NARRATOR: By the late summer of 1943,
the United States had been at war for more than 20 months.
Its factories and shipyards
were now performing miracles of manufacturing around the clock.
But its armed forces were still far from ready
to mount an assault on the Germans occupying western Europe.
Meanwhile, along a thousand-mile front,
the Soviets were struggling to hurl the Nazis from their soil.
The Americans and British did what they could
to help relieve the pressure on the Russians.
American airmen, including Earl Burke of Sacramento, California,
would be called upon to defy preposterous odds
and begin to bring the war to the heart of Germany itself.
While Private 'Babe' Ciarlo,
an Italian immigrant's son from Waterbury, Connecticut,
would find himself battling foul weather, hostile terrain
and fierce enemy resistance
to liberate the land where his parents had been born.
SAM HYNES: Dying is different for pilots,
for aviation personnel.
On the ground, in the infantry, there's a corpse.
It might be blown apart, but there's a foot
or an arm or something.
And it's very close.
In aviation, the planes tend to go away and not come back.
Even if someone dies in the air with you
the plane explodes, it falls to the ground
at a place you'll never see.
I had a number of friends killed during the war...
...but I never saw any of their bodies.
EARL BURKE: The war came home to my family
on a very gut level.
Uh, my Uncle Earl,
who lived in Sacramento called me one night and said,
"I want you to come over to my house."
He was only a couple blocks away, so I went over there.
And he showed me an article in the newspaper that said
there was a crash in Puerto Rico.
And my only brother I had, older brother,
was listed as killed in an airplane accident.
And we tried for 12 hours on the telephone to try to get
to Puerto Rico to confirm that this was, indeed, my brother.
And finally, somebody says,
"Yes, it was a Tom Burke from Sacramento."
Well, five days later, we got the telegram
telling that he had been killed.
So that's how my war came to us.
And there was no talking
about what had happened.
My parents were very stoic.
And I only heard my mother cry once.
It was in her bedroom, since she never cried in front of me.
So it was a tough thing for those two people.
For me, I lost a brother.
"Yeah, damn it.
"We gonna do something about it."
Then I got the crazy idea that I was going to enlist
and win the war. (Chuckles)
It was kind of for Tommy...
in a way.
Not so consciously.
I didn't say, "This is for you, Tom."
No, I never did that.
But, uh, I enlisted.
I'm glad I did.
(BENNY GOODMAN'S 'ON THE ALAMO' PLAYS)
NARRATOR: Earl Burke joined the army
and trained first at Fort Lewis in Seattle
where, he remembered, he learned "how to pick up cigarette butts,
"paint anything that didn't move
"and salute anything that did".
Like his late brother,
he wanted to take part in the air war.
After serving at a base outside Reno, Nevada,
where he loaded bombs onto heavy bombers,
he was sent across the country to Camp Shanks, New Jersey,
and then on June 1, 1943,
boarded the 'Queen Mary',
part of the seemingly endless stream of Gls now headed
for England to prepare for the invasion of France.
Soon after he got there, he happened upon
two old friends from Sacramento,
twin brothers named Richard and Robert Egger.
BURKE: I was in a Red Cross hut on a base.
It was kind of a PX type of thing.
So as we were drinking the beer and all that,
having a good time, they said,
"Well, why don't you get with us?"
They were tail and ball turret gunners on a B-17.
It sounded like fun.
What the heck, you know?
I was 19. I could've had a lot of fun.
They seemed to be having a lot of fun.
They were not scared at all.
So I says, "OK," so the next day I went down
and got an application and filled out the application.
And at that time, they were losing a lot of bombers.
They were losing 60 at a time.
They were losing over 600 men in a raid.
So they were taking anybody.
They were taking cooks.
They were taking truck drivers,
mechanics - anybody that could get into an airplane.
Nothing was going to happen to me - no way.
I'm 19 years old. I'm gonna conquer this world.
Nothing was going to happen to me, you know... no.
NARRATOR: Until the Allies were able to launch
their long-planned invasion of Europe,
the only way to weaken German power
on the Continent was from the air.
Since bombing during the day attracted anti-aircraft fire
and swarms of German fighters,
the British preferred to fly their missions
at night.
But when aerial surveys showed
that only one in five British bombs had fallen
within five miles of its intended industrial target,
their policy shifted
to what was called area bombing.
