Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Dear Elizabeth,

I doubt very much you will remember me as we met only once, briefly, at your grandmother’s funeral. But I have thought of you often since. I knew your grandmother very well. We served together in World War II. She was a very great woman, your grandmother.

Anyway, as I write this the doctors tell me I have less than a week left. I’ve left most everything to Jack—that’s my husband—and his family. We never had children of our own, and when you’re contemplating the end you want to pass something along.

In the box you will find something that served me very well when I held your rank as a sergeant. May it serve you as well.

Rio Richlin

Major General, US Army, Retired

PS: You’ll want to oil the scabbard from time to time.

Ten minutes later Elizabeth emerges into the glare again.

“Whoa, Sarge, what do you have there?”

“What, this?” Elizabeth pats the knife strapped to her thigh. “Well, I just googled it, and I believe it’s called a koummya.”

“Badass, top.”

“Yep. Okay!” She claps her hands loudly and insistently. “Enough playtime, boys and girls, these holes aren’t gonna dig themselves. I want to see some shovel work, people!”

“Fugging sergeants,” Cofield says under his breath. “They’re all the same.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I confronted a surprising problem in writing this last book of the trilogy. The events from D-day onward are much better known to people from books, movies, and TV than earlier battles in North Africa and Italy. As a result some stories are tied in readers’ minds directly to specific individuals, real soldiers who did terribly brave things. It felt wrong repurposing their personal stories, so I?

?ve tried to avoid that. I’ve also been at pains to avoid my fictional 119th Division seeming to take the place of real units, many of which suffered catastrophically. My goal has been to insert my characters without attempting to replace the real-life Americans who died at Omaha Beach, in the bocage, in the Hürtgen, or in the Bulge.

That said, I’ve stuck as close as I know how to the actual events of World War II.

Rainy’s mission is invented, but the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane happened: 642 French civilians, of whom 205 were children, were mercilessly gunned down by the SS. And yes, the SS officer responsible, Adolf Diekmann, was killed a few days later in Normandy, though the details of how have never been satisfactorily determined. . . .

After the war, French general Charles de Gaulle decreed that the burned and shattered village should be preserved as the SS left it. You can visit it, as I did. It is the most deeply moving war memorial I’ve ever seen.

The Hürtgen Forest happened as well, a stupid waste of thousands of American lives. First-person accounts generally agree that nothing in the European theater of war was more terrible. Even German soldiers who’d been in the hell of the Eastern Front often agreed that the Hürtgen was worse.

Some have slighted American soldiers, alleging that they could not fight without the masses of weapons and equipment provided by the productive power of American industry. But the battles of the Hürtgen Forest and the Bulge were not contests of machine against machine, but of soldier against soldier in pitiless conditions. The American soldier, outgunned, outnumbered, cut off, and surrounded, held on against everything Hitler had to throw at them.

Malmédy happened as well, which set off a wave of pitiless brutality from both sides, as all the rules of war were cast aside.

The liberation of Buchenwald began at the Ohrdruf satellite camp, where SS guards did in fact build a sort of macabre grill and attempt to hide the evidence of their atrocities before fleeing. The Dachau death train also happened.

The aftermath was where I felt free at last to depart from actual history. I don’t know what effect women serving in combat would have had on the politics of the United States. I know that after World War II was over, women were quickly pushed out of the jobs they had held while the men fought. The 1950s were a period of genteel but steady suppression of women, and the beginning of more women pushing back. I have to believe that feminists would have made short work of it with a nation of female war veterans marching in their ranks.

I do know that the civil rights movement took inspiration from the courage and sacrifice of black soldiers. I suspect the women’s rights movement would have been similarly inspired.

I just used the word sacrifice. I don’t usually like the word because it is so overused, but what word better suits the reality? American soldiers lost their lives fighting to defend the simple ideas that gave birth to the United States of America: that we are all created equal, that simply by virtue of our membership in the human race we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

More than 400,000 Americans were killed in World War II. Nearly 700,000 were wounded. Millions worked and trained and risked and did what needed to be done. They saved the world.

Race hatred, religious bigotry, contempt for anyone different, bitterness, resentment, and spite fed the greatest, most terrible war in human history and left 60 million dead. No German at the start of the Nazi regime pictured Dachau or Buchenwald or Oradour. But by their moral cowardice they made those crimes against humanity inevitable.

We, the heirs of the American soldiers who lie in the thousands beneath shining white crosses and Stars of David in military cemeteries in Europe, we who have benefited so wonderfully from their pain and courage and sacrifice, have only to be vigilant, to be strong in the right, and to say with one voice: never again.

—Michael Grant