Dogface Soldiers. US-Infantry in Europe in World War II

While well over one hundred infantry and ten Panzer divisions of the German Wehrmacht drove deep corridors of conquest into France and the Low Countries in early summer of 1940, two American divisions were on active duty in all of the continental United States of America. 1st Cavalry Division on patrol duty along the Mexican border in Texas, and 2nd Infantry Division, also stationed in the Lone Star State. They counted among them less then thirty thousand servicemen. When Generaloberst Jodl, Hitlers operations officer in his Wehrmacht high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), signed the instrument of unconditional surrender in a schoolhouse turned allied supreme headquarters in Reims in the early morning hours of May 7th, 1945, the American ground forces among Eisenhowers Allied Expeditionary Forces counted 2.6 million servicemen in continental Europe and another four hundred thousand in the UK. Dogface Soldiers sheds light on the many diverse and distinctive political, social, military, logistic and cultural histories beyond the creation of this army of citizen soldiers. Afterwards it undertakes an exploration in depth of the specific and distinctive realities on the proverbial sharp end of this impressive and victorious military machine in developing the history of the genesis and the habitat of the Dogface Soldiers. Theirs was the essential task of every army in war, to enter the killing zones, to close in with and destroy the main enemy. The unique significance of the history of the Dogface Soldiers derives from the fact of them being a tiny minority within the armed forces organization, while suffering the vast majority of casualties of the European campaigns of 1943 to 1945. It has implications on the public perception of World War II, as well as on its place and function within the narrative of American history. The core constituents of the second part of the present study, as well as the analytical cornerstones of the history of living and dying in the killing zones, are thirteen exemplary drawings of the two times Pulitzer prize winner, infantry rifleman and civil rights activist Bill Mauldin, whose works have to be counted among the most authentic testimony about and analysis of humanity at war in general.