All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father's War
Autor Bill Thornessen Limba Engleză Hardback – dec 2024
When a slim packet of his father’s letters came to light after his mother’s death, Bill Thorness began a quest to rediscover his father. Thorness traveled to the World War II battlefields where America’s first team of commandos fought. The youngest son of one of those commandos, Thorness gained a sense of the horror his father had kept from his family while standing on the mountain where the First Special Service Force fought. Then, standing on a bridge in Rome, he reflected on the loss his father must have felt in not making it to the end of the campaign to liberate the Eternal City.
In All Roads Lead to Rome Thorness considers his father’s decisive moments in battle and beyond, and how he soldiered on as a disabled veteran through his life, raising a family and succumbing to an early death. Alternating between reimagined battle scenes and present-day travels, Thorness explores World War II and family history, the value and limits of memory, the attitudes of war, and our society’s inadequate understanding and support of combat veterans, who may return with physical and emotional scars that change them deeply.
Thorness steps into his father’s shoes to revisit his story and finish that walk into Rome, weaving an account that is part travelogue, part history, and part memoir about the ravages of war.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781640126275
ISBN-10: 1640126279
Pagini: 280
Ilustrații: 15 photographs, 2 maps
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Editura: Potomac Books Inc
Colecția Potomac Books
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1640126279
Pagini: 280
Ilustrații: 15 photographs, 2 maps
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Editura: Potomac Books Inc
Colecția Potomac Books
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Bill Thorness’s varied work as a journalist has spanned more than thirty-five years, from early work as editor of a national business magazine to current work as a freelance travel writer for the Seattle Times. He is the author of five nonfiction books, including Cycling the Pacific Coast: The Complete Guide from Canada to Mexico.
Extras
Chapter 1
May 2009
I stood on the beachfront of my father’s last campaign, looking out at the
slate-gray sea where the commandos had come ashore. “He never got to
tell me about this place and what he went through,” I said to my wife, Susie.
“Didn’t make it long enough to be there when I was ready to hear about it.”
“He wouldn’t have talked about it anyway,” Susie said, “according to . . .
everybody.” Undeniably true. And yet, that was what I wanted. Maybe I
could have forced it from him, looked into his eyes and gotten through to
the soldier inside, and agonized with him over the indelible results of his
battles. Taken some of the pain away. But I would have to have been an adult
to do that, and I’d have needed to catch him on his own turf.
A grainy picture swam into view. My dad, Erick, leaning on a bar rail, two
fingers holding the neck of a beer bottle, not quite a smile on his face. The
photo had been taken at his main watering hole, in the one-street
town of Springbrook, North Dakota. That dusty country bar would be where he
might have given up a story, his tongue loosened by a drink. But as a child,
I wouldn’t have heard it, even though sometimes I was only fifty yards away.
On occasion, when a couple of us kids would hop into the back seat of the
car for a trip to town with him, the errand would end with the old Chevy
nosing into place in front of the tavern and him disappearing through the dark
doorway. If the stop went on very long, we might be visited by the bartender,
who’d step out to the car with bottles of pop and bags of chips. Forbidden
from leaving our seats, we would wait for Dad through the hot afternoon.
“Guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself,” I said. “And for him.” Susie and
I turned to walk up the boardwalk, stepping over a scree of gravel on the
crumbling sidewalk. She laid one hand lightly on my back. Could the clues
in this old war landscape redeem his memory and help me understand his
struggles?
There are moments when the lens spins into focus and unexamined connections
become exposed, a flash defining before and after. I had never much
studied war or imagined how battles half a world away would shape my life.
But illumination began to dawn in me, as real as the seasons, on the occasion
of a death. Standing on the beachfront on my first visit to Italy, my thoughts
went back to the family gathering that launched me on this quest.
Seldom had the table been so crowded as when the letters came out.
Unfolded from a slim box, the simple stack sat shorter than a coffee cup,
envelopes yellow against the expanse of polished wood. I exchanged glances
with my younger sister Karen, removed from knowing Dad by three additional
years, and then scanned the oval table that filled the dining room of my eldest
sister, Maggie. Most of my eight brothers and sisters, some spouses, and a
smattering of their many children looked on in anticipation.
With knotted fingers, Maggie pried out the first letter, an act that sent
a pang of grief through my mind. She, most of all of us, had inherited my
mother’s arthritic hands. On that day of the funeral of my mother, Shirley, in
late summer 2007, the letters Mom had kept near her Bible in her bedroom
were being uncovered, having been spared the dustbin but allowed to be
read only after her death.
