I have read a couple dozen military memoirs. Combat infantrymen have always fascinated me. Those foot soldiers who survived WWI and WWII are most amazing, as they demonstrate, in this reader’s mind, cases of supernatural intercession. I was honestly embarrassed, still am, that of all those stories of American and German, and even a Japanese service man [1] I had not read Audie’s. Perhaps this was because I saw the movie he starred in based on the book. I watched some of his westerns and thought he seemed a good soul.

My first job, as a man who has ghost written two books and written hundreds of others, perhaps half of which contained relations spoken to me by folks I interviewed, was to note the hand of the ghost writer. I find no indication of the ghost writer by name. It is inconceivable that a book this important to the U.S. Army and the nation was left to a man of action who had no writing experience. Someone was assigned by the publishing house, perhaps even the Army, to sit with Audie Murphy and get his story into writing. Quiet hurrah narrative was inserted in some places, but minimal. Audie made sure that the personality of his fallen fellows came through, to include their rude jokes, as a first principle. On page 273, I find what I believe were the last narrative words Audie spoke to the ghost writer:

“Have the years of blood and ruin stripped me of all decency? Of all belief?

[I bet my life that the writer asked him here, to qualify that. Then comes the voice of the quiet killer rising from the gory mud.]

“Not of all belief. I believe in the force of a hand grenade, the power of artillery, the accuracy of a Garand. I believe in hitting before you get hit, and that dead men do not look noble.”

What follows is USG company policy, three paragraphs of laconic patriotism, which it seems Audie only signed off on because his three best buddies were included at the top of his editorially expanded beliefs, against a faceless, nameless, anonymous enemy. The ghost writer inserts, “My country, America!” which fits with none of the depressing narrative in the previous 272 pages of slaughter. Audie respected the enemy as much as he did the invisible high command he served like a thinking bullet. He seemed bitter that, unlike the Germans, combat veterans were not rotated back to train new men, but that new men were simply fed piecemeal, like so many soft bullets, into depleted units, mostly to die, a few lucky ones to learn how to continue into death. One man, facing court martial for cowardice, was talked to by Audie, who felt bad for testifying against him. His soldier laughed at him, that he had at most 20 years to serve and would be alive at 38, not dead at 19 like Audie and the rest. It was he. From his cell, who pitied the men headed back to the front.

Command demonstrated zero concern for the life of the soldier or even the fate of a unit. The German “enemy” appeared as a living, reacting foe, human, even as the American Army behaved in regards to its men, as if it were a sausage-maker taking cuts of sub-prime meat and feeding it into a grinder. Audie’s every relation, especially his brief, verbal relationship with the nurse named Helen, who was apparently killed soon after they found each other, depicts a vast, uncaring industrial killing machine of which Audie and his buddies were mere treads.

That men died easily, very easily, like warriors stricken by gods, is the strongest impression. The most feared weapons were German machine guns and .88s. Mortars were a menace that Audie felt he was able to gauge until the two other sergeants who had just received battlefield promotions to officer jumped into the same shell whole next to him, followed by a mortar round that turned them both into shredded ruin. Over and over again nearly his entire company is wiped out. Eventually even the Captain gets it. The most feared weapon was the Mustang, the U.S. multipurpose fighter/ground attack plane, that slaughtered half of his platoon on an Italian road as they were directed to stay on top of the retreating enemy. U.S. friendly fire was second in fear to the German machine gun and .88. A rare, but feared German weapon was the grease gun. The German tanks were greatly feared, even in mountains and forest, but could be dealt with by calling in Artillery.

The weapons that Audie and his men valued, in order, was: the BAR, especially when manned by the Cherokee, who died in Italy. Along with Kerrigan, that Indian was their best soldier. Audie would be third—but he had the luck and the pluck to lead. The second most valued weapon was the hand grenade, of which there seemed an endless supply. The most valued firearm next to the BAR was the Tommy gun, by far. This was the only weapon that the men mentioned when they didn’t have it, in hopes they would find one. So many American soldiers were mowed down that there was no shortage of weapons to pick up. The weapon that Audie did most of his work with was the M1 Carbine, which had a lot of shortfalls. But, when you did not have a Tommy gun, the M1 Gave a soldier the ability to react quickly. Many times, Audie described running into a German and only surviving their mutual surprise, because his shorter carbine came on line quicker. Having joined the Army for adventure, the poor rural kid, who survived in part because of his shooting ability, but mostly by fate or fortune and the closeness he kept with the enemy, found his signature weapon: the radio.

Having their three open hatch tank destroyers knocked out and being overrun by well lead enemy infantry and flanked by panzers, Audie called in artillery on himself from the back of an armored vehicle stuck in a ditch. After this battle, Audie was promoted out of the front line to a job riding around in a jeep coordinating the actions of the various units in the battalion. He loaded up for combat, and when his platoon was pinned down and getting wiped out, he went in and rescued them by leading them forward.

The total physical and spiritual ruin of the men on both sides was astounding. Numerous times, wounded veterans came back to the lines and died quickly. One such man had a wound that got him back stateside, where he was part of various patriotic gathering in honor of visiting soldiers headed back to the front. He told Audie, after his visit to America, that in his opinion, the big winners at the end of the war, were going to be “the divorce lawyers.” He was soon killed after voicing this opinion that we have been conditioned was a 1960s and 70s issue, not a family fault line forming during the Great War of Arуan Extinction. Audie was not taken out of combat to save him. He was pulled to replace a man who ranked him and had been killed, to handle the all important artillery, which he had proved master of. Every officer except himself was killed in the action that earned him his amazing distinction.

The fronts in Italy, France and Germany where Audie Murphy fought on the front lines, were scenes of constant attack and defense actions by both sides, which were won, according to Audie’s testimony, by the vast resources at his disposal. He never had to worry about the US artillery running low on ammo. In fact, he and his front line bosses liked to bait the Germans into throwing away their limited artillery.

In the end, Audie Murphy walked like a dead man to an enemy position, telling his men to die on their feet rather than in a ditch, and was blessed to discover that the Germans ahead of them were dead, gone, or shell shocked. The story of Audie Murphy’s war is even more stark than secondary sources claim, for he and two men like him were sent right back into the meat-grinder, where his fellows were turned to pudding next to him, and he and his men continued to be used like ammunition to wear down the enemy. Some quotes of Audie and his fellows are selected below:

“They will then thrust through the middle of our defenses, split our forces, and drive us into the sea. We believe nothing; doubt nothing.”

“I’ve been fighting the whole war with this idiot’s spoon.” [entrenching tool]

“Loosely we cluster together, bound by a common memory and loneliness.”

“It is front line religion: God and the Garand.”

“He’s dead. You are now a full-fledged member of the Brotherhood of International Killers.”

“Lying there in the hospital, a man has too much time to think. And that’s bad. He gets in the mood to live again.”

Audie Murphy suffered malaria and gang green, shrapnel, concussion, bullets, and mostly mud, caked from head to toe in mud for nearly two years. Except for two men, the dozen or so he was close to died, mostly next to him. In ancient Arуan terms, WWII, as expressed by this front-line soldier, who would have had no name in the Iliad, had he fought there, was a struggle not between men, but between vast collective gods, for whom even armies of men were no more than bowling pins to be tumbled in cold affront to their rivals. In Homeric terms, Audie Murphy’s war was fought like Diomedes and Odysseus before Troy, including night hunts for prisoners.

No book has been better titled than To Hell And Back.

Notes

-1. Shelters For the Self, JL, 2017