The 225th won four battle stars in the ETO, for the campaigns in Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland, and Central Germany. This much can be gleaned from looking them up in Stanton's book, a simple shred of fact shared by those hundreds of other units that fought in the ETO. But what was being a member of the 225th really like? From the day you received an induction notice through V-E day and the million memories in between? That information is not buried in the vast holdings of the National Archives. That "data" is not recorded in any history one could happen across in a dusty stack at Carlisle Barracks. The only place we can find that today is in the memories of the men that were there. Many of those memories are as clear as the day they entered memory. Some of them are gone. Others are fragile and fleeting. Out of focus. In need of strengthening. Some men don't recall very much at all. And a lot of these men are plain gone, and, with them, their recollections. Perhaps we will never have the "whole" story.

   In the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which probably many WW II veterans have never seen, a soldier of the future, an android built for interstellar combat with a preset lifespan, laments his own impending death. He says: "I have seen things you people would not believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. But, all these memories will soon be lost, like tears in rain." I hear this fictional soliloquy in my mind as I piece together the story of this single unremarkable unit of searchlight men. We would not believe the things that these men have seen. And, yes, their memories will soon be lost, like tears in rain. So, we make humble attempts to tell as much of the story as possible.

   This Web page has one purpose: to provide a location for these fragile memories, a tiny shelf in a small corner of a little out-of-the-way museum that seeks to commemorate seemingly insignificant personal events that occurred 50 or more years ago within the larger cataclysm of World War II. It is an attempt to first illuminate, then fan, a solitary ember cooling at the core of a long-extinguished, but vast conflagration. Five years ago, this mission would have been impossible. The little out-of-the-way museum certainly would never have existed physically. But now it does, in so-called "cyberspace," constructed from the connectivity protocols that enable the document-sharing that we know as the World Wide Web and from the very human desire to create the documents that we can now share. We can all find that little museum now. All the roads have been constructed to reach it. Now all we have to do is finish building it. And that's what we're doing here. Each little piece of information is meticulously added to our vision of this museum in the mind, like delicate crystalline things that catch the light and our imagination and that reflect the light back to tell us something about these men and, magically, about ourselves.

   This web site is, yes, dedicated to the memory of the 225th, for it no longer exists as a unit in the modern U. S. Army. And, yes, it is dedicated to the members of the battalion who have passed on. And, yes, it is further dedicated to the survivors, those now-old men, many on the brink of death, who remember, and through their precious memories, provide the real human history of World War II. But it is also dedicated to the occasional visitor who may have lost a father or mother or brother or sister who lived inside the terrible crucible of that war, and who is attempting to discover something, anything about that parent or person, to plumb the lives of those mysterious people who sat across the kitchen table from them all those years and said very little or nothing about that time of their lives.

   Finally, this site is a salutation to my father's generation, the generation that went to war all those years ago and to which we owe a debt of gratitude regardless of whether we think any war is correct, and to my father, to whom it is a small attempt to pay part of the impossible debt of a son.

— Larry M. Belmont, Blue Point, NY