My father’s words had not been heard in thirty-nine years. And I, only a
boy at the time of his death and now nearing fifty, could not recall the timbre
of his voice any more than I might the rare touch of his hand. The old farmer
loomed, but he was mute, stoic as his Norwegian forefathers. He was about
to become unquiet.
As Maggie prepared to read, I leaned over, and there, in orderly script with
sharp corners on every cursive word, were my father’s thoughts—sent to
his new love back home, who would become my mother—from a hospital
bed three states away. He had returned from fighting Hitler’s forces in Italy
with immobilizing battle wounds, and as he healed, he discovered her. His
treks home to the northern prairie broke up the surgeries and months of
convalescence, which also were referenced in his letters, but it was clear
that his anticipation of her spurred his recovery. He signed off with “All my
love, Erick.”
As the correspondence unfolded into the air, and the young lives of our
parents-to-be took shape in his words, Shirley and Erick became alive again
in the imagination of their youngest son, me. Was I holding my breath?
My mother’s death five days previous had settled a cloud over my mind,
which the words cut through. Air seeped back into my lungs, relaxing my
muscles. The dining room’s glow cast youth back onto the faces of my family
gathered two deep at the memory pool. I had not known the letters existed,
but my disbelief was edged out by awe at the treasure of ink on paper, folded
away for a lifetime.
And I began to consider the mystery of a man so important to my mother,
who was the most cherished person in my life up until the time of my own
marriage. Dad’s absence at my wedding was barely noted, he had been gone
so long, but the love and pride in my mother’s eyes had completed the
day for me. Shirley had lived four decades beyond him, but his memory
had lingered in her heart, and the letters were a part of him still there for
comfort. When they met, he was thirty-two, she was twenty-one, and it
may have been the first love of his life and of hers. I wondered if the travel
and the battles and the worldliness that came with wartime service made
him more open to love, more bold in it. He pined for her deeply as soon
as each furlough ended.
When I read your letters, it seems as though you are talking to me and I surely
wish it was so, as I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more.
His words on paper conjured his voice, echoing as rare pieces of instruction
but also as an overheard murmur of his nightmares or an angry shout at a
family dynamic fueled by his frustration at life and pain in his body, amplified
by alcohol. Looking back from adulthood, I recognized that throughout his
too-short existence, he battled physical and emotional demons, suffering that
may have soured his expectation of the future and twisted his enjoyment of
postwar family life into endurance. Perhaps he lived in withdrawal, choosing
to fight his battles alone and stoically shielding his family from the misery
he had endured on the battlefields of Italy. But the tenor of the letters did
not foreshadow those problems.
My siblings and I stayed up late with coffee and talk, grateful for this
glimpse of family history. The war still held power to affect us all, including
Susie and other family present, and it was clear that the letters would trigger
more exploration. As I finally set myself off to bed and drifted into sleep, my
mother’s absence softened slightly into images of a young couple planning
a postwar life.
Memories of the whole family together, though, remained grainy and distant.
A dust cloud blew through the sparse trees that barely had shielded our
clapboard farmhouse. I felt the need to make the landscape come back to life.
Erick’s writings brought hope that an image could again emerge with him in it,
as a husband, a father, a son, a decorated soldier, and a man who left the earth
with a devoted wife and nine children on it. I didn’t possess that picture yet,
but the letters sparked kindling. He could come into view, if I looked.
It was hot and windy when we laid Shirley to rest next to Erick at the
back of the little-used cemetery on a rise west of Epping, the North Dakota
village closest to our family farm. I thought about the endurance of place and
the devastation of time, two immutable facts of existence. You had to live
somewhere, and hopefully you made the best of it, in a life of meaning, joy,
community, family. You affected others in ways you’d never know. As the days
passed, you built up memories, which augmented and sometimes replaced
reality. Finally, you became the memory. My thoughts were jumbled about
death and anything that might come after, but standing graveside, I held on
to an idea that the two of them would be closer than they had been in many
years. I realized that I was joining them together in my mind, possibly for
the first time, and I became even more grateful for the gift that came from
my father writing those letters and my mother keeping them.
Once I returned home to Seattle after we laid my mother to rest, the autumn
days whirled by. My first book, a travel guide on regional bicycling, was about
to be released, launching me into a new aspect of my writing career. I spent
the rest of the year regaling audiences with pictures and stories and advice
about experiencing our world from the seat of a bike. Travel, for me, had
become an exercise in exploration that I could share with others.
