On Oct. 27, 1947, thousands of caskets were unloaded from a ship in New York. The bodies of soldiers from the European theater, writes Rick Atkinson, "then traveled by rail in a great diaspora across the republic for burial in their hometowns." Three young men, killed between the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and April 1945 in Germany two weeks before the war in Europe ended, were destined for Henry Wright's Missouri farm:
"Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born. Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky."
Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light," the completion of his trilogy on the liberation of Western Europe, is history written at the level of literature. If, as a U.S. infantryman wrote, "No war is really over until the last veteran is dead," the war has not ended: About 400 World War II veterans, almost half a battalion, are dying each day. Spend the shank end of summer with Atkinson's tribute to all who served and suffered.
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