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Acknowledgments I accumulated a great many personal debts in the course of writing this book. A number of archivists and librarians made the process much easier with their hard work on my behalf. Especially helpful were Mark Renovitch and Alycia Vivona at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library ; Randy Lee Sowell and Dennis Bilger at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library; Chelsea Millner, Tom Branigan, and Michelle Kopfer at the DwightD.EisenhowerPresidentialLibrary;KenSchlessingerandDonSinger at National Archives and Records Administration II; Kevin Flanagan at the American Legion Archives National Headquarters; Bill Marshall and Jeff Suchanek at the Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky; and R. L. Baker and Stephen M. Bye at the U.S. Army Military History Institute/Army Heritage Center. Martin Morgan at the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans generously shared electronic copies of their extensive oral history collection. Finally, the staffs at Alden Library at Ohio University and the Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth, especially Renee Geary, Sharon Strein, and Heather Turner, tracked down innumerable interlibrary loans, without which this book could not have been written. A number of individuals contributed directly to the finished product. Doug Mundy lent me his father’s unpublished memoir. Joshua Brown generously let me use an image from his father’s sketchbook. The American Battle Monument Commission shared some photographs with me. T. David Curp offered much-needed advice with some of the international aspects of the study,andDonaldJordanletmeborrowsomefamilymaterials.ShaeDavidson took time from his own work to point out, and often copy, a variety of interesting sources that hopefully helped give life to this study. Likewise, Brent Geary paused his own research to dig up a document for me at the National Archives. Several friends patiently listened and provided important feedback as I prattled along about this topic. First among equals in this regard stands Ren Lessard, an expert in military affairs and great friend to boot. My colleagues at the Center of Military History, Combat Studies Institute, and the School of Advanced Military Studies also deserve mention, especially Tim Challans, Dan Cox, Robert Epstein, John Frappier, Candi Hamm, Jacob Kipp, Stephen Acknowledgments 220 Lofgren, Rob McClary, Michael Mosser, Jim Schneider, and Michael Swanson. I also have to mention the remarkable men and women of Seminar 6 (2007– 8), who graciously let me spend a class period discussing my book topic. They are all bravely serving our country in its current war, and I admire them all more than they can know. J. D. Wyneken and James Waite read some of the early chapters and offeredthoughtfuladvice.AlonzoHamby,CharlesAlexander,RichardVedder, John Bodnar, Edward M. Coffman, and a number of other anonymous readers looked at parts or all of the manuscript, and all of their comments and criticisms helped make for a better final product. The same goes for all of the folks at the University of Tennessee Press, especially director Scot Danforth, manuscript editor Gene Adair, and freelance copyeditor Karin Kaufman. Marvin Fletcher and G. Kurt Piehler deserve special mention in this respect, as they both put in more effort making this book work than I hoped for (or deserved). Even without such aid, I would like to thank all of them for their friendship. I hope the final product—including its inevitable flaws, which are mine alone—lives up to their expectations. O O O This book began as a historian’s exploration into how World War II changed the United States, an enormous topic. I needed some small slice of the issue, and that came on a long drive to a library book sale with my friend Robert T. Davis II. Amid my ramblings about the war and all the ways it changed the country, I mentioned something about how in their surveys at Carlisle, multiple veterans mentioned the joking nature of ethnic slurs in their units in the army. Robert had been reading wartime letters from his grandfather to his grandmother, and one of those letters included a note about how he had been working with a Jewish soldier. He was the first Jew Robert’s grandfather had ever met, and he was a good guy. So I have Robert T. Davis, and his grandson and namesake, to thank for giving me my angle on World War II and two of the photographs in this book. Robert T. Davis and his wife came from Kansas. They were Presbyterians of English and German descent. Their son Norman married Tina Blackmor, a German Methodist from Texas and daughter of...

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