Lawrence World War II veteran Glenn Kappelman wasn’t supposed to take his camera overseas.

But in 1944, against the orders of his superiors, he stealthily stashed a Kodak Bimat in his gas mask. Fortunately, the equipment inspector didn’t find it, and the 20-year-old gunner in the Army’s 106th Cavalry Group captured in photographs his yearlong European tour at the tail end of the war.

Two years ago, a Lawrence filmmaker created a documentary that combined Kappelman’s images and the stories that he and war buddy Art Barkis recalled from their time fighting in Europe. Now, that film, “Through My Sights: A Gunner’s View of WWII,” is getting national attention.

Topeka public television station KTWU aired the show last Veteran’s Day and was so pleased with its popularity that it became the licensing producer for its distribution through American Public Television. It will be KTWU’s first national launch. Already, stations in Boston, New York, Miami, Denver and St. Louis have signed on to air the 56-minute movie.

“We’re happy that people are interested in it,” said Kappelman, now 78. “It is a piece of history.”

As he thumbed Wednesday night through the pages of a thick album brimming with many of the black and white photographs that found their way into the documentary, Kappelman rattled off dates, names of people and places still crystallized in his mind after more than 50 years. The reflections aren’t bitter.

“I didn’t leave the war with a lot of bad memories,” he said. “For me, it was primarily a big adventure.”

Kappelman’s photo collection has been hailed by historians at the U.S. Cavalry Museum in Fort Riley as a rarity of tremendous quality that provides an intimate portrait of soldiers, equipment, civilians and destruction in moments of spontaneity.

He pieced together the detailed captions that accompany the more than 400 photos partially from recollection, partially by revisiting stacks of hand-written letters he had sent home to his parents once a week during the war.

Linda “Sam” Haskins produced and directed the documentary that puts the photos and memories in an organized, chronological format. Kappelman’s nephew, Lawrence cameraman Clay Kappelman, was the videographer.

Haskins has enjoyed working on the project, her first to go national.

“It was the culmination of a 50-year dream of Glenn’s to get this to a larger market and get it in one place for his family,” she said.

It also becomes more imperative with each passing day as more and more veterans die that oral and pictorial histories of the war be committed to print and film. Kappelman’s friend Barkis, who had been a radio operator in the same armored car from which Kappelman shot so many of his photos, died in August 2001. Kappelman and the men who fought alongside him in the 106th gather for a reunion each year in Urbana, Ill. The crowd thins by about 20 each time, Kappelman said.

Near the end of the documentary, Kappelman and Barkis explain how, like most veterans, their stories only recreate a small part of the war.

“But what they saw is so important,” Haskins said, “because all those pieces of oral history and visual history put together in the end, people will get a human picture of World War II.”