The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey From the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau

Since its opening as Nazi Germany’s7 first concentration camp on March 22, 1933, just fifty-one days after Hitler took power, more than two hundred thousand “undesirable elements” had passed through Dachau and at least thirty thousand had died inside, more than thirteen thousand8 in 1945 alone.

But one of the many things he had learned from Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily was that he should always appear calm and collected. Indeed, good leaders were often good actors, able to convince their men if not themselves that they would somehow prevail. “The truth of the matter was I was scared shitless but my men didn’t know it,” Sparks later confessed. “Sometimes you just have to take care of business. Just do it, get24 through it. That’s all.”

We live in a free world today because in 1945 the forces of imperfect goodness defeated the forces of near-perfect evil.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler telephoned Hitler in his bunker. “Mein Führer,” Himmler said excitedly. “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April Thirteenth! Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us. Twice he has saved you from assassins. Death, which the enemy aimed at you in 1939 and 1944, has now struck down our most dangerous enemy. It is a miracle.”

Across Germany, ten million civilians were now homeless. More than six hundred thousand had been killed and eight hundred thousand badly injured in the Allies’ five-year-old bombing campaign, the ferocity and scale of which even Churchill, its primary architect, had come to regret.

According to the U.S. Army surgeon general, all men in rifle battalions became psychiatric casualties after two hundred days in combat. “There aren’t any iron men,” declared one army psychiatrist. “The strongest personality, subjected11 to sufficient stress over a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.”

Late on Easter Sunday, Sparks reached Aschaffenburg’s central square. A gruesome scene awaited him. Two German soldiers, executed69 on Lamberth’s orders, had been hanged from a gallows with signs pinned on each of them: THIS IS THE REWARD FOR COWARDS.

Others were smarter and did it right. They took a loaf of bread and put it on their foot so that when they fired there would be no powder trace. That way, they got14 away with it.

Defeat was inevitable. But it was not Hitler’s fault. Then began a wild stream of invective and crude abuse. His generals, his people, and his soldiers had failed him.

Sparks had seen too much and waited too long for the end. For four years, he had planned for this day and had often wondered if he would ever see it. So many of his11 men were not there with him: The regiment had suffered 20,251 casualties since landing in Sicily. A total of 1,44912 of his fellow Thunderbirds in the 157th Infantry Regiment had laid down their lives to liberate Europe from the greatest evil of modern times.