The holidays arrived with an unexpected treasure. Some family members
had assembled Dad’s letters and arranged them into a spiral-bound book,
enlivened with historical photos. Images of the letters filled the tan paper,
and I could again marvel at the thoughts and endearments he had sent to
his “Dearest Shirley,” all in the sharp, flowing cursive of my father’s pen. I
savored them. And as I reread his mentions of the war and his army service,
I became more and more curious about that early chapter in his life. Certainly
it was a turning point, in a way that my first published book would be for
me. Army service provided a direction for the second-in-line farmer’s son
who had become a man in the destitute Depression years and had cast about
for a way to contribute, to lessen the hardships for himself and his family.
What had it felt like, I wondered, to emerge from the disastrous decade of
the 1930s only to see the planet inflamed with a calamitous world war? The
letters offered bits of evidence about his path out of the war, but how did
he get into it? Who was he when he signed on as a private in the U.S. Army,
and what did it make of him? It was then, reading between the lines of those
postwar letters, that the germ of an idea came into my head. Could he be
rediscovered through that pivotal time in his life? Could I regain the father
that had been lost to me for decades? How would knowing who he was affect
my understanding of myself?
May 2009
I stood on the beachfront of my father’s last campaign, looking out at the
slate-gray sea where the commandos had come ashore. “He never got to
tell me about this place and what he went through,” I said to my wife, Susie.
“Didn’t make it long enough to be there when I was ready to hear about it.”
“He wouldn’t have talked about it anyway,” Susie said, “according to . . .
everybody.” Undeniably true. And yet, that was what I wanted. Maybe I
could have forced it from him, looked into his eyes and gotten through to
the soldier inside, and agonized with him over the indelible results of his
battles. Taken some of the pain away. But I would have to have been an adult
to do that, and I’d have needed to catch him on his own turf.
A grainy picture swam into view. My dad, Erick, leaning on a bar rail, two
fingers holding the neck of a beer bottle, not quite a smile on his face. The
photo had been taken at his main watering hole, in the one-street
town of Springbrook, North Dakota. That dusty country bar would be where he
might have given up a story, his tongue loosened by a drink. But as a child,
I wouldn’t have heard it, even though sometimes I was only fifty yards away.
On occasion, when a couple of us kids would hop into the back seat of the
car for a trip to town with him, the errand would end with the old Chevy
nosing into place in front of the tavern and him disappearing through the dark
doorway. If the stop went on very long, we might be visited by the bartender,
who’d step out to the car with bottles of pop and bags of chips. Forbidden
from leaving our seats, we would wait for Dad through the hot afternoon.
“Guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself,” I said. “And for him.” Susie and
I turned to walk up the boardwalk, stepping over a scree of gravel on the
crumbling sidewalk. She laid one hand lightly on my back. Could the clues
in this old war landscape redeem his memory and help me understand his
struggles?
There are moments when the lens spins into focus and unexamined connections
become exposed, a flash defining before and after. I had never much
studied war or imagined how battles half a world away would shape my life.
But illumination began to dawn in me, as real as the seasons, on the occasion
of a death. Standing on the beachfront on my first visit to Italy, my thoughts
went back to the family gathering that launched me on this quest.
Seldom had the table been so crowded as when the letters came out.
Unfolded from a slim box, the simple stack sat shorter than a coffee cup,
envelopes yellow against the expanse of polished wood. I exchanged glances
with my younger sister Karen, removed from knowing Dad by three additional
years, and then scanned the oval table that filled the dining room of my eldest
sister, Maggie. Most of my eight brothers and sisters, some spouses, and a
smattering of their many children looked on in anticipation.
With knotted fingers, Maggie pried out the first letter, an act that sent
a pang of grief through my mind. She, most of all of us, had inherited my
mother’s arthritic hands. On that day of the funeral of my mother, Shirley, in
late summer 2007, the letters Mom had kept near her Bible in her bedroom
were being uncovered, having been spared the dustbin but allowed to be
read only after her death.
My father’s words had not been heard in thirty-nine years. And I, only a
boy at the time of his death and now nearing fifty, could not recall the timbre
of his voice any more than I might the rare touch of his hand. The old farmer
loomed, but he was mute, stoic as his Norwegian forefathers. He was about
to become unquiet.
As Maggie prepared to read, I leaned over, and there, in orderly script with
sharp corners on every cursive word, were my father’s thoughts—sent to
his new love back home, who would become my mother—from a hospital
bed three states away. He had returned from fighting Hitler’s forces in Italy
with immobilizing battle wounds, and as he healed, he discovered her. His
treks home to the northern prairie broke up the surgeries and months of
convalescence, which also were referenced in his letters, but it was clear
that his anticipation of her spurred his recovery. He signed off with “All my
love, Erick.”
