PART I: The Valley Of Death

The sky was clear and illuminated with millions of stars that night.. as I lay clutching my rifle, the wood and steel speckled with dirt and my own blood. Such beauty so far above the brutal and bleak hosilities of man's struggle to conquer or be. Even if the bullet only grazed my arm, the horrifying knowledge of mortality was more prevalent than ever. In these situations, the mind triggers the starkest of questions and thoughts.

How will I die today?

Images of shattered bone, torn flesh, razor wire, mortar blasts, and life taken from young men flooded my thoughts. Close friends and men I hardly knew strewn about, ripped to shreds, screaming, trying to put themselves back together.. when will my days run out? The piercing sound of MG42 fire ripping earth up around me immediately expunges these thoughts. We had been dug in this position for three grueling days with no relief and pondering mortality was not high on the to-do list.

It had now been 2 months since the beaches in France where littered with bodies, and the oceans stained red. We had taken Cherbourg, Caen, and St. Lô but where now battling it out with the krauts in Chambois.. the last stronghold in the Falaise Gap area. We knew we would have France within days, and the hope of crossing into Germany and a massive airborne offensive kept us hopefull for the weeks to come. This war has gone on long enough.

Raising my rifle to eye level just above my foxhole I could see their silhouettes popping up, frantically moving about, firing at us. The German machine guns rate of fire made it easy to pick out amongst the hail of muzzle flashes, it sounds like a saw tearing through steel. I line up my shot and squeeze the trigger twice, the machine gun falls silent.. John C. Garand would be proud. I slide back down into the earth to avoid the hail of bullets raining onto my position just as a mortar round lands no more than 10 feet to my left, completely obliterating Odowski and Stewart. Better them not me. The dirt and smoke kicked up in the air provide me just enough time to position myself and fire a few more shots across the clearing and into the enemy.

The Brits and the Canadians had been fighting hard years before any of us had stepped foot on these shores, and now here we where crushing fascism.. side by side with them. Hitler's tanks and reinforcements proved to be no match for our lust for victory. With von Kluge's few remaining battle worthy formations destroyed by the First Army, Allied command realised that the entire German position in Normandy was collapsing. General Bradley declared: "This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We're about to destroy an entire hostile army and go all the way from here to the German border."