The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy)

by Rick Atkinson

monumental scale. Even war-weary soldiers felt a new sense of purpose. “What kind of people are these that we are fighting?” an anguished GI in the 8th Infantry Division asked after viewing Wöbbelin. If the answer to that question remained elusive, the corollaries—What kind of people are we? What kind of people should we be?—seemed ever clearer. Complete victory would require not only vanquishing the enemy on the battlefield, but also bearing witness to all that the war had revealed about the human heart. “Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist,” wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell, “but after the camps, a moral attitude was dominant and there was no disagreement on the main point.” A rifleman in the 157th Infantry agreed. “I’ve been in the Army for thirty-nine months,” he said. “I’ve been overseas in combat for twenty-three. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”