Books – Brides of 1941

Books by Bonnie Bedford Park

The Trilogy that humanizes the Greatest Generation

Latest Book

Six Weeks for Boat Mail

The second book in the trilogy

It’s August 29, 1941, embarkation day for the SS Santa Elena, a Grace Line steamship bound for Valparaiso, Chile. At Pier 57, New York Harbor, twenty-two-year-old Robin Bedford settles into cabin 128. Meanwhile Buster, her husband of ten weeks, hovers with the U.S. Army 101^st Cavalry Regiment near the crisp and piney Massachusetts/New Hampshire border. That’s where 15,000 troops of the Blue Army face off with 25,000 men in the Red Army in the New England Maneuvers. So begins the continuing story of Robin, Buster, and a handful of other mid-twentieth century twenty-somethings, embarking on their newly-wed lives together under the shadow of WWII.

Three weeks later, in an open Scout car, Buster rolls south in a khaki-colored convoy through Gettysburg, Antietam, and along the Skyline Drive to Fort Bragg. In the Carolina Maneuvers, Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum, Commanding General of the 400,000 soldiers of the “First Army,” sees to it the military might of the new U.S. Army strategically grows bigger and stronger in an all-out sham war over sixteen counties in North and South Carolina.