7/25/2023 0 Comments Memoires onlineEtched in Purple relates the author’s anger and sorrow when he was forced to kill enemy soldiers and watch his close friends being killed and mutilated. The book gives the impression that the author wrote his memoir both to come to terms with his own trauma, and to show people what soldiers endured. Irgang published his account just four years after the war, and this proximity to the events he described is evident in the minor details he included and his poetic language. I had never realized this so sharply before.” I was more frightened than I had ever been before. I remembered then with a painful start that the enemy fights back. He recalled that as his boat prepared to land on the shores of France, “suddenly, the whistling scream of an incoming enemy shell sent all of us diving for the deck. Irgang’s descriptions of combat are particularly evocative. Instead of detracting from the story, the absence of those details conveys the narrowness of the infantryman’s world and his daily focus on survival. Nor does he include the names of the towns he liberated. Irgang never identifies the infantry divisions or regiments in which he served. He waded ashore under fire at Normandy, fought amid the impenetrable hedgerows, raced across central France, narrowly escaped capture in the Battle of the Bulge, survived being shot, and returned to fight in Germany after recovering from his wounds. Irgang experienced nearly every aspect of the fighting in France and Germany. There is no shortage of outstanding memoirs written by American infantrymen who fought in Europe, but Etched in Purple is noteworthy both for its content and style. The first memoir on this list, and also one of the earliest memoirs published about World War II, is Frank Irgang’s Etched in Purple (1949).
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