Note from the editor:  The original manuscript proved to be too long to suit modern market conditions for printed books of this sort, so the publisher and I agreed that I would delete parts of the manuscript from the print edition, and would issue an e-book edition of the full memoir three years after the printed book went on the market. In the meantime, we have arranged for me to post the deleted materials to this website so that interested readers of the book could see the stories that I had to condense in the printed edition or delete altogether.

In creating the abridged version of the memoir, I deleted three types of material. One type was material in which Olexa attempted to tell the larger story of the war and place his own experiences in context. These sections do not always match up well with what we know about that larger history of the division or the war from other sources, and in most cases it worked better for me to provide that context in the headnotes or footnotes.  The second type was stories that proved difficult to verify, such as the ones involving “Major Smits,” the P-38 fighter pilot who appears on several occasions in the material relating to the early part of the Tunisia campaign.  This type also includes accounts where he had largely lost track of where exactly he was when.  With these, I retained important sections in the printed version, filling in the context as best I could, but deleted the rest, and have included them here. The third type, and the one that I most regret having to cut, were stories about his experiences away from the front, many of which are just as compelling on a human interest level as the combat stories. These include some of his interactions with French soldiers and civilians in North Africa, the archaeological foray in the North African desert with Lt. Forse, much of the material relating to his Sea Scout training, parts of his discussion of his hospital stay after being wounded in Normandy, and his entire experience after receiving a concussion in the Hürtgen Forest, which made up several chapters in the full manuscript.

This supplement follows the chapter organization in the book using page references from the printed book to help the reader places these passages in context. In general, the excerpts presented here are what the material I presented in the editor’s notes cover in the printed book. For the supplemental material for the final chapter, which is quite long, I have added subheadings corresponding to the chapter breaks in the full manuscript. The footnotes here are the ones from the original manuscript, and some of these use abbreviations or short format for materials previously cited in the book. For clarification and full information, see the bibliography in the printed book.

My plan for the future is to add some supplemental material to this site. I hope to add some of Olexa’s letters to his future wife, including censor’s signatures made by some of the officers mentions in the memoir. I will also add video material from interviews with veterans whose experiences paralleled Olexa’s.