1943
Three great Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Italy’s Benito Mussolini began as Hitler’s mentor, but after failure upon failure it has become clear that Mussolini’s Italy lacks the resources and the will to fight effectively. The war in Europe will be fought between the Allies and Germany, with Mussolini more a hindrance than a help.
For too long Britain stood alone while the Soviet Union’s paranoid dictator, Stalin, purged his own army and worked backroom deals with the Nazis to seize Finland and divide Poland. But in one of the great mistakes of history, Hitler attacked Stalin. The Soviet Union’s vast size, terrible winter, and the astonishing courage and endurance of its people have proven too much, even for the Wehrmacht.
And now, thanks to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States of America is in the fight, bringing staggering industrial might and a military that will, in just a few short years, go from being a negligible force of 334,000 to a 12-million-strong juggernaut.
In the Pacific, the US Marines have survived a protracted living nightmare on Guadalcanal. Japanese expansion is halted. Australia and New Zealand are safe, but China, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia still bleed under brutal Japanese occupation.
In Europe, the Soviet Red Army has fought the German Wehrmacht to a halt at Stalingrad. Hitler’s mad order allowing no retreat will lead to the death of a third of a million Germans and Romanians and the surrender of 91,000 more. The greatest tank battle in history will be fought at a place called Kursk, and by dint of sheer numbers and steely determination, the Soviet T-34 tanks will beat the German panzers back.
London is still struggling to recover from the Blitz, and now German cities cringe beneath falling bombs. In Poland, the Jews who had been herded into the ghetto to be starved to death rise up against their Nazi oppressors and, despite great heroism, are exterminated.
The Americans, British, British Commonwealth, and Free French forces have pushed the Nazis out of North Africa. Benito Mussolini is weakened and discredited but not yet destroyed.
No one is certain about the next objective, including Allied leadership.
The Germans have been bloodied, but Nazi Germany is very far from beaten. And in places called Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, the killing gas still flows and the ovens still burn hot.
Prologue
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945
Welcome back, Gentle Reader, welcome back to the war.
I’ve got quite a pile of typed pages now, quite a pile, and I’m not even a third of the way through. But I’ve already got some readers, some of the people here in this hospital with me, and, well, they’ve stopped complaining about me being up typing at all hours. So I guess I’ll keep at it.
I’m still not quite ready to tell you who I am. I’m not being coy or cute, I just find it easier to write about all of it, even my own part, as if it happened to someone else. And if I put myself forward, you might start thinking of me as the hero of the story. I can’t allow that because I know better. I know who the heroes are and who the heroes were, and I am neither. I’m just a shot-up GI sitting here typing and trying not to scratch the wound on my chest, which, dammit, feels like I’ve got a whole colony of ants in there. I suppose this means I’ll never be able to wear a bathing suit or a plunging neckline. That will bother me someday, but right now, looking around this ward at my fellow soldier girls, and at the soldier boys across the hall, I’m not feeling the urge to complain.
I hear civilians saying we’re all heroes, heard someone . . . was it Arthur Godfrey on Armed Forces Radio? I can’t recall, but it’s nonsense anyway. If everyone is a hero, then no one is. Others say everyone below ground is a hero, but a lot of those were just green kids who spent an hour or a day on the battlefield before standing up when they shouldn’t have, or stepping where they shouldn’t have stepped. If there’s something heroic about standing up to scratch your ass and having some Kraut sniper ventilate your head, I guess I don’t see it.
If by “hero,” you mean one of those soldiers who will follow an order to rush a Kraut machine gun or stuff a grenade in a tank hatch, well, that’s closer to meaning something. But the picture in your imagination, Gentle Reader, may not bear much similarity to reality. I knew a guy who did just that—jumped up on a Tiger tank and dropped a grenade (or was it two?) down the hatch. Blew the hell out of it too. But he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his fiancée in the same batch of mail that informed him his brother had been killed. So I guess it was right on the line between heroism and suicide.
Don’t take me for a cynic, though; I am not cynical about bravery. There are some real heroes, some gold-plated heroes, here on this ward with me. There are still more lined up in rows beneath white crosses and Stars of David in Italy and France, Belgium, Holland . . . And some of them were friends of mine.
Oh boy, it’s hard to type once I get teary. Goddammit, I’ll just take a minute here. . . .
Anyway, my feeling bad doesn’t raise any of those people from the grave.
They brought some wounded Krauts in today, four of them. They’re in a separate ward of course, but I saw them through the window, saw the ambulance, dusty olive green with a big red cross on its roof. It wasn’t easy to tell that they were Germans at first—they were more bandage than uniform—but even through the dingy window glass I could make out that one still had some medals pinned to his tunic. Not our medals. So I guess he was a hero too, just on the wrong side.
I hope the medals give that Kraut some comfort because he was missing both legs above the knee and his right hand was gone as well. I saw his face. He was a handsome fellow, movie star handsome, I thought, with a wide mouth and perfectly straight Aryan nose and dark, sunken eyes. I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kr
aut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the war, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye sockets.
No, not like animals, like GIs. There’s nothing a soldier knows better than squatting in the bottom of a hole. Cat Preeling wrote a poem about it, which I’ll probably mangle, but here’s what I recall:
Dig it deep and in you creep,
While all around there’s the boom-boom sound.
Mud to your knees while your buddy pees.
Another hole, like the hole before . . .
Yeah, that’s all I remember. It goes on for a couple dozen verses.