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Part Three: Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany
- Texas A&M University Press
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I n the spring of 2008 Adam Pinson came to visit us. At the time an advanced graduate student in history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Adam has a long-term photographic memory. While this permitted him to tr ounce key contestants f rom Duke and Princeton on the television show College Jeopardy, from which he walked away with $50,000,it also facilitated his minutely detailed knowledge of World War II battles.With my needing him on battles and his needing Europe, we struck a deal: He covered his airfare out of “the Jeopardy fund,”and we covered most of his other trip costs. We picked him up at the de Gaulle airport in Paris and gave him a day in P ennedepie to recover from the flight before spending two days at the D-day sites,where he saw,touched, and smelled what he had long had in his mind. Then we headed for northern Europe. Susan and I had been w orking historical turf of profound human dimensions. Now, with Adam knowing precisely where Patton’s Third Army was on any given day and sitting on the back seat telling us about it (Pennie the Yorkie beside him, nodding approval), we followed the 102nd into some of the most dramatic militar y dimensions of the war and into places where the unit experienced its most trying times. PA R T T H R E E Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany ...