I do know that the civil rights movement took inspiration from the courage and sacrifice of black soldiers. I suspect the women’s rights movement would have been similarly inspired.
I just used the word sacrifice. I don’t usually like the word because it is so overused, but what word better suits the reality? American soldiers lost their lives fighting to defend the simple ideas that gave birth to the United States of America: that we are all created equal, that simply by virtue of our membership in the human race we are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
More than 400,000 Americans were killed in World War II. Nearly 700,000 were wounded. Millions worked and trained and risked and did what needed to be done. They saved the world.
Race hatred, religious bigotry, contempt for anyone different, bitterness, resentment, and spite fed the greatest, most terrible war in human history and left 60 million dead. No German at the start of the Nazi regime pictured Dachau or Buchenwald or Oradour. But by their moral cowardice they made those crimes against humanity inevitable.
We, the heirs of the American soldiers who lie in the thousands beneath shining white crosses and Stars of David in military cemeteries in Europe, we who have benefited so wonderfully from their pain and courage and sacrifice, have only to be vigilant, to be strong in the right, and to say with one voice: never again.
—Michael Grant
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An undertaking as complex as the Front Lines trilogy is not the work of one writer alone. I may be the guy in the foxhole (so to speak), but I have my own sergeants, officers, and, thankfully, support troops.
So, some thanks are in order: to Kelsey Horton and Mabel Hsu for their editorial support; to Jill Amack and Kathryn Silsand, the copy editors who saved me so much embarrassment; Joel Tippie and Amy Ryan, who designed the book; Tina Cameron in production; Bess Braswell, the marketing director; and the hardest-working woman in publicity, Ro Romanello.
Above all, of course, is Katherine Tegen, my editor, publisher, and friend. None of this happens without Tegen.
Outside of HarperCollins, I’d like to thank Stella Paskins, my UK editor, and their equivalents to the above listed.
And of course, Steve Sheppard at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams and same, who is my lawyer, my pal, the guy you talk to about rights for this or any of my books, and the guy assigned to talking me down off ledges.
PHOTO GLOSSARY
Omaha Beach, D-day (Wiki Commons)
LST (Landing Ship Tank) unloading a truck at Omaha Beach (Wiki Commons)
The ill-fated Sherman-DD with its flotation skirt not inflated
(Wiki Commons)
P-51 “Mustang,” the Cadillac of the Air. Widely considered the best fighter plane of WW2. (Wiki Commons)
Panzerfausts, the basic German infantry anti-tank weapon (Author photo)
American soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge (Wiki Commons)
Oradour-sur-Glane today. General and future president Charles DeGaulle ordered it to be left as a permanent memorial. (Author photo)
SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, responsible for the Oradour massacre (German file photo)
The Hürtgen Forest (Wiki Commons)
American prisoners murdered by the SS (Wiki Commons)
P-38 Lightning, a deadly American ground-attack fighter (Creative Commons)
P-47 Thunderbolt, a workhorse of ground attack (Creative Commons)
American combat medics at work (Science Photo)
Clervaux Castle, Luxembourg (Author photo)
Sten gun, British commando submachine gun (ShutterStock)
Omaha Beach today (ShutterStock)
The German city of Dresden after Allied bombing
(Public domain, US Army)
Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley view remains at Ohrdruf, a satellite of Buchenwald. (Public domain, US Army)
US military cemetery, Belgium
(Wiki Commons)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Note: The list of sources is partial at best. I have no practical way to keep track of the many videos and photos I took in. Even as to books I am certain to have missed a few, and books that helped me here may have been cited in earlier bibliographies in the Front Lines series.
Books
Astor, Gerald. The Bloody Forest. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2000.
Atkinson, Rick. The Guns at Last Light (The Liberation Trilogy, Book 3). New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2013.
Beevor, Antony. Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. New York: Viking, 2015.
———. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. New York: Viking, 2009.
Bérubé, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Bowman, Martin W. Mighty Eighth at War: USAAF 8th Air Force Bombers Versus the Luftwaffe 1943–1945. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2010.
Daugherty, James Harden. The Buffalo Saga. XLibris Corp., 2009.
Farmer, Sarah. Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
Franklin, Robert. Medic! Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Friedrich, Jörg. The Fire—The Bombing of Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Gellhorn, Martha. The Face of War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.
Gildea, Robert. Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015.
Graves, Donald E. Blood and Steel 3: The Wehrmacht Archive: The Ardennes Offensive, December 1944 to January 1945. Barnsley, UK: Frontline Books, 2015.
Hackett, David A. The Buchenwald Report. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Hansen, Randall. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945. New York: NAL, 2010.
Hébras, Robert. Oradour-sur-Glane—Le Drame heure par heure. Nieul-lès-Saintes, France: Les Productions de Pertuis, 2001.
Heslop, Richard. Xavier: A British Secret Agent with the French Resistance. London: Biteback Publishing, 2014.
McLachlan, Ian. Eighth Air Force Bomber Stories—A New Selection. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2004.
McManus, John C. Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Miller, Edward G. A Dark and Bloody Ground. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
Neitzel, Sonke, and Harald Welzer. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying; The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Phillips, Robert F. To Save Bastogne. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1983.
Rottman, Gordon L. World War II Infantry Assault Tactics. Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2008.
Stone, Dan. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
Todorov, Tzvetan. A French Tragedy—Scenes of Civil War, Summer 1944. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1996.
Urban, Mark. The Tank War. Boston: Little, Brown, 2013.
Wieviorka, Olivier. The French Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.
Yeide, Harry. The Longest Battle: September 1944–February 1945: From Aachen to the Roer and Across. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press, 2005.
Museums and Memorials
The Imperial War Museum, London, UK
Oradour-sur-Glane, Village Martyr, Oradour, France
Bastogne War Museum, Bastogne, Belgium
Museum of the Battle of the Bulge, Clervaux, Luxembourg
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Weimar, Germany
Please visit www.frontlinesbook.com for additional stories as well as videos, photos, etc.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL GRANT is the internationally bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy for teens. He is the author of the Gone, Monsters, Front Lines, Messenger of Fear, and Bzrk series. He lives in California with his wife, Katherine Applegate, with whom he cowrote the popular Animorphs series.
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BOOKS BY MICHAEL GRANT
Gone
Hunger
Lies
Plague
Fear
Light
Gone Series Complete Collection
Monster
Villain
Messenger of Fear
The Tattooed Heart: A Messenger of Fear Novel
The Snake: A Messenger of Fear Story
Front Lines
Silver Stars
Purple Hearts
Soldier Girls in Action: A Front Lines Novella
The Magnificent 12: The Call
The Magnificent 12: The Trap
The Magnificent 12: The Key
The Magnificent 12: The Power
CREDITS
Cover art by Matt Murphy
Cover design by Joel Tippie
COPYRIGHT
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
PURPLE HEARTS. Copyright © 2018 by Michael Grant. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934897
ISBN 978-0-06-234221-8
EPub Edition © January 2018 ISBN 9780062342232
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FIRST EDITION
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