Sublime

Fresh from the first successful ground reconnaissance in the Central Pacific Theater, General Smith sent forth his VAC Recon Company like the twelve spies into Canaan. At Majuro Atoll, one of the VAC Recon platoon commanders, Lieutenant Harvey Weeks—a former Yale wrestler, former attorney, and former enlisted man—captured the Japanese commander wit

The veteran 1st Division took hold. “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach,” shouted Colonel George A. Taylor as he rallied his troops in the 18th Infantry Regiment, “the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

In World War II, Eisenhower made Davis his adjutant general both in North Africa and at SHAEF. Davis accompanied Ike to Russia in 1945, and served as the Army’s assistant adjutant general from 1946 until his retirement in 1953.

the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their c

Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, Eisenhower’s new commander, was an amalgam of Fox Conner and Kenyon Joyce—a military intellectual who relished leading troops in the field. Universally regarded as “a soldier’s soldier,” Krueger was a combat infantryman at heart. He was also widely respected as one of the Army’s best educated and most perceptive o