PASADENA, Texas—When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, 17-year-old James Watkins ran away from home and lied about his age to enlist in the Army.

He survived the German bombings of London, parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped Allied forces capture the bridge at Remagen. He racked up four Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.

In 1989, the 65-year-old retired plant supervisor died in Pasadena of a heart attack, taking his memories of those historic battles with him to the grave. Nearly 20 years later, his widow, Bobbie Ames, still regrets never recording his story in writing or on tape.

“I never even thought of it, to tell you the truth,” she said. “When Jim would tell me these things about the war, he was very quiet and very matter of fact. It was never like, ’Look at me, look at me, I’m a hero.’ He was just a little short man, doing his job, and I just loved him so much.”

Now the 72-year-old court reporter is one of thousands of volunteers across the country interviewing Americans who fought in World War II and other major U.S. conflicts for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

With an estimated 900 World War II veterans dying every day, however, the effort to preserve their tales has taken on a special urgency—and drew renewed attention on Veterans Day.

For Ames, who suffers from a degenerative muscle disease, the sense of mission is personal. “That’s why I’m kind of frantic,” she said. “I feel like my time’s running out, too.”

So far, Ames has recorded the stories of 19 World War II veterans and three Korean War veterans, including 10 from the Houston area whom she interviewed herself. She transcribed the rest from recordings sent to her by the National Court Reporters Association, an official partner in the Veterans History Project.

“I would’ve done one a month if I could just find ’em,” she said. “You don’t know how hard it is to find ’em.”

Even when Ames tracks down veterans to interview, they’re often reluctant to talk about the war, even to their own families.

“They’ll say, ’I don’t have a story,’ or ’Mine is not important,’ but every single one is important,” Ames said. “You have to have patience and you have to be able to pull it out of them.”

It took Ames five months to get her friend Eugene Smith to sit down for an interview about his experience as a World War II fighter pilot.

“Actually, it’s not really something that I talk about,” said Smith, 84, who visited Ames at her Pasadena home Monday afternoon. “I just haven’t been around people who seemed interested.”

“He’s very modest,” chuckled Ames.

Smith, who lives in the Clear Lake area, quit college at 19 to join the Army Air Corps. He flew a single-engine P-47 Thunderbolt he named “Lady Be Good” for a popular song at the time. “Also it had a double meaning because I was hoping the plane would be good to me,” he said.

The slim, silver-haired man with clear blue eyes is frustrated by his inability to recall details such as exact dates and locations, but he remembers the emotions and adrenaline of crash landings, recon missions and dogfights.

One time his 12-plane formation was attacked by 50 German fighters from above during a bombing run. Miraculously, Smith said, the American planes shot down 17 enemy planes and only lost one.

Another time, Smith’s plane was shot down by enemy fire. He couldn’t eject because the canopy was stuck. So he wrestled the controls into a crash landing at a French airfield. The plane flipped over, but he walked away without a scratch.

“My nerves were the only things that were shaken,” he said.

Smith, who was awarded the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross, encourages other veterans to record their own stories before it’s too late.

“If they haven’t been in the habit of talking about it with their families, they should at least do it so their families will have a record of it,” Smith said.

The U.S. Congress passed legislation creating the Veterans History Project eight years ago to record the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women in major conflicts from World War I to the war on terrorism.

“The purpose of the project is to look at the human experience of war, war at the grassroots level for those who were there and fought it,” said the project’s director, Bob Patrick.

To date, volunteers have collected more than 60,000 individual stories, mostly in the form of oral interviews, but also scrapbooks, diaries, memoirs, letters, photos and videos, Patrick said. Anyone can participate, as long as they follow the guidelines in the project’s Field Kit, which is available online.

The project already interviewed the country’s last identified surviving World War I veteran: 107-year-old Frank Buckles of West Virginia. Now, America’s aging World War II veterans are considered a priority.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that there are about 2.55 million living World War II veterans, Patrick said. By this time next year, that number is expected to fall to less than 2.2 million, he said.