In Italy with the 332nd Infantry

What transforms a history lesson into something you cannot put down is the voice behind it. Joseph L. Lettau was not a general writing strategy, nor a journalist filing dispatches. He was a young man from Ohio who found himself commanding a squad in the Great War, and his memoir is the closest thing to sitting across from a veteran and hearing his story firsthand. The 332nd Infantry trained in the American heartland before crossing the Atlantic into a world at war. Lettau recounts the tedium of training, the strange beauty of the French countryside, and then the unexpected posting to Italy where the fighting was different, the mountains harsher, the stakes as deadly as any on the Western Front. This is not a tale of famous battles or heroic charges. It is the small, essential history of ordinary men trying to survive, eat, sleep, and make it home. The return to America, months after the armistice, brings its own strange grief, a homecoming marked by a war that had already begun to fade from public memory.