Relentless night-time raids on German cities,
intended to destroy not only factories,
but whole neighbourhoods
and "break the spirit of the people".
While the British continued to bomb German cities at night,
the Americans decided to take on the much more dangerous task
of bombing defence industries by day.
The Americans believed the B-17 -
their big, 4-engine bomber -
superior to anything else their Allies or the enemy had.
It was called the Flying Fortress,
because it was armed with as many as nine
.50-calibre machine guns,
and each plane was fitted out
with the revolutionary Norden bombsight,
said to be so accurate
it made it possible to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel
"from 20,000 feet".
Around-the-clock bombing took a fearful toll.
In late July, British bombs
set off a whirling firestorm that burned
or asphyxiated at least 40,000 German civilians
in and around Hamburg,
taking almost as many lives in one week
as the German Luftwaffe had taken
in eight months of bombing Britain.
But the German will to resist
only intensified, just as the will of Londoners
had intensified during the Blitz.
Hamburg's factories
were soon back in business.
Meanwhile, American airmen
were suffering terrible losses.
MAN: Keep your eyes open. MAN 2: Three planes, 9:00.
MAN 3: I got my sights. (ENGINE ROARS)
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
MAN: B-17 out of control at 3:00.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's friends from Sacramento,
the Egger twins,
would both be shot down in the coming months.
BURKE: The number of missions that you had to fly
before you were returned to the States
and/or given a non-combat job
was 25 at that point.
The average number of missions
flown in 1943 for a combat person
was only 14.
If you got to 14, you were usually dead.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke was now a member
of the 854th Chemical Warfare Company,
part of the 384th Bomb Group
in the US Army's Eighth Air Force.
On September 16, 1943,
he clambered into the ball turret
for the first time.
Their target was the German submarine facilities at Nantes,
on the French coast.
BURKE: The ball turret is underneath the aircraft.
You put your knees up against your ears... almost.
Almost like a foetal position,
'cause you're up in there jammed in that little thing,
and you got these horrendous guns
in front of you, two of 'em.
Didn't pass my mind that I was getting into trouble...
...till the first mission.
We're flying about 28,000 feet.
And, uh, the first time I tried my turret
to see whether I could fire, you know, possibly, uh...
do a reasonable job of tracking a fighter plane,
I didn't know my right foot from my left foot.
I thought I wanted the gun to go that way,
and I'd press up my right foot, it'd go that way.
And I didn't know where it was going.
I was so scared.
I didn't know what I was doing.
And pretty soon,
you know, before we got to the bombing area,
and the fighters started to come out,
uh, I learned my right foot from my left foot.
MAN: Two fighters, 6:00 up, coming in, diving out, chief.
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
NARRATOR: Earl Burke survived his first mission.
The raid and others like it
reduced French coastal towns to rubble.
"Not a dog or a cat survived in them," a German officer said,
but the concrete submarine pens that had been
the Americans' target remained intact.
BURKE: Well, the accuracy of our bombing
left much to be desired.
They said you could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel.
We couldn't drop a bomb in France
that hit anything, any target, in the beginning.
We just couldn't hit 'em.
NARRATOR: In August,
376 B-17 s had conducted a massive raid on Schweinfurt
and Regensburg, Germany, hoping to smash
the heavily-defended factories that supplied ball bearings
to the Nazi war machine.
MAN: Fighters, 10:00.
NARRATOR: It had been a disaster.
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
60 Flying Fortresses failed to return.
600 crewmen were lost.
The battered factories were again
back working round the clock.
And so the Allied command
ordered a second strike on Schweinfurt for October 14.
BURKE: We were briefed that we were going to Schweinfurt.
And you could have heard all
the people groan and moan... swear.
Nobody wanted to go back to Schweinfurt.
NARRATOR: Burke's squadron was ready before dawn.
BURKE: You were getting ready to go.
Those were the times you were more nervous and scared
to get into that airplane.
You did not want to get into that airplane.
But you did anyway.
You got in the airplane because your friends were
getting in the aircraft.
You didn't want to let your friends down.
Even though, you know...
didn't want to go.
NARRATOR: 283 B-17 s
took off into the fog and headed for Schweinfurt.
