Robert Sterling Herron

The sixth book in The Protocols series is now available. Its title is What Remained: January to May 1943. 1943 was the year the Second World War changed shape. What Remained preserves the voices that lived inside that turning.

For those of you unfamiliar with me and my work, I am Robert Sterling Herron, a historian, educator, and writer long devoted to recovering the human voice within history’s largest catastrophes. My aim in The Protocols is not simply to recount events, but to restore the words, fears, convictions, and illusions of those who moved through them while the outcome was still unknown. Each volume follows the war through dated entries, first-person testimony, political reflection, and battlefield witness, allowing readers to inhabit history as lived experience rather than retrospective summary.

My own path to this work began in the Pacific Northwest, where I entered the University of Washington as an Honors History student in 1967. After service at FOCCPAC during the Vietnam era, I completed my studies in English and education, later teaching in New York City and serving as both educator and librarian. Those years in the classroom deepened my conviction that history must remain a conversation between the dead and the living.

The Protocols grew from that conviction. The series seeks to preserve not only the chronology of the Second World War, but the moral weather in which decisions were made: the rhetoric, the fear, the courage, the self-deceptions, and the cost borne by ordinary people trapped within extraordinary times.

If you have joined the series with What Remained, welcome. You are entering the hinge year of the war, when conquest began to turn into contraction, illusion into reckoning, and survival itself became a form of testimony.