May 7, 1945 Well, the war ended today. Tomorrow is officially V - E Day! All is quiet on the western front. Thank our Almighty God that at last we have peace over here. We cant really be happy as long as we have boys fighting on the other side of the world but it is also a big step towards ending the war over there too. We hope and pray that it ends soon. It looked like the 4th of July here tonight. The French civilians are shooting up flares and rockets of all colors. The soldiers are not celebrating very much though. The order to Cease Firing has come. I just cant help but thinking of our buddies who were left behind on the battlefields and never will hear the order.

First published just a year after the end of the war, this is the story of the Second Infantry Division in World War II. It is the story of innumerable acts of fortitude and courage, of individual sacrifice and devotion to duty under fire, by a fighting division which has served with honor in two world wars. “Closely following actual combat operations, brief editions of our participation in World War II were published. With the passage of time, the need for a more authentic and comprehensive history of this period has become evident. This book is designed to meet that need. “This history shows that from D+1 to V-E Day our Division, in the face of repeated fanatical enemy action, was employed constantly as a spearhead shock division, and that in this role it maintained unblemished its proud record of never having failed to take its objective nor of having relinquished ground so gained. During operations we were concerned with our immediate task. Now in the light of subsequent events and broader perspective, the importance to the nation and to our army of our successes becomes increasingly evident.”—W. M. Robertson, Major-General, U.S. Army

A beautiful reckoning with the life and work of the legendary journalist Ernie Pyle, who gave World War II a human face for millions of Americans even as he wrestled with his own demons At the height of his fame and influence during World War II, Ernie Pyle’s nationally syndicated dispatches from combat zones shaped America’s understanding of what the war felt like to ordinary soldiers, as no writer’s work had before or has since. From North Africa to Sicily, from the beaches of Anzio to the beaches of Normandy, and on to the war in the Pacific, where he would meet his end, Ernie Pyle had a genius for connecting with his beloved dogfaced grunts. A humble man, himself plagued by melancholy and tortured by marriage to a partner whose mental health struggles were much more acute than his own, Pyle was in touch with suffering in a way that left an indelible mark on his readers. While never defeatist, his stories left no doubt as to the heavy weight of the burden soldiers carried. He wrote about post-traumatic stress long before that was a diagnosis. In The Soldier's Truth, acclaimed writer David Chrisinger brings Pyle’s journey to vivid life in all its heroism and pathos. Drawing on access to all of Pyle’s personal correspondence, his book captures every dramatic turn of Pyle’s war with sensory immediacy and a powerful feel for both the outer and the inner landscape. With a background in helping veterans and other survivors of trauma come to terms with their experiences through storytelling, Chrisinger brings enormous reservoirs of empathy and insight to bear on Pyle’s trials. Woven in and out of his chronicle is the golden thread of his own travels across these same landscapes, many of them still battle-scarred, searching for the landmarks Pyle wrote about. A moving tribute to an ordinary American hero whose impact on the war is still too little understood, and a powerful account of that war’s impact and how it is remembered, The Soldier's Truth takes its place among the essential contributions to our perception of war and how we make sense of it.

Kampberetning fra 2. infanteridivision (US) under 2. Verdenskrig. Normandiet 7/6 1944, Brest 21/8-18/9, Paris 29/9, St. Vith 4/10-12/12, Giessen 29/3 1945. Returfra Le Havre 13/7. God og fyldig beretning med mange billeder og fornødne kortskitser

Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts—including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections—Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.

This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II. Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre- and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program. In designing Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening’s validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two “malingering” neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted. While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not “predisposition,” precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared. Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists’ wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with “PTSD,” not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.