In the summer of 1995, while at my mother’s townhouse, I came upon a box of over two hundred photos that my father, Roland Regan Sr., had taken during his service in the Second World War between 1943 and 1945. As I studied these old photographs, I began to feel a commitment to my deceased father and his generation to make them public so that others could share this wartime experience.

For the next several summers, I began to arrange my father’s photos so that they could be viewed and preserved for later generations. In 1997, I contacted several publishers while simultaneously contacting several universities and colleges about the possibility of donating copies of these rare photographs to their history departments. To my surprise, the response from both publishers and universities was very encouraging. And, to my delight, organizing the collection of photos proved to be a labor of love as I selected, scanned, and edited hundreds of original photos.