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Back
By mid-1944, the U.S. Army was facing a
critical shortage of the most important commodity in any war, the
common foot soldier. Higher-than-expected casualties during the
liberation of France had forced the Army to comb its ranks for
replacement infantrymen. Plucked in 1944 from the safety and
privilege of the Army Specialized Training Program (the World War
II version of the college deferment of the Vietnam years),
twenty-two-year-old John Babcock suddenly found himself an infantry
private headed to Europe. Raised in an upper-middle-class family,
this sensitive and literate youth was thrust into a group of
coarse, uneducated, and sometimes brutal draftees who were headed
to the 78th Infantry Division as replacements. Babcock demonstrates
that the greatest generation was not always that. Instead, it was
like any other cohortfull of liars, cowards, and ordinary men who
simply wanted to stay alive and go home. Babcock lets us see the
war through his eyesjust over the rim of the foxhole. Undergoing
his baptism of fire in the Battle of the Bulge, he endures the
trials of combat, advancing through attrition to become the senior
sergeant in the company. This ordinary enlisted infantryman in just
another combat division takes the reader from infantry basic
training and seven months of combat to postwar occupation duty in
Germany and back home. It is one infantry riflemans story rather
than an account of how his division fit into the grander scheme of
the war in Europethough the author relates to that by providing the
reader with a roadmap of dates and locations taken. Babcock offers
an intimate taste of combat, casualties, how he fought, and with
which weapons (in clear civilian language), and both the heroism
and cowardice of his fellow soldiers. Published in cooperation with
the Association of the United States Army, it is a gripping account
of how an ordinary American boy felt and experienced the so-called
good war. |
| Product Code |
Description |
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| ISBN-10: 1574888005 ISBN-13: 9781574888003 |
Paperback - June 2006 |
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£12.50
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