As the correspondence unfolded into the air, and the young lives of our
parents-to-be took shape in his words, Shirley and Erick became alive again
in the imagination of their youngest son, me. Was I holding my breath?
My mother’s death five days previous had settled a cloud over my mind,
which the words cut through. Air seeped back into my lungs, relaxing my
muscles. The dining room’s glow cast youth back onto the faces of my family
gathered two deep at the memory pool. I had not known the letters existed,
but my disbelief was edged out by awe at the treasure of ink on paper, folded
away for a lifetime.
And I began to consider the mystery of a man so important to my mother,
who was the most cherished person in my life up until the time of my own
marriage. Dad’s absence at my wedding was barely noted, he had been gone
so long, but the love and pride in my mother’s eyes had completed the
day for me. Shirley had lived four decades beyond him, but his memory
had lingered in her heart, and the letters were a part of him still there for
comfort. When they met, he was thirty-two, she was twenty-one, and it
may have been the first love of his life and of hers. I wondered if the travel
and the battles and the worldliness that came with wartime service made
him more open to love, more bold in it. He pined for her deeply as soon
as each furlough ended.
When I read your letters, it seems as though you are talking to me and I surely
wish it was so, as I can’t think of anything I would enjoy more.
His words on paper conjured his voice, echoing as rare pieces of instruction
but also as an overheard murmur of his nightmares or an angry shout at a
family dynamic fueled by his frustration at life and pain in his body, amplified
by alcohol. Looking back from adulthood, I recognized that throughout his
too-short existence, he battled physical and emotional demons, suffering that
may have soured his expectation of the future and twisted his enjoyment of
postwar family life into endurance. Perhaps he lived in withdrawal, choosing
to fight his battles alone and stoically shielding his family from the misery
he had endured on the battlefields of Italy. But the tenor of the letters did
not foreshadow those problems.
My siblings and I stayed up late with coffee and talk, grateful for this
glimpse of family history. The war still held power to affect us all, including
Susie and other family present, and it was clear that the letters would trigger
more exploration. As I finally set myself off to bed and drifted into sleep, my
mother’s absence softened slightly into images of a young couple planning
a postwar life.
Memories of the whole family together, though, remained grainy and distant.
A dust cloud blew through the sparse trees that barely had shielded our
clapboard farmhouse. I felt the need to make the landscape come back to life.
Erick’s writings brought hope that an image could again emerge with him in it,
as a husband, a father, a son, a decorated soldier, and a man who left the earth
with a devoted wife and nine children on it. I didn’t possess that picture yet,
but the letters sparked kindling. He could come into view, if I looked.
It was hot and windy when we laid Shirley to rest next to Erick at the
back of the little-used cemetery on a rise west of Epping, the North Dakota
village closest to our family farm. I thought about the endurance of place and
the devastation of time, two immutable facts of existence. You had to live
somewhere, and hopefully you made the best of it, in a life of meaning, joy,
community, family. You affected others in ways you’d never know. As the days
passed, you built up memories, which augmented and sometimes replaced
reality. Finally, you became the memory. My thoughts were jumbled about
death and anything that might come after, but standing graveside, I held on
to an idea that the two of them would be closer than they had been in many
years. I realized that I was joining them together in my mind, possibly for
the first time, and I became even more grateful for the gift that came from
my father writing those letters and my mother keeping them.
Once I returned home to Seattle after we laid my mother to rest, the autumn
days whirled by. My first book, a travel guide on regional bicycling, was about
to be released, launching me into a new aspect of my writing career. I spent
the rest of the year regaling audiences with pictures and stories and advice
about experiencing our world from the seat of a bike. Travel, for me, had
become an exercise in exploration that I could share with others.
The holidays arrived with an unexpected treasure. Some family members
had assembled Dad’s letters and arranged them into a spiral-bound book,
enlivened with historical photos. Images of the letters filled the tan paper,
and I could again marvel at the thoughts and endearments he had sent to
his “Dearest Shirley,” all in the sharp, flowing cursive of my father’s pen. I
savored them. And as I reread his mentions of the war and his army service,
I became more and more curious about that early chapter in his life. Certainly
it was a turning point, in a way that my first published book would be for
me. Army service provided a direction for the second-in-line farmer’s son
who had become a man in the destitute Depression years and had cast about
for a way to contribute, to lessen the hardships for himself and his family.
