Recommended Reading: An Army at Dawn PT 1

I'm reading a very good book at the moment re WW2, a topic I've been reading about for the past year or two. I've barely scratched the surface, truth be told.

'An Army at Dawn', Part 1 of a Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy, focuses upon the Allied effort in North Africa beginning in November, 1942. I'm presently at the part where US and English troops are trying to move east from the shores of North Africa (Morocco, French Algeria) to engage and dispatch the German forces in Tunisia. Tough times are ahead for all concerned, I know, including my father.

My father, Gordon Douglas (Doug) Harrison, was a member of the RCNVR from 1941 - 45 and during those four years helped bring landing craft ashore in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and participated in a training program on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. So he not only delivered troops, jerry cans full of gasoline, bulldozers, and whatever else an army needed to wage a war upon land, but he taught other young recruits how to do the same. (Gunnery training was also a part of the Givenchy III program in B.C. but I'm not sure if dad was involved with 'ready, aim, fire'.)

A day or two ago I came across a passage from which 'An Army at Dawn' got its name:

["...an army at dawn..."]

Young men, fated to survive

and become old men

dying abed half a century hence,

would forever remember this hour,

when an army at dawn

made for the open sea in a cause

none could yet comprehend.

Ashore, as the great fleet glided past,

dreams of them stepped, like men alive,

into the rooms where their loved ones

lay sleeping.

Truthfully, as I read the passage it struck me as powerfully as any piece of prose I've ever read, so I arranged it, not like it appeared in the book as normally-spaced lines of type, but as shorter, halting phrases.

I then looked at my father's notes about his 'Navy days', to see how he recalled his time sailing toward and landing upon the shores of North Africa. Would he also refer to 'an army at dawn' from his vantage point as one seaman amongst a 500 ship convoy?

More to follow.

Photos by GH

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