Bill Plante
Gloucester's Joseph E. Garland has written what I believe will be regarded as the most important book of his brilliant career.
His has been the pre-eminent voice of the making of the North Shore's heritage and evolution zestful in its telling.
Some 65 years in the making, "Unknown Soldiers: Reliving War in Europe" is no less so. It is about humanity when all that is worst about warfare summons the willing and the less than willing to face the unknown. It is about brotherhood. It is about what happens when rationality shelters itself in ways that only cartoonist Bill Mauldin, a fellow traveler, was able to depict, and psychiatrists attempt to define. It is about what happens to the young and innocent when we see them off to do the dirty work of history.
It is about love: the unspoken bonding among men under stress: stories from the quick time of warfare, and the truly storybook telling of life of love found, lost, and reclaimed told as only Garland could tell it.
It is a book encasing the best evidence of what fractures the inner peace of those who have managed to live through the worst that mankind can create. It is a personal accounting that puts flesh on some of what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
It is the raw history of what happened within, and without, the narrow world of Garland's I and R ( Intelligence and Reconnaissance) unit of the 45th (Thunderbird) Infantry Division during the Italian campaign at and beyond the Anzio beachhead.
Well, some would say, "That again? Others have done it, over and over.''
Not like this, they haven't.
And of a certainty, they haven't been told it as only Garland could tell it — firsthand, up front, inside, outside, up, down and spot on from those with whom he served as well as from himself.
Over the years, he revisited those of his unit, taped much of their recall, blended them with the notes he had taken during lulls in combat, letters, photos, separating the chaff from the wheat of recall, writing, editing, and re-writing again and again.
Joe Garland is not a small man. There is a photograph of him standing and leaning on a pile of drafts compiled over the years as he wrote, and rewrote what became 508 pages (references included) of a book that moved me more than any war history I have read.
Upon returning home, he faced what so many of our military faced then, and face today — the unwinding and rewinding of what was, to what is.
The missions of what are called I and R units seek intelligence by way of reconnoitering within, or in sight of enemy forces; noting movement, identifying and directing fire sometimes while receiving it. It is not a career move to invite longevity.
The personal accounts are etched against the history of what so many now consider to have been a wasteful adventure by British and American forces in what has been called the "soft underbelly'' of the Nazi/Italian alliance. The 45th Division bore the brunt of that deadly assault, fought it to its conclusion, and then was transferred to central Europe, the Ardennes and beyond.
There is a Mauldin cartoon on page 444. Willy, pecking away at the ground with a pick, is saying to Joe, who is squatting, shovel in hand, "You'll get over it, Joe. Oncet I was gonna write a book esposin the army after the war myself.''
Willie did. So has Joe, and this is it.
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Bill Plante, of Newbury, is a staff columnist and Army Combat Engineer veteran. He served in World War II in Europe.
