 By winter 1942, one year after Pearl Harbor, our army fighting forces were building up fast and being deployed around the world. Fighting beside Australian troops in New Guinea, on Guadalcanal, where they had taken over from the long embattled Marines. Large-scale amphibious landings had been made successfully in North Africa. Joining up with the British and the fighting French. Other army units were arriving in overseas staging areas in North Ireland, England and Australia. As our combat and support forces began to encircle the globe, our lengthening supply lines were stretched to the utmost. An army cannot fight without food, clothing, weapons, ammunition, medical supplies and services, transportation, armor and aircraft that must be constantly supplied with fuel and as constantly serviced, repaired or replaced. During the fighting of the vast stretches of arid desert lands in North Africa, German General von Ravenstein, commander of the 21st Panzer Division, remarked that North Africa is a tactician's paradise and a quartermaster's hell. An American or Allied commander could very well have made the same statement. On the other side of the world, in the Southwest Pacific, support for the combat troops was even more difficult in an entirely different kind of warfare. Supply is spoken of as logistics. More specifically, it is the transportation, supply and quartering of troops, the procurement of all required military equipment and materiel, shipping and distributing cargo to the right place to arrive at the right time. In World War II, our military planners successfully solved the most stupendous problems of logistics the world has ever known. Our lines of supply fanned off like a network around the world, extending northward to Alaska and the Aleutians, to the Panama Canal, westward across the Pacific to a chain of islands, on to China by way of India, to Burma, to Australia, eastward across the Atlantic to North Africa, the length of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the southern route through the Persian Gulf to Russia, to Great Britain, Iceland, and to Russia by way of Murmansk in the far north, and ultimately the entire continent of Europe. Under land lease to our allies alone, the services of supply shipped approximately $25 billion worth of war materiel. These included approximately 850,000 pieces of heavy equipment, tanks, trucks, free French forces in North Africa were supplied enough arms and materiel to equip 12 combat divisions. Millions of dollars worth of supplies went to China, flown there from India. To Russia alone, over the submarine manist route to Murmansk, almost a half million pieces of heavy equipment, railroad rolling stock and clothing, vast stores of munitions and equipment went to England and Commonwealth. All of this while we were supplying our own widely deployed forces and building up mountains of supplies for the massive invasion of Europe yet to come. The miracle of supply achieved by the United States Army in World War II was historic. It represented the outpouring of a great nation's energies and resources, not for conquest, but to win freedom for men who would be free everywhere. Mighty America had come fully alive. A revitalized agriculture reached the largest food production goals in the history of mankind. Food not only for ourselves and our allies, but for the hungry populations of the countries our armies would liberate and occupy. Industrial output staggered the imagination, brought renewed hope to our hard-pressed allies, dismay and consternation to the aggressors. It amazed even ourselves. At long last the United States had come of age, had found a vitality, a strength and a will to do that was phenomenal in all the annals of men and nations. Great convoys of ships stretched out as far as the eye could see, carrying the millions of tons of cargo we kept pouring overseas. Of this in support of G.I. Joe. And who was G.I. Joe? He was the off-times grimy, unshaven, heart and soul, blood and guts of America, the citizen soldier, the immortal image of the American fighting man whose forefathers had starved and frozen at Valley Forge to fight on and triumph at Yorktown and again a few years later at the Battle of New Orleans. He had been a raw recruit at Bull Run, but emerged the victor at Gettysburg and the winner of a great and tragic civil war at Appomattox. He was the man who drove the enemy to defeat at Chateau Thierry, at San Miguel and the Muse Argonne. He was and is the American soldier, personified. And who were his leaders? Marshall. Eisenhower. MacArthur. McNair. Bradley. Devers. Patton. Clark. Hodges. Kruger. Eichelberger. Men like Macaulay. Men who possessed the indomitable spirit and genius of Washington. Wenfield Scott. Andrew Jackson. Grant. Sheridan. George G. Mead. Robert E. Lee. John J. Pershing. This was the heritage of American military leadership in World War II. A heritage they could not and would not fail. Their one and only goal, victory. From buck privates to four star generals, these were the priceless outpouring of America's greatest resource. The product of more than a century and a half of freedom and democracy in action. Of a great dream that their forefathers had fought for and made a reality and which these, their sons, were fighting to preserve. But even amidst the tensions of