Fighter escorts shielded them across Belgium,
then turned back before their fuel ran out.
Within minutes, hundreds of German fighters
rose up to meet them.
(RAPID ARTILLERY FIRE)
BURKE: They came in 10 abreast.
You see these little things wink.
And, as they wink, you know what's coming.
You're talking about a quarter pound of lead
each time you saw one of those winks.
Then they would stay off a fair thousand yards,
and they would lob... Iob rockets at you.
You couldn't reach them
because your.50-calibre machine gun couldn't touch them.
That's why we needed
the fighter escorts.
We were sitting ducks.
MAN: B-17 in trouble.
BURKE: When the bogeys were coming in,
you're up there, you're pressing the little red button here.
And, uh, hope that he flies into it.
And I was up there flying two .50-calibre machine guns.
Shooting rounds of shells about half an inch in diameter.
Lots of lead in the air.
MAN: Going up... and down.
Take the shot, you guys.
One shot.
NARRATOR: As Earl Burke's battered formation approached its target,
the German fighters withdrew,
and American crews braced for yet another terror -
anti-aircraft fire, exploding shells that filled the air
with thousands of metal shards.
The Germans called it flak.
MAN: B-17 out of control at 3:00.
NARRATOR: Many more planes were hit
and never reached their target.
BURKE: And over Schweinfurt...
...bang.
Plexiglas on my right-hand side exploded.
My left-hand side exploded.
And a 20-millimetre shell had come up through my turret,
hitting me in the left arm.
Not breaking the arm, but smashing the bone...
tearing my jacket off,
and went up into the waist window
on the left-hand side, hit the stanchion
of the.50-calibre gun, and blew up.
Killed the waist gunner.
And here I was down in this ball turret
trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.
And, I have to say this,
my training as an Eagle Scout
in the Boy Scouts of America saved my arm that day.
Because I put a tourniquet around it, knew how to do that.
Knew how to stop the flow of blood.
And, uh, everything hunky-dory then.
And continued on flying in the ball turret.
So it's, about 35, 40 degrees below zero.
And when blood flows out,
it freezes and drops down and rolls around on the bottom.
So the idea is to make sure that when you're at altitude,
you pick your blood up and throw it out.
Because if you didn't,
you'd have to mop it up when you got down. (Chuckles)
But I fly... I flew that way
for around four, four and a half hours.
When I got hit, immediately I says,
"Oh, my goodness... my parents.
"My parents will get another telegram
"telling either I was wounded or dead."
At that point, I didn't know which.
That was the first time I ever thought
what my being in the service
did to my parents.
And I had second thoughts then.
But it was too late.
MAN: 1:00 high... coming around.
NARRATOR: German fighters returned
and attacked the bombers in Earl Burke's group
again and again,
all the way back to the English Channel.
The survivors landed wherever they could,
at airfields scattered all across England.
The second Schweinfurt raid was
just as disastrous as the first.
60 more Fortresses had been shot down.
600 more men were lost
and hundreds more were wounded.
Surviving airmen remembered that day
as Black Thursday.
We, uh, first were sent
to a bomber base to meet the B-17 s
coming in shooting off red flares,
which meant there were wounded aboard.
The first one came in just right over the treetops.
We thought it was going to crash.
It skidded on the runway.
And I was in the ambulance.
We ran over there and ran in...
You had to crawl.
There was no way to get back to a B-17 standing up.
The tail gunner was dead.
He'd been, you know, just shot right through the head.
The, uh, copilot and the pilot had been in a fire.
The belly gunner was hurt.
They were all injured.
I guess that the, uh, plane that, uh...
the German plane that fired on 'em
just riddled the whole plane.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's injury kept him out of action for weeks.
But each time he - or anyone else -
returned to the air,
their odds of surviving the war grew longer.
BURKE: I kept away from making friends.
I did not make friends.
The reason is,
if you met a guy at the... at the PX and bought him a beer,
tomorrow he would be gone.
You know, and you kept saying "I'm losing people."
So you locked yourself up.
NEWSREEL: Hollywood's most famous movie stars
leave the film capital to help the government sell war bonds.
The country has asked the people to invest a billion dollars
in one month to help pay for the war.
And here's the start of the drive.
They'll tour 300 cities from coast to coast.
