Historical fiction is the intersection of things that actually happened with things the author has imagined. Here are some clues for readers interested in where I’ve drawn that line.
The men and women of the U.S. Army Medical Corps accomplished all the heroics the fictional characters in this book do, including surgery under fire and in terrible conditions. By 1943, the time period of this story, the army had made great improvements to the medical care of wounded and injured soldiers very near the front lines. A World War II GI had a much better chance of surviving even grievous wounds than did his doughboy counterpart of the Great War a generation earlier. Thanks to the hard work of all hands, that system continued to evolve through conflicts in Korea (with its advent of the helicopter as a means for evacuation), Vietnam, and the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
I have taken some liberties with the organization and movements of the real-life Eleventh Field Hospital. The actual organization, parts of which landed on Sicily on D-Day, July 10, 1943, moved farther and faster than the fictional unit depicted here and was often split into its smaller elements to provide critical care close to the fighting. Speed of evacuation really did save lives, and medical personnel did find themselves under fire.
I was surprised at some of the actual events I discovered in my research. For instance, Eddie Harkins is shocked to hear about nurses going ashore with the initial waves in the 1942 invasion of North Africa, called Operation Torch. That sounded far-fetched to him, as it did to me. However, according to authors Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee (And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II), nurses and other personnel of the Forty-Eighth Surgical Hospital did follow the assault teams, and Eisenhower did have second thoughts about that decision. The character Kathleen Donnelly would have reached North Africa when the Eleventh Field Hospital landed in Oran, Algeria, in May 1943.
Although I imagined the scene in which the paratrooper Sergeant White murders a wounded and unarmed Italian prisoner, the fictional crime is, sadly, based on actual events. In separate incidents that both took place on July 14, 1943, two American soldiers, Sergeant Horace T. West and Captain John T. Compton, both of the U.S. Forty-Fifth Division, murdered (or, in Compton’s case, ordered the murders of) at least seventy-three unarmed Italian and German prisoners of war near the Biscari airfield in Sicily. Both men were tried for homicide, and both men cited in their defense remarks made by Lieutenant General George Patton, commander of U.S. ground forces in the invasion. In their separate court-martials, the defendants claimed that Patton had specifically discouraged the taking of prisoners and that, furthermore, enemy soldiers who fired on GIs and then waited until the last possible moment to surrender should be killed. Witnesses at each trial corroborated that this was the message the troops took from Patton’s remarks. Sergeant West was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, though his sentence was commuted in time for him to return to action near the end of the war. He eventually received an honorable discharge. Captain Compton was acquitted only to be killed in action in November 1943. Court-martial records remained classified until 1950. [The Army Lawyer, March 2013. “War Crimes in Sicily: Sergeant West, Captain Compton and the Murder of Prisoners of War in 1943,” page 1.]
Among the things I made up: At one point in the story, Eddie Harkins and Dominic Colianno are concerned about a major German offensive and attempt to disrupt the Allied advance in Sicily. While there were no German counterattacks that threatened the Allies on a strategic level, Wehrmacht doctrine always called for local counterattacks, at least. GIs knew this and, once they took a position or drove German defenders back, they immediately braced for an assault. For individual soldiers under fire, the difference between a local attack and a strategic offensive isn’t as important as the fact that the artillery is incoming.
German medical personnel did sometimes remain behind with the most severely wounded when the Wehrmacht retreated. U.S. Army regulations dictated that these doctors and medics care for German soldiers only. Captured surgeons, such as the fictitious Oberstleutnant Matthias Lindner, were prohibited from performing any kind of surgery, even on their German comrades. Of course, many American soldiers considered regulations of any kind to be mere suggestions.
During World War II, U.S. Army nurses really did have “relative rank,” as Kathleen Donnelly complains to Eddie Harkins. Most nurses were second lieutenants, so they could direct medical orderlies (who were enlisted soldiers), but the women did not rate salutes and were paid only half of what male second lieutenants were paid.
Although fetal alcohol syndrome was not named in medical literature until 1973, antipathy toward heavy drinking by pregnant women predated Prohibition, and the warnings would have been familiar to medical professionals like Nurse Donnelly.
Chaplain Patrick Harkins tells his brother a story about a Texas-born paratrooper who used a ruse to capture a crossroads that was a critical objective for the paratroopers on D-Day. The real-life Captain Edwin Sayre of Breckenridge, Texas, who commanded A Company, 505th Regimental Combat Team, Eighty-Second Airborne Division, accomplished that mission in exactly the way Patrick Harkins describes. The comment about the prisoner being an “eloquent speaker” is from a 1947 report Sayre wrote while a student at the infantry school at Fort Benning. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ed Sayre and many of his comrades while writing the nonfiction Combat Jump: The Young Men Who Led the Assault Into Fortress Europe, July 1943.
The scene in which Eddie Harkins learns the fate of his younger brother is based on a real incident. My father, drafted near the end of World War II, was on occupation duty in Germany at Christmas 1945. Like Eddie Harkins, he was excited when an entire packet of letters from home caught up to him. He relished the prospect of reading them in private—a holiday celebration that would make him feel closer to loved ones. As he read a few of the letters from his siblings it became clear that something terrible had happened. Finally, he opened a letter that told him his mother had died at the end of November. I suspect that each of the sixty-plus Christmases he celebrated after that had a touch of the bittersweet.
Those are the most important junctures of fact and fiction. Now I’m left with what is all true.
I am grateful to the terrific writer Mary Roach for her detailed and sensitive description of urotrauma wounds in Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.
Thanks to Matt Bialer of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, who patiently worked with me through the ups and downs and years. And to Kristin Sevick of Forge, for taking a chance and setting out in a new direction.
I also appreciate the generous help of Colonel (Retired) Holly Olson, M.D.; Chief Warrant Officer 3 (Retired) Paul Russell, PA; and retired forensic pathologist Ed McDonough, M.D., who loaned their time and expertise to this effort. Any errors in the medical sections or elsewhere in the book are my responsibility alone.
Finally, and most of all, thanks to Marcia for her love, unflagging support, encouragement, and faith in me.
For more about Carl Sandburg’s poetry go to www.NPS.gov/Carl.
FORGE BOOKS BY ED RUGGERO
Blame the Dead
OTHER TITLES BY ED RUGGERO
Nonfiction
Duty First: A Year in the Life of West Point and the Making of American Leaders
Combat Jump: The Young Men Who Led the Assault into Fortress Europe, July 1943
The First Men In: U.S. Paratroopers and the Fight to Save D-Day
Army Leadership (with the Center for Army Leadership)
The Leader’s Compass (with Dennis F. Haley)
The Corporate Compass (with Dennis F. Haley)
Fiction
38 North Yankee
The Common Defense
Breaking Ranks
The Academy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ED RUGGERO is a West Point graduate and former U.S. Army officer who has studied, practiced, and taught leadership for more than twenty-five years. His client
list includes the FBI, the New York City Police Department, CEO Conference Europe, the CIA, YPO, and Forbes, among many others. He has appeared on CNN, History, Discovery Channel, and CNBC and has spoken to audiences around the world on leadership, leader development, and ethics. Blame the Dead is his first novel starring World War II military police officer Eddie Harkins. He lives in Philadelphia. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Forge Books by Ed Ruggero
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BLAME THE DEAD
Copyright © 2020 by Ed Ruggero
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel (airplane and landscape) and Getty Images (woman)
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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First Edition: March 2020