Word: battalion
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...assigned to a front-line infantry battalion in the Fifth Army in Italy, and since my division has been up front I have been up with them. I have seen much small-arms fire, and at times when the riflemen were pinned down by machine-gun fire, the other aid men and I have left our slit trenches to give aid to our wounded buddies. At the same time we saw our litter bearers risking their lives trying to evacuate the casualties from the field. Several of us were awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in combat...
...north and east were terrain and towns he knew as one of World War I's battalion commanders: the Somme, the Argonne, Sedan, Amiens, the Meuse. Those Allied objectives were reminders-if the German command needed any more -of how completely Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley had reversed their classic Schlieffen plan of enveloping France.*Now the Eisenhower-Montgomery wheeling movement, anchored at the mouth of the Seine, was developing arcs that expanded toward Belgium and Germany...
They were armed and clothed with U.S. equipment, drilled English-style, saluted either flat-handed like the British, or finger-tips-to-forehead, G.I.-fashion. Two of the three top commanders were men from the U.S., most of the battalion leaders, Canadian. Most top sergeants were Canadian; most junior officers, from below the border. Troops from the two countries got along together, despite the pay differential in favor of the U.S. soldiers...
...Cost. Before the S.S.F. reached Rome, it had lost more than half the men who sailed from Kiska, including two regimental commanders and nearly all battalion C.O.s. At Levant, where the Germans fought bitterly from their camouflaged hideouts, the casualties struck deep again. By then, because Canadian replacements were fewer, the outfit was more than two-thirds U.S. and many of its officers were ex-noncoms commissioned on the battlefield...
...some U.S. ports Italian prisoners do stevedore duty. In Seattle it is done in part by a Negro battalion stationed at Fort Lawton; the paroled Italians work as gardeners and orderlies in the camp. They also have long had the run of the post exchange, and for the Negro troops that, along with other privileges, was just too much. There was open bad feeling, a small scrap last week when the U.S. troops decided the Italians were getting the best of the PX's beer and cigarets...