What had it felt like, I wondered, to emerge from the disastrous decade of
the 1930s only to see the planet inflamed with a calamitous world war? The
letters offered bits of evidence about his path out of the war, but how did
he get into it? Who was he when he signed on as a private in the U.S. Army,
and what did it make of him? It was then, reading between the lines of those
postwar letters, that the germ of an idea came into my head. Could he be
rediscovered through that pivotal time in his life? Could I regain the father
that had been lost to me for decades? How would knowing who he was affect
my understanding of myself?
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Part 1: Difensa
Part 1: Difensa
- 2009 – Journey: Bringing My Father into Focus
- 1944 – War: Scaling a Mountain
- 2009 – Journey: An Initial Exploration
- 2009 – Journey: Replowing Dakota Soil
- 1944 – War: Talking la Difensa
- 2010 – Journey: The Language of a Quest
- 1942 – War: Becoming a Solider
- 1943 – War: Training the Braves
- 2011 – Journey: Returning to the Battlefield
- 1943 – War: Sailing to Naples
- 2011 – Journey: Meeting the Force Family
- 1943 – War: Boots on Italian Soil
- 2011 – Journey: Revisiting Difensa
- 1943 – War: From Winter Line to Anzio
- 2011 – Journey: Memorials to Begin the Trek
- 1943 – War: The D-Day Diversion
- 2011 – Journey: In the Command Caves
- 1944 – War: Landing at Anzio
- 2011 – Journey: Finding Foce Verde
- 2011 – Journey: Hot Feet on the Road
- 1944 – War: The Force Joins the Fight
- 2011 – Journey: Cisterna’s Buzzing Roads
- 2011 – Journey: History is What You See
- 1944 – War: Settling in at the Front
- 2011 – Journey: Conjuring up the “Billiard Table”
- 1944 – War: The Black Devils Raid at Night
- 2011 – Journey: Edging into the Hills
- 2011 – Journey: Dog Tired at the Top of the Town
- 1944 – War: Off the Beachhead
- 2011 – Journey: The Suffering of Cori
- 2011 – Journey: Last Legs to Artena
- 1944 – War: Making a Mountain Fortress
- 2011 – Journey: Castle Graffiti
- 1944 – War: Cut Down in Colleferro
- 2011 – Journey: Devastation of Mountain Villages
- 1944 – War: Forces at Rome’s Gates
- 2011 – Journey: Walking the Ancient Gates
- 1944 – War: Making the White Sheets
- 1944 – Family: A Soldier’s Rough Return
- 2011 – Journey: Commemoration
Recenzii
"Retracing his father's steps, Thorness admirably chronicles his father's service while relating his own march through Italy over 60 years later, gaining insight into both his father and himself."—Philip Zozzaro, Booklist
“All Roads Lead to Rome starts as a journey of discovery and becomes one of self-discovery. A masterful accomplishment.”—Steve Olson, author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age
“A moving and compelling story about the enduring power of the past. Bill Thorness juxtaposes two Italian journeys—his father’s during the Anzio campaign of World War II and his own retracing of it—to find a parent whose damaged leg disguised deeper wounds. He discovers a war’s lasting consequences.”—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History emeritus, Stanford University, and author of Who Killed Jane Stanford?
“All Roads Lead to Rome is a deftly woven history of one man’s attempt to understand his father’s taciturn and damaged life by hiking the route his father’s army commando unit took as it fought its way north from the Anzio beaches to liberate Rome from the Nazis in World War II. A warm memoir and a historical resource, All Roads Lead to Rome stands as a heartfelt attempt to bridge a generation gap and probe the brutal and fiercely debilitating impact of war.”—Kit Bakke, author of Protest on Trial and Miss Alcott’s E-mail
“A touching and outstanding story, All Roads Lead to Rome is Bill Thorness’s journey to understanding his father, which takes us from the farmland of North Dakota to the battlefields of World War II Italy.”—Bill Woon, past executive director of the First Special Service Force Association and son of Force veteran Dave Woon, 2nd Company, 2nd Regiment
“An expansive journey through World War II Italy, All Roads Lead to Rome is a poignant, picturesque memoir of redemption and truth between father and son, past and present.”—Alicia DeFonzo, author of The Time Left between Us
“Any hope that humanity will more quickly move beyond war as a method of conflict resolution will likely come as a result of leaders who, whether personally or peripherally, finally acknowledge and speak to the damaging ramifications of war on present and future generations. Books such as All Roads Lead to Rome are vital for what they can add to this awareness, and it is one of the best books I have read so far on the cross-generational impact of military service, particularly combat.”—Tracy Crow, coeditor of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan
Descriere
When a slim packet of his father’s letters came to light after his mother’s death, Bill Thorness began a quest to rediscover his father, who was an army commando battling in Italy to liberate Rome in World War II.