Book Cover showing a valley

They Called it “Purple Heart Valley”-A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy by Margaret Bourke-White

An excerpt from The New York Times review by Foster Hailey, November 26, 1944:

“Reading Miss White’s remarkable book and looking at her even more remarkable photographs, many of them taken under fire, you know that all the American men and boys, in Italy, in France, in India, China, Burma and the many Pacific islands, have what it takes to defeat their country’s enemies. That’s why they’re winning the war.

“Margaret Bourke-White’s photographic-written record of the weeks she spent slogging through the mud, riding a Jeep up and down Highway 6, climbing mountain peaks in the dark with her heavy equipment to get just the right place and the right light to shoot her pictures, photo­graphing the quick, the dead and the dying in gun emplacements. front-line foxhole, emergency dressing station and rear-base hospital, is one of the best and most remarkable books to come out of the war. The author prefers to be known perhaps as a photographer; but this book qualifies her as a first-rate reporter, in command of a lean, hard prose that is the only true medium of description for the ordered insanity of war…

“…Although the most exciting photographs and the best reading are of battle. Miss Bourke-White gives the whole picture. She tells of the misery of the Italian civilians behind the lines; the black market through which some Italians fleeced other Italians; the bungling of the American Military Government, which (by a confession to her, she said, of one of its high officials) was more interested in how the United States would react to what it was doing than of getting a disagreeable job done quietly and efficiently.”

 

From Foreign Affairs: Reviewed By Robert Gale Woolbert July 1945

In this intimate, first-hand description of the Cassino campaign in Italy the author has accompanied her usual superb photography with exciting text.


Download in epub format for your Apple or Android device:

Download in mobi format for your Amazon ereader or Fire tablet:

Image of GIs Wading Ashore

From a Pulitzer-Prize Winning War Correspondent with Maps and a Study Guide

Read about the first year of the Korean War in “War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.”  The author, Marguerite Higgins, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. The book is about the battles at the start of the war as the armies moved up and down the Korean Peninsula. But Higgins is not concerned with military strategy. She writes about the lives of U.S. GIs, the Korean civilians, and how she navigated through a male dominated military who wanted to send her home.

The military historian, S.L.A. Marshall appreciated Higgins’s work: “This Maggie’s eye view of the Korean police action is downright irresistible in its candor, in its simple expression of the things which most of us feel strongly but can’t say very well, in its change of pace between the tragedy of the battlefield and the high comedy of much of human behavior in close relationship to it….Many of her word pictures are remarkable in their ability to convey much in little; where she philosophizes at all about men in battle her style is almost epigrammatic, and many of her observations have such a true ring that they deserve to be remembered and widely quoted.”

According to the Saturday Review of Literature it is “….a whale of a war story.”

Here is the ebook in pdf format:
War In Korea The Report Of A Wo – Marguerite Higgins

To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.

To read on a device from Amazon, or on the Kindle app on your computer, here is the ebook in mobi format.


Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle WhisperCast Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to a group of student Kindle email addresses even if the document or ebook was not purchased on Amazon. In the WhisperCast Service, the mobi files you upload such as this one, will then be found in the Documents folder. Only items purchased on Amazon, will appear in the Books folder.