A COMPELLING STORY OF WORLD WAR II AND HOW IT SHAPED THE LIVES OF SIX MEN, ONE TOWN, AND AMERICA
Of the sixteen million Americans who served in the armed forces during the war, not quite a thousand came from Freehold, New Jersey–an old court-house town busy with factories, ringed by fields, and home to a diverse populace that reflected the varied faces and aspirations of the nation. Marching Home follows six young men from this town as they are swept overseas into a conflict more vast and vicious than any other in history–into the army, the navy, the air corps; to Europe and the Pacific from Tarawa to the Bulge; from Normandy to Leyte.
And once their battles are won, the book follows the men back home again, to a town, and a nation, poised for changes larger than any of them had imagined. Farms and factories flourish, then fade: Main Street blooms, then withers; the bonds of community tighten, then fray. A black soldier endures segregation in the army and racial unrest on the streets of home. An airman bombs the enemy to rubble, then builds new houses and stores for his neighbors. A sailor faces a kamikaze hurtling at his ship, then walks a police beat back home, trying to keep the peace.
Marching Home tells the rich story of these men and their lives in a town that, with its rare mixture of village intimacy and city diversity, offers a remarkable microcosm of the whole sweep of twentieth-century American history. Their story is the story of millions of other veterans, thousands of other towns, and it is the great epic of the last century–the story of what America was then, in its hardest hours, and how it became what it is now.
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