Henry Atkinson

“This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends”

“At the American cemetery in Henri-Chapelle, fifteen miles east of Liège, grave diggers with backhoes worked around the clock to bury as many as five hundred GIs a day. Each was interred in a hole five feet deep, two feet wide, and six and a half feet long, but only after their overshoes had been removed for reuse. One dog tag was placed in the dead man’s mouth, the other tacked to a cross or a Star of David atop the grave. Those whose tags had been lost first went to a morgue tent for photographs and dental charting. Fingertips were cleaned and injected with fluid to enhance prints, while technicians searched for laundry marks, tattoos, and other identifying clues, all to avoid conceding that here was yet another mother’s son known but to God.””

“Yet, as always, he remained controversial and divisive, his accomplishments appreciated more by the British than by many of his compatriots. Richard Henry Lee called him “fiery, hot, and impetuous””