte as a sailor and experience the Canteen? Although in the later years of his life he spoke about growing …