Surviving Three Shermans: With the 3rd Armored Division into the Battle of the Bulge: What I Didn’t Tell Mother About My War

A WWII soldier’s rosy letters home are juxtaposed with his recollections of combat’s harrowing on-the-ground reality in this immersive debut memoir. Stitt, who joined the Army at 18 and served as a tank gunner in the 3rd Armored Division, follows up each letter to his parents and sister in West Virginia with a commentary explaining what he omitted out of personal reticence or to avoid the censor’s red pen. What begin as minor elisions of mishaps during basic training (like not mentioning how often he was assigned for kitchen duty because he couldn’t work up the energy to shave in the morning), coupled with requests for cookies and candy, quickly morph into much wider gulfs between the written reports and reality, as well as into far more ominous requests, once he enters the European theater in May 1944. “I have been kind of busy,” he writes after narrowly escaping from a tank destroyed by German shelling and receiving a shrapnel wound to the leg. In the same letter, he tells his loved ones, “there isn’t anything I need real bad except a New Testament, mine was destroyed,” not mentioning that his Bible was lost along with his tank and the rest of its crew. With its unique vantage point, this is a noteworthy addition to the literature of WWII. (July)