This is the people's way of saying,
"From the home front to the battle front,
"from movie stars to sales clerks,
"America's 130 million citizens are in the war."
NARRATOR: The war - the single greatest
coordinated effort in American history -
would eventually cost the United States
$304 billion dollars.
More than $3 trillion in today's terms.
Taxes alone could never pay for it all.
That required a series of annual war bond drives.
The whole country got involved.
In Mobile, John Cottingham, a worker at Brookley Field,
invested all but eight cents of his pay cheque each month
in war bonds.
The Black Bears, the local Negro league baseball team,
staged a double-header that raised $100,000.
The citizens of Sacramento were asked
to buy $16 million worth of bonds
during one particular drive.
They were told it would pay for 96 minutes of the war.
In Waterbury, bonds were sold from 'Liberty House',
set up in the middle of the town green
on the site where similar bonds
had been sold to help defeat Germany
during the First World War.
People turned out to gaze at a giant barrage balloon,
to see a German plane that had been shot from the sky
and ride a tank.
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"They can send all the movie stars they want
"on countrywide war bond sales drives,
"but for our part, we'll take Maude Jochims
"as the best bond salesman - or saleswoman - of them all.
"We stopped in at the Palace Wednesday afternoon,
"and they were going to fall $8,000 short.
"Then Maude, as a 1 -woman campaign,
"waded in to canvass Rock County patrons.
"The bond orders poured in
"and the total was boosted over $48,000."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
MAN: "Dear Mom and family,
"I know you didn't receive mail from me for over a week,
"but circumstances prevented me from writing to you.
"Yes, that's right,
"I took a little boat ride and I didn't even get seasick.
"Well, I suppose you're wondering where I am.
"I think if I wouldn't tell you, you would never guess it.
"OK, I'll tell you,
"because I know you will want to know in the worst way.
"I'm somewhere in North Africa.
"Surprised?
"Well, I am, too,
"but I am very safe, so don't worry.
"Love, Babe."
NARRATOR: At the Casablanca Conference
back in January, the Allies had publicly called
for the unconditional surrender of the Axis,
and privately decided upon an invasion of the island of Sicily
and then the Italian mainland,
what Churchill called "the soft underbelly of the Axis".
American commanders had impatiently insisted
on a cross-Channel invasion of France,
but the British were wary,
still haunted by the memory of the losses
they had suffered there during the First World War.
They got their way.
Sicily would be first.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)
NEWSREEL: American troops of General Patton's Seventh Army
move swiftly through western Sicily, taking town after town
as they drive to join
General Montgomery's British Eighth Army.
(EXPLOSIONS AND RAPID GUNFIRE)
DWAIN LUCE: And Patton came to see us and talk to us.
We all loved Patton.
We loved lke, too. But I mean, we loved Patton.
And then, he was something.
He says, "Now, some troops can move and some troops can shoot.
"But when you can move and shoot at the same time,
"then you and Napoleon are pissing through the same straw."
NARRATOR: It took the Allies just 38 days to capture Sicily,
pushing the enemy from one town to another.
Thousands of civilians died,
and 25,000 Allied soldiers were dead or out of action.
The Axis lost 167,000 men,
the overwhelming majority of them Italian.
Tens of thousands of crack German troops
had managed to escape.
In Rome, Mussolini had been deposed
by his own generals and counsellors.
The new Italian government surrendered on September 8,
and declared war on Germany soon thereafter.
But there were now more than 132,000 German troops
waiting on the Italian mainland,
another 460,000 were on their way to join them.
And a daring Nazi commando raid rescued Mussolini from captivity
and set him up in northern Italy as head of a puppet regime.
It was clear to the Allies
that the Germans were resolved to hold Italy
at all costs.
NARRATOR: "ltaly is like a boot," Napoleon once said.
"You must enter it, like Hannibal, from the top."
The Allies planned to attack it from the bottom.
(ALARMS BLARE)
(RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)
At first, everything seemed to go according to plan.
The Fifth Army landed at Salerno on September 9.
(MEN SHOUT)
The British Eighth Army
seized the important airfields at Foggia.
And Naples fell to the Americans on October 1.
(APPLAUSE AND CHEERING)
Despite fierce resistance, in three months
the Allies managed to achieve two key goals -
they had forced Italy out of the war
and onto their side,
and they were keeping thousands of German troops busy
who might otherwise have been fighting in Russia
or preparing to defend France
against the invasion both sides knew was coming.
