R D Byron-Smith

We'll Always Have Venice: Stories of Love and War on the Italian Front R D Byron-Smith

In 1944 eighteen-year-old Michael Sandler enlists in the United States Army and, after being told in basic training that half of the recruits in his Regiment would be killed in the war, he's shipped off to fight Nazis on the Italian Front to prove it. From the Army's disastrous Anzio beachhead to its bloody slog up the North Apennine Mountains towards liberation of Italy, Private Sandler is buffeted by fusillades of German bullets in front of him and, from behind, by the rampant anti-Semitism of his own comrades. Caught in the midst of what he learns to call, "felonies of war," manhood is thrust upon this naïve Brooklyn Jew, who experiences both the extreme trauma of frontline combat, and after Italy's liberation, the delightful pleasures of a worldly Italian woman who is as stunningly beautiful as she is cunning. Above all, however, wartime teaches Michael Sandler that all enemies don't hide in bunkers - some dwell deep inside his own guts. For decades he never talks of his heroism under fire, nor of WWII secrets of murder, Army corruption and personal betrayal. A self-portrait of bloody war and doomed love, We'll Always Have Venice was inspired by recollections - confessions, if you will - of an American soldier who survived fierce combat on the Italian Front, only to be haunted ever after by "felonies of war."