This is WW II's long invasion of Italy via Sicily, through the eyes of Tregaskis, journalist and author of Guadalcanal Diary. It is refreshing to get history from his professional perspective because a journalist's angle is always story and not just leaders and greatnesses or weaknesses. Tregaskis did not write from behind the lines but in the fox holes with the soldiers who lived and died around him. Through his pages we get soldiers' names, former jobs, and where they were from as well as their states of mind. Italy eventually capitulated but Germany did not, making the Italian campaign bloody and dangerous for someone whose only war-accouterment was a pen. The descriptions of the soldiers and the battlefields and screaming bombs were horrifyingly clear. When his luck disastrously ran out, he wrote about that, too, with clarity and frankness. It is an easy book to read in pages, but between the graphic scenes, realizing what the soldiers faced hourly, and the bravery of a journalist who constantly threw himself into battle, all left me with impressions that are not so easily left behind when the book is done.