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www.bluetyger.ca magazine bluetyger main home top head where it all begins page Box Camera Adventures by Mike Connealy African Episcopal Church near Barrie, Ontario Book
Recommendation:
Special thanks to: Ian Donen, Mike Connealy, and the moments of sunlight that made it through.
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WAR An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 Rick Atkinson Henry Holt and Company, NY 2002, 681 pages. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2 (hb) (Highly recommended) Among those who had not come back was a young American stretcher bearer, Caleb Milne, who was killed by a mortar round on May 11 while giving first aid to a wounded soldier. In a final prescient letter to his mother, Milne described the Tunisian Campaign as "a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things, and bad. How often you will have me near you when wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm.....Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute, not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must be lonely." p.540-541 Most people when they think about the Second World War, have some knowledge of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, Pearl Harbour, something about the fight in the Pacific against the Japanese. They often know little about the 20 million total killed in the German fight against the Soviet Union, the campaign in Italy, and certainly little about the US Army's first campaign against the Germans. Atkinson believes that this overlooked time in the American involvement is critical to understanding later successes. This was Eisenhower's first combat command. His first trial by Allies, both the English and the French. This book describes the mistakes, the waste, the bravery, and the costs. In the current situation in the world, it is a useful book to consider reading. Military planning does not always predict or prepare for actual warfare.
Rick Atkinson is a journalist, a Pullitzer Prize winner and the author of two other books: The Long Gray Line and Crusade. This book by Atkinson is the first in a series - The Liberation Trilogy (Vol. 2 a history of the war in Italy is to be published in 2005, Vol. 3 a history of the war in Western Europe will be published in 2008) - article by William J. Gibson - bluetyger is Made in Canada |
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