An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

by Rick Atkinson

Into the holds went tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and step-ladders, alarm clocks and bicycles. Into the holds went: tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, mostly in five-gallon tins. Into the holds went: thousands of miles of wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellent, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags. Into the holds went: black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins, entrusted to George Patton personally. And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and sixty rolls of fly-paper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company. A special crate, requisitioned in a frantic message to the War Department on October 18, held a thousand Purple Hearts.

An army marches on more than its stomach.