Alex Kershaw · 2012 · overland

Alex Kershaw's 2012 history of Felix Sparks and the 157th Infantry of the 45th Thunderbird Division, across five hundred days of combat, the longest and bloodiest road of any American regiment in Europe. From four amphibious invasions, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and southern France, through the frozen Vosges and into the Reich, the citizen-soldiers of the American West fought to the gates of Dachau, where Sparks confronted the worst of the war and the limits of his own men's restraint.

1. 1
   Sicily

   July 1943: green and untested, the Thunderbirds of the 157th wade ashore in Sicily, Felix Sparks among them, on their first day of war.

2. 2
   Salerno

   September, and a second landing, at Salerno on the Italian mainland, where the beachhead is nearly thrown back into the sea.

3. 3
   Anzio

   At Anzio, in the meatgrinder beyond the beach, Sparks loses almost his entire company holding the line against the German counterattack.

4. 4
   Sainte-Maxime

   A fourth amphibious assault, Operation Dragoon, puts them ashore on the Riviera, and they drive north up the Rhone.

5. 5
   Vosges

   In the freezing Vosges that winter a whole battalion is surrounded and destroyed; again and again the regiment is rebuilt from replacements.

6. 6
   Aschaffenburg

   Across the Siegfried Line and the Rhine into Germany, and a savage ten-day street fight for Hitler's fortress town of Aschaffenburg.

7. 7
   Nuremberg

   Then the rubble of Nuremberg, shrine city of the Nazi rallies, taken block by block.

8. 8
   Dachau

   And on the 29th of April 1945, the gates of Dachau, where what they find robs the mind of reason, and Sparks draws his pistol to stop his own men.