The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2)
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Young Davis at West Point had endured four years of silence from classmates who refused to speak to him because of his race, reducing him to what he called “an invisible man.” From that ordeal, and from the segregated toilets, theaters, and clubs at Tuskegee, Davis concluded that blacks “could best overcome racist attitudes through their achievements,” including prowess in the cockpit.
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The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half dozen .50-caliber machine guns. “I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail,” Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr., later reported. “I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot.” Flames spurted from the enemy fuselage, then from another and another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops and fled toward Rome only to clip the earth in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one ...more
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“Negroes are doing their bit here, their supreme bit, not for glory, not for honor, but for, I think, the generation that will come.”
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“All afternoon we throw ourselves against the enemy,” Audie Murphy wrote. “If the suffering of men could do the job, the German lines would be split wide open. But not one real dent do we make.”
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A German soldier trotted forward for a final handshake. “It is such a tragedy, this life,” he said.
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He was both sentimental—after digging the grave of his friend Rupert Brooke, he had lined it with flowering sage—and fond of aphorisms, including a line from another friend, J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December.”
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So back we go to World War I. Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones.
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the fourth day of a battle that had become an existential struggle between two exhausted armies.
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Allied artillery inflicted three-quarters of all German battle casualties at Anzio.
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think Napoleon was right when he came to the conclusion that it was better to fight allies than to be one of them.”
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“Parents abandoned their shrieking children and fled to safety,” according to a German account. “Sons fled, leaving their aged parents to their fate. One woman had both her feet blown off.”
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“Whenever I am offered a liqueur glass of benedictine,” he wrote in his diary, “I shall recall with regret the needless destruction of the abbey.” Of course the deeper regret extended beyond ecclesiastical landmarks. War was whittling it all away: civility and moderation, youth and innocence, mountains and men.
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When a soldier spotted Humphrey Bogart in the Hotel Parca, he asked how he could purchase a pistol like the one the actor had used in Sahara, which “could fire sixteen shots without reloading.” Bogart flicked away his cigarette and replied, “Hollywood is a wonderful place.”
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“I could never forget,” wrote Bourke-White, “that many of these boys would go back into the rain and mud and screaming dangers of the hills, never to return.”
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At times he imagined that he had been “carried back thirty years and was wandering across the battlefield at the Somme.”
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Soldiers distrusted the gung ho, the cocksure, and anyone less miserable than themselves. “We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another,”
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The conceits of fate, destiny, and God comforted some, but believers and nonbelievers alike rubbed their crucifixes and lucky coins and St. Christopher medals with a suspicion, as Muirhead said, that “one is never saved for long.”
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“Slowly I am becoming insensitive to everything,” wrote one soldier in his diary. “God in Heaven, help me to keep my humanity.”
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“Those Krauts,” a paratrooper in the 504th Parachute Infantry said, “I sure hate their guts.”
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on September 24, 1943, with the Duce reduced to a pathetic puppet, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, secretly ordered the Gestapo chief in Rome, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, to arrest all Jews in the city.
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Saturday, October 16, storm troopers swept through the Roman ghetto anyway, seizing twelve hundred Jews; sixteen of them survived the war. Most were promptly shipped to Auschwitz and gassed, including an infant born after the roundup. Mussolini on December 1 ordered the arrest of “all Jews living on the national territory.”
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Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The
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“We suffered more during the 24 hours of contact with the Moroccans than in the eight months under the Germans,” one Italian complained. They were “savages,” a GI in the 88th Division concluded, and they “gave war and soldiers a bad name.”
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An 88th Division reconnaissance troop and Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force, which had been merged with Howze’s task force, had the strongest claims,
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Clark gave another short address from a second-floor balcony, then slipped into a suite for a private moment. Kneeling on the bedroom floor, he thanked God for victory and prayed for the souls of his men. A hand gently touched his shoulder. Clark turned to find Juin behind him. Beneath his brushy mustache, the Frenchman smiled and said, “I just did the same thing.”
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“We prowl through Rome like ghosts, finding no satisfaction in anything we see or do,” wrote Audie Murphy. “I feel like a man reprieved from death; and there is no joy in me.”
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“I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,” wrote the pilot John Muirhead, “for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.”
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Or, as an old paratrooper from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment said almost sixty years after the war: “I hate the smell of anything dead…. It reminds me of Salerno.”
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