Fire Across the Old World

From the beaches of Normandy to the ruins of Germany, the European Theater of World War II produced acts of individual courage so extreme that they strain the ordinary vocabulary of war. Between 1942 and 1945, American forces alone awarded 164 Medals of Honor in the European and Mediterranean theaters — nearly a quarter of them to men of a single division, the 3rd Infantry, which endured more days in combat and lost more men than any other American unit on the continent. Fire Across the Old World moves through these moments not as statistics but as portraits. It reconstructs the afternoon of May 23, 1944, near Carano, Italy, where Technical Sergeant Van T. Barfoot — acting without orders — crawled alone into three successive German machine gun positions, captured seventeen prisoners, and then, on his return, stood in an open field with a bazooka and disabled a column of advancing Mark VI tanks at 75 yards. It follows Staff Sergeant Walter Ehlers through the bocage of Normandy on June 9–10, 1944 — already wounded, he stood in the open to draw German fire onto himself while his squad retreated, then carried his wounded automatic rifleman to safety before returning across shell-swept ground to retrieve the rifle he had been forced to leave behind. It places these American stories alongside those of Allied soldiers across the theater — among them the 18-year-old RAF wireless operator John Hannah, who fought a raging fire with his bare hands in the burning fuselage of a Hampden bomber over Antwerp rather than abandon his crew.