The Allies' target now was Rome,
only 150 miles away.
Getting there would prove harder than anyone could have imagined.
With the Allied forces
was Private Babe Ciarlo of Waterbury, Connecticut,
now a member of Company G,
2nd Battalion, 15th Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division,
Fifth Allied Army,
under the command of General Mark Clark.
On September 18, nine days after the first elements
of the Fifth Army had landed at Salerno,
the 3rd Division had gone ashore to join them.
(DISTANT GUNFIRE)
MAN: "October 20, 1943.
"Dear family,
"I know I haven't written to you for a long time,
"and I hope you understand
"the army has been keeping me pretty busy.
"I suppose you've been keeping up with the news lately,
"and by the way we're beating the Germans,
"this war won't last much longer.
(DISTANT EXPLOSION)
"Eddie and I are dying for some nice raviolis
"and I don't think it'll be long before we get them.
"Will you please send me Mom's brother's address
"in your next letter?
(EXPLOSION)
"Love, Babe."
NARRATOR: Babe was careful always to keep the details of what he was doing
from his family so as not to alarm his mother.
But her brother lived in Rome,
and Babe clearly wanted everybody back home
to know he'd made it to Italy.
As the Allies tried to move north,
the weather turned bad,
and the terrain grew more and more forbidding.
Crags, deep-cut valleys,
twisting mountain roads, blown bridges -
all under constant German fire
from hidden hillside strongholds.
(MACHINE GUN FIRES)
Bill Mauldin, from Mountain Park, New Mexico,
was a cartoonist for 'Stars and Stripes', the army newspaper.
Week after week, he managed to find laughs
in the lives of ordinary infantrymen,
even when, as he said,
"You don't think life could be any more miserable."
MAN: "Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining.
"Sit in the hole while the water climbs up around your ankles.
"Pour cold mud down your shirt collar.
"Sit there for 48 hours...
"...and so there is no danger of your dozing off,
"imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance
"to club you on the head or set your house on fire.
"Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks,
"pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand,
"and walk on the muddiest road you can find.
"Fall flat on your face every few minutes,
"as you imagine big meteors streaking down
"to sock you.
"If you repeat this performance every three days
"for several months, you may begin to understand
"why an infantryman gets out of breath...
"...but you still won't understand
"how he feels when things get tough."
NARRATOR: The men learned to sleep while marching -
it was "a kind of coma", one remembered -
and when they got a chance to lie down,
preferred to sleep on rocks rather than bare ground
because rocks were relatively dry.
Hundreds of mules were used to carry up supplies...
...and to carry back the dead.
Boulder by boulder, hill by hill,
the Allies battered their way through the German defences -
the Volturno Line...
the Barbara Line...
the Reinhard Line...
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
On November 17,
Babe Ciarlo's 3rd Infantry Division
was pulled back to rest.
In 58 straight days of combat since the landing at Salerno,
they had lost 3,265 men and moved less than 50 miles.
The 3rd Division would cycle through 76,000 men
before the war was over.
MAN: "November 17, 1943.
"The reason why I didn't write
"is because I don't have much to say and I am a little lazy.
"I hope you have a good time over the holidays,
"and I hope you eat up at Mom's house for Christmas
"so that Mom might be happier.
"Your loving brother, always, Babe."
(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)
(ENGINES HUM)
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
NARRATOR: The terrible losses suffered
during the second assault on Schweinfurt in October of 1943,
and other raids that week
in which 88 more American bombers had been shot down,
helped persuade the Allies to cut back
on daytime raids over Germany
until they could design and produce enough fighters
capable of escorting bombers
all the way to their targets and back again.
The targets themselves were changed, as well.
Bombers continued to bomb cities, including Berlin,
and to batter war industries,
but the destruction of the German air force on the ground,
as well as in the air, now took top priority.
MAN: Right to your left.
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
MAN: I got my sights on him.
NARRATOR: The Allies were determined to dominate the skies
before the planned invasion of France.
Before D-day.
EARL BURKE: Of course, being an enlisted man,
we didn't think the officers knew what they were doing.
We could have fought it a little bit better than they did.
(CHEERING)
But, occasionally,
the missions came off proper.
