En savoir plus
Informationen zum Autor Alex Kershaw Klappentext *The instant New York Times bestseller* The untold story of four of the most decorated soldiers of World War II—all Medal of Honor recipients—from the beaches of French Morocco to Hitler’s own mountaintop fortress, by the national bestselling author of The First Wave “Pitch-perfect.”— The Wall Street Journal • “Riveting.”— World War II magazine • “Alex Kershaw is the master of putting the reader in the heat of the action.”—Martin Dugard As the Allies raced to defeat Hitler, four men, all in the same unit, earned medal after medal for battlefield heroism. Maurice “Footsie” Britt, a former professional football player, became the very first American to receive every award for valor in a single war. Michael Daly was a West Point dropout who risked his neck over and over to keep his men alive. Keith Ware would one day become the first and only draftee in history to attain the rank of general before serving in Vietnam. In WWII, Ware owed his life to the finest soldier he ever commanded, a baby-faced Texan named Audie Murphy. In the campaign to liberate Europe, each would gain the ultimate accolade, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Tapping into personal interviews and a wealth of primary source material, Alex Kershaw has delivered his most gripping account yet of American courage, spanning more than six hundred days of increasingly merciless combat, from the deserts of North Africa to the dark heart of Nazi Germany. Once the guns fell silent, these four exceptional warriors would discover just how heavy the Medal of Honor could be—and how great the expectations associated with it. Having survived against all odds, who among them would finally find peace? Leseprobe CHAPTER 1 Baptism of Fire The silence was unnerving after several days at sea, crossing from America with the constant grinding of the ship's engines, quiet now in the Atlantic waters off North Africa. But it didn't last long. In the early hours, bells clanged and then soldiers heard an anchor chain's rattle, barked orders, heavy and frantic footsteps, power winches whirring as they started to lower landing craft into the whitecapped water. A radio played. Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Maurice "Footsie" Britt to his surprise heard the voice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt announce that the invasion of North Africa had already begun. "We figured he had jumped the gun a little," Britt later remembered. "After all, we were still eight miles from shore."1 Then blond-haired Britt, all two hundred twenty pounds of him, took his place in his landing craft. Finally, the craft headed toward the shore. The seas as far as the horizon were dotted with transports. Britt belonged to the 3rd Division's 30th Infantry Regiment, whose motto was "Our country, not ourselves."2 He was one of thirty-five thousand green American troops in Western Task Force, commanded by General George S. Patton, one of three forces attacking French Morocco and Algeria in three areas of a thousand-mile-long coastline, stretching all the way from Safi on the Atlantic to Algiers. The arrival of the first Americans in Europe to fight the Axis powers came at a critical point in the war. After enjoying stunning success against the British 8th Army through 1941 and much of 1942, General Erwin Rommel and his famed Afrika Korps were now on the defensive, having been defeated at El Alamein in Egypt less than a week earlier. In all, the Torch Landings, the first joint operation of the war by the Americans and the British, comprised more than a hundred thousand troops backed by three hundred fifty warships from seven Allied navies. The Americans had tried to negotiate an armistice with the French in recent days but to no avail, and so an order had come from on high to Britt's division: "Okay, ...
