If Ive vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn’t seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.

The spring of 1942 was given over to a very impassioned, strategic debate about where we should first attack in counterpunching against the Germans and Italians. The British argued very persuasively on the part of Winston Churchill, prime minister, that this was a very green American Army, green soldiers, green commanders.

The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. Thats almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.