We finally realised that these guys knew what they were doing.
That we're fighting the right war.
It was not an economical thing to do in terms of life.
You'd lose 10 bombers,
you'd lose 100 men.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke was no longer flying.
He had been wounded again,
this time by shrapnel
from a bomb that exploded while he was on the ground.
BURKE: They put me in a hospital.
And there they told me
that I had to have my arm removed.
But fortunately,
there was the chief of surgery came upon me in a hallway
as I was going into the operating room.
Says, what was I doing in there?
I says, "Well, I'm...
"guess I'm going to have a little problem with my arm."
"What's wrong with your arm?"
"L-I... I got wounded,
"and I got what they call osteomyelitis."
And that was the scourge of World War I.
If you got wounded in the bone, that's what happened.
He says, "That... No, but... not going to do it.
"Back in the ward."
They put me back in the ward, bring me back in a cast,
cut a hole in the cast, put a little wire net across it.
I said, "What are you doing?"
He says, "I'm making a little home for somebody."
I said, "What is that little home going to do?"
He says, "I'm going to keep these little guys in on your arm
"so they can eat all that stuff out of your bone."
And I said, "Well, what-what kind of things are they?"
He says, "They're little white things,
"you know, like-like this."
Had a handful of maggots, flipped them in there,
and put the wire cage back on it.
Says, "Now, those little guys are going
"to eat that stuff out of you,
"'cause we can't get it out of you.
"No way we can get that out of you."
So, there I was with this little thing over there,
and watching those guys having a meal.
I was in the hospital 15 months.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's air war was over.
He returned to California,
helped rescue pilots lost at sea on training missions,
and finally, went home to his parents in Sacramento.
Despite the all-out Allied raids,
German aircraft production would actually increase.
"We are virtually drowning in aircraft,"
wrote one German flyer.
But the Luftwaffe was now losing trained crews far faster
than they could be replaced.
And Allied bombing had also denied the Germans
the precious fuel they needed to train new ones.
"The time has come,"
the chief of the German fighter wing told his superiors,
"when our force is within sight of collapse."
When the time finally came to invade France,
the Allies would own the skies.
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"For our Rock County boys.
"Dear gang,
"Who'd have thought four years ago
"that you'd be reading this in all the states of the Union,
"maybe in Africa, India,
"Iceland, England,
"Alaska, New Guinea,
"Australia, Caledonia, Hawaii,
"New Zealand
"and a score of other places with funny names?
"Up until late Monday,
"it didn't look much like winter,
"and then the white flakes began to fall silently,
"swirling in white clouds,
"almost blotting out the street lights at night.
"But it didn't last very long,
"just enough to throw a little mantle of white
"in patches over the dark, bare, dirty-looking ground.
"Tuesday morning, the snapping cold came,
"and by Wednesday morning,
"the smoke from the chimneys was hanging like white plumes
"in the clear, quiet, frosty air."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
NARRATOR: Americans could now look back
on some real progress in the war against the Axis.
In the Pacific Theatre of Operations,
Americans had recaptured Attu in the Aleutian Islands
and were fighting on Bougainville and New Guinea.
But the Japanese were still on the march in Burma,
intent on invading north-eastern India.
And the long campaign to take the Gilberts,
the Marshalls and the Carolines,
to liberate the Philippines
and eventually attack the Japanese home islands,
had only just begun.
In the European Theatre,
improved radar,
new, long-range Allied aircraft
and ever-growing numbers of escort ships
sailing from American shipyards
reduced the threat from German U-boats.
More and more weapons
and equipment were now reaching the embattled Soviet Union.
When the Red Army began to sweep the enemy from the Ukraine,
thousands of newly-manufactured American trucks
helped make possible their deadly pursuit.
The Axis had been driven from North Africa, too,
and Sicily was now in Allied hands.
But the Germans were fighting back hard in Italy.
And in secret,
they had already begun to implement a policy
of systematised murder
that would one day persuade even the most cynical GI
that the war had to be fought.
As Allied leaders drew up plans
for the long-delayed invasion of the Continent,
Hitler put tens of thousands of labourers to work
strengthening his coastal defences.
For the men of Luverne, Sacramento,
Mobile, Waterbury, and every other American town,
things were bound to get still tougher.