Note: This article is by Don Milne, creator of Stories Behind the Stars.

Flash forward four years to 2025. Take your smartphone to your local cemetery and look for the gravesite of any of the 400,000+ World War II fallen. Use the Stories Behind the Stars app and scan the name of the fallen person with your phone camera. Instantly, you will be able to read his or her story. This app will work anywhere in the world where there is a gravesite or memorial for any of these American heroes.

So why do you have to wait to use this app, that will forever change the experience of visiting the graves of the fallen?

Because we first have to write these 400,000+ stories.

That is the mission of the non-profit initiative Stories Behind the Stars.

In the movie Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner character plows under a big section of his farm to build a professional sized baseball diamond. He does this in reaction to a voice he hears: “If you build it, he (they) will come.” He believes this crazy idea will bring back the ghosts of some long-lost baseball players.

Stories Behind the Stars was started only in 2020. It is the brainchild of Don Milne, who left behind a lifetime career of 30+ years in banking to start this effort. He didn’t hear any voices, but he did feel drawn to make this dream a reality, even if it meant taking this career risk. Bringing back 400,000+ long lost WWII fallen through their stories is not a one-man effort.

The Field of Dreams (Stories Behind the Stars) has already been built. At the end of the movie, there is a line of cars going on for miles coming to the baseball field. In a similar vein, Stories Behind the Stars already involves more than 1,000 people from all 50 states and more than a dozen other countries.

To prove this project is viable, Milne enlisted the help of 125 volunteers to write all of the WWII fallen stories from one state—Utah. It took six months, but those 2,100 stories are done. You can read about that project here.

Stories Behind the Stars is now working on a project to write the stories of all the 2,502 Americans who died in Normandy on D-Day. Though this project has only been going on for two months, it is already more than fifty percent done. With this project wrapping up soon, volunteers will move on to doing all the names of the WWII fallen buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The goal is to have all 400,000+ stories of the US WWII fallen completed by September 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. By then we will have the accompanying smartphone app ready so all the stories will be accessible at the most obvious location – each grave and memorial.

Reaching this goal is going to need hundreds, if not thousands, of additional volunteers. Volunteers range in age from teens to pushing ninety. Some only write as few as one story. Others write dozens, and even hundreds of stories.

The whole process is very addicting: you start with just a name and a couple of hours later you have a short obituary-style story that anyone will be able to read at the fallen’s grave. How would you like to write the story of one or more of our D-Day fallen? This story of army medic David MacRunnel makes a good example.

Stories Behind the Stars provides free training documents and videos, and free access to research sites like Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com. You don’t have to be a genealogical expert to help (though there are a lot of those among the volunteers). If you want to preserve the legacy of the greatest of the Greatest Generation, this project is for you.

Stories Behind the Stars has received a lot of great news coverage nationwide (see here). Articles like this one in The Family History Guide are the main way it finds people who want to help future generations learn about each and everyone of our fallen WWII heroes.

If you build it, they will come.

To find out more, visit www.storiesbehindthestars.org.

Also, be sure to visit the World War II section of the Family History Guide, at https://www.thefhguide.com/project-9-united-statese2.html#d