About This Site
This site was built based solely on a book that I received from my Grandfather, S/Sgt. Charles J. LiVecchi, A Battery, 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalion, 4th Armored Division when he passed away. The book has no publisher name, date, or copyright information in it. It appears to have been printed by the U.S. Army shortly after World War II. It is basically the Battalion history from the December 29, 1943 to May 9, 1945.
This website originally began as a personal quest to discover what my Grandfather's Army days were like. He died when I was only 12 years old. I don't remember him ever telling me any stories, nor do any of my relatives. From what I understand, he just never talked about it. When he died, I was given a display case full of medals, along with some documents and books. I always wondered what his life was like then, but nobody really knew.
My Grandfather received two purple hearts, two silver stars, and several campaign medals. I have always been curious what he did to earn these. The book that this site is based on briefly mentions one exploit that he participated in that earned him a silver star. It gives very few details.
Since it became practically impossible to get any specific information about my Grandfather, I decided to take another route in my quest for knowledge. I began reading books and watching documentaries about World War II to try to gain an understanding of what life for an enlisted soldier on the front lines must have been like. Through this I could extrapolate what my Grandfather must have gone through. The oral histories found in books by Stephen Ambrose, and several History Channel documentaries on WWII are the closest most of us will ever get to understanding what it could have been like.
Rather than retype all 120 pages of text in the book, I used a demo of an OCR scanning program call Finereader 4.0 by ABBYY that I downloaded off the internet. The OCR software allowed me to scan each page and then convert it to a Microsoft Word Document. I could then make any necessary changes. I then saved the Word file as an HTML file for use in publishing to the web.
The OCR program was amazingly accurate, but there are a few typos. Although I have made every attempt to clean the text up, occasionally you might come across an erroneous character. For the most part, this text appears exactly as it does in the original document.
There are spelling and grammatical errors in the text. In order to preserve the historical integritiy of the original document, I have left the majority of them. I have only corrected spelling errors that may have confused the reader. For example, the first chapter of the original document is titled "Beach to the Breakhtrough." I belive the original author and/or publisher did not intend for this to be the title. I have left all sentence structures and punctuations in their original form, right or wrong.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email me. I appreaciate your interest in this document.
Sean Rafferty
December 17, 1999