war, there were precious hours of respite in which battle weary men found rest and relaxation and brief moments of humor. But when they fought, they fought to win. There's was a sublime dedication. This was a glory the world would not soon forget. While the fighting was continuing in North Africa, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met at Casablanca to determine further strategical moves. They agreed on four major points. Invade Sicily and Italy at the first opportunity. Intensify counterattacks against Hitler's submarines and launch a combined bomber offensive on Germany. Begin preparing for a major offensive in the Pacific. Except nothing short of unconditional surrender as a basis for ending the war. This was the kind of positive, top-level determination the free world had long awaited. There was swift response on all fighting fronts. Tripoli fell to the British 8th Army. In bitter fighting, Nazi tanks hurled back allied forces to the Algerian border. But then combined American, British and French units stopped the German-Italian drive at Casserine and to Tunisia. In the Pacific, on bloody Guadalcanal, fighting an entirely different kind of warfare, United States troops overcame the last fanatical Japanese resistance and won complete control of the island and its airfield. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Allied bombers sank eight transports and four destroyers of a Japanese convoy of 16 ships. 181 days after the allied landings in North Africa, Tunis and Bizerte fell before the drive of American, British and French forces. The drive reached its full fury with lightning speed in the air and on the ground. The enemy was hit harder and harder, crushed in a vice from which there was no escape. In five days, all German resistance in Tunisia collapsed. The Axis forces surrendered. The myth of Hitler's super race was beginning to crack. In the faraway Aleutian islands, American troops had landed on Attu. Still farther away in New Guinea, American and Australian troops drove back the stubborn and fanatical enemy in close fighting in malaria-infested jungles. Among the battle casualties we had suffered while fighting in the Boona area were three of our general officers, shot in action within less than a hundred yards of the Japanese lines. From victories on the deserts of North Africa, the fog-bound Aleutians to the tropical island of Guadalcanal and the New Guinea jungles where our troops were driving forward against desperate Japanese resistance, we had indeed spread our forces around the world. Who was it that once said, the United States was incapable of fighting a two-front war? Within less than 16 months, the United States Navy had performed a miracle of salvage. Of all the ships sunk or damaged on December 7th, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, all but three were back in service and in fighting trim by May 1943. An achievement on a scale unequaled in naval history. In Russia, the Germans had taken virtually all of Stalingrad by late 1942. Their conquest was short-lived. Early in 1943, the Russians launched a massive counter-attack. Retook Stalingrad, destroying a Nazi army of 330,000, capturing 17 of Hitler's generals. It had started to turn in Russia. In June of 1943, hundreds of Royal Air Force planes engaged in a non-stop aerial offensive over occupied Europe that continued unremittingly for 10 days. While the tide was turning in the air over Hitler's fortress Europe, American Army, Navy and Air Forces, along with those of Australia and New Zealand, launched a concerted offensive to drive the Japanese out of New Guinea and the northern Solomon Islands. Three forces on Rendova Island were wiped out. Our troops drove for the Munda airfield on New Georgia Island. With all of North Africa in allied hands, preparations for Operation Husky were begun immediately to attack the soft underbelly of Europe. The immediate target, Sicily. Little time was lost. Only 60 days after the surrender, only 60 days after the surrender of Axis forces in North Africa, Patton's 7th Army invaded Sicily simultaneously with British and Canadian troops under Montgomery. Some 3,000 craft were employed to land an initial force of 160,000 troops. Almost 14,000 vehicles, about 600 tanks, nearly 2,000 guns. But Sicily was held by more than 200,000 Italian and German troops, strongly entrenched on rugged terrain. It was to be a tough, hard-fought campaign. We invaded Sicily just 18 months after Pearl Harbor. Actually an incredibly short period of time for a peaceful and unprepared nation to have accomplished so much, to have come so far. It was a brilliant reflection of our military planning and the energy and enterprise that implemented that planning. It was America at its dynamic best. The forces of agriculture, industry, labor and management, finance and manufacturing, and management, finance and manpower coordinated with the military. What the United States alone did in those first 18 months will live long in history. Yes, we had come a long way, but we still had far to go in Europe, still farther in the Pacific. It would be 11 months after the invasion of Sicily before we could build up and coordinate massive ground, air and sea forces for the invasion of Normandy. 11 months of bitter fighting in Italy and the vast island chain in the Pacific.