More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Investigators put the casualties at 410, although the actual number long remained in dispute. That the mission had been a fiasco—among the worst friendly fire episodes in modern warfare—
John Steinbeck studied the pearly mists rising from the Mediterranean. “Each man, in this last night in the moonlight, looks strangely at the others and sees death there,”
When a German shell killed a lieutenant sleeping in his slit trench at Chiunzi, a comrade concluded, “I don’t think God
has anything to do with this war.”
(Twenty inches of rain would fall in the final three months of 1943.)
One account likened the soldier’s day in Italy to “climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung.”
By any reckoning, two U.S. infantry regiments had been gutted in one of the worst drubbings of the war;
“You can’t get used to bein’ scared.”
Initiative, that turncoat, had returned to the Allied camp.
eighteen hours to travel thirteen miles.
Sergeants doled out rum rations in enamel cups after breakfast and sent their men off to commit mayhem.
