Karen Gerni always knew her father, Claude Bobilya, served in World War II. He’d make references to it from time to time, and he’d mention pathfinders, which Gerni didn’t understand, but he didn’t talk about it a lot.

He had seven kids and was running his own downtown business, Bobilya Shoes, so there were plenty of things to do other than tell war stories.

When he retired, though, he started connecting with other people who had also been in the war, Gerni said.

“He felt a need to capture his involvement,” she said.

He wrote a memoir of his time in the war, though he never tried to have it published. He did a lot of research and eventually linked up with a friend who ran a World War II museum in Arizona.

There was no boasting about his exploits, though.

“So many people in that generation were not into self-praise. They were just proud to be part of history and spreading freedom,” Gerni said.

They took pride in being part of a huge effort that changed the world.

Take Operation Varsity. It involved thousands of aircraft and is supposed to have been the largest one-day airborne operation in history. Gerni’s father once told her it took 2 1/2 hours for all the planes on the mission to pass.

Gerni’s father died Jan. 1, 2009, and with him, one would suspect, passed the stories he had to tell.

Just a few months after Bobilya died, though, a Dutchman who was trying to preserve World War II history came across an old C-47 airplane in Florida.

He had the plane disassembled and shipped to the city of Best in the Netherlands, where the townspeople celebrated the arrival of the parts with a parade.

In time, the plane was reassembled, and with it came a logbook, and among the names found in the logbook was one Claude Bobilya, who was the navigator on the plane in March 1945 during something called Operation Varsity.

The plane, it turned out, had been assigned to pathfinders, the first soldiers involved in the invasion force, whose job was to establish radio beacons to direct the thousands of planes that would follow them on exactly where to drop their paratroopers and equipment.

It wasn’t long before officials with the museum were in contact with the Bobilya family in Fort Wayne, trying to gather as much information as possible.

Suddenly, that memoir Gerni’s father had written, the aerial photographs her father – who had dabbled in photography as a hobby – had taken and all the other memorabilia left over from the war became important.

When the museum opened its doors for the first time this year, Gerni and her husband were among those in attendance for the unveiling of the C-47.

It’s a unique story. How many people can say they have seen the airplane their father flew in 65 years ago during World War II? How many people can say they’ve actually sat in the navigator’s chair their father used during a massive invasion during World War II?

But there’s another story. In Europe, the American veteran is still revered, and museums like the one in Best still remind people of the terrible regime that once ruled their land and celebrate the American soldiers who helped defeat it.