A vivid, boots-on-the-ground memoir of World War II by an infantryman in General Patton’s army, from the Battle of the Bulge to Germany’s defeat On December 19, 1944, Gene Garrison turned nineteen. He spent his birthday in a muddy foxhole, listening to the cries of wounded comrades while exploding artillery shells sent shrapnel raining down on him and the enemy prepared to attack. It was his first day in combat. Unless Victory Comes recounts Garrison's journey as he was transformed from a fresh-faced kid from the farmlands of Ohio into a hardened soldier fighting for survival. From his baptism under fire, to the bitter fighting in the frozen Ardennes forest during Hitler’s last desperate push, to the end of the war on the Czechoslovakian border, Gene Garrison witnessed the war from the ground up. This is the story of one young man, far from home, surrounded by strangers, facing death yet never losing hope that he would live to see his family again.

Unless Victory Comes: Combat With a World War II Machine Gunner in Patton's Third Army

Biographies & Memoirs

Gilbert, Patrick

Garrison, Gene

Leaders & Notable People

Penguin Publishing Group

Gene Garrison spent a terrifying nineteenth birthday crammed into a muddy foxhole near the German border in the Saar. He listened helplessly to cries of wounded comrades as exploding artillery shells sent deadly shrapnel raining down on them. The date was December 16, 1944, he was a member of a .30-caliber machine-gun crew with the 87th Infantry Division and this was his first day in combat. Less than a year earlier, he had taken the first steps in charting his future, entering college as a fresh-faced kid from the farmlands of Ohio. Now, as the night closed around Garrison, slices of light pierced the darkness with frightening brilliance. Battle-hardened German SS troopers using flashlights infiltrated the line of the young, untested American soldiers. Someone screamed "Counterattack!" In the maelstrom of gun fire that followed the teenaged Garrison struggled to comprehend the horrors of the present, his entire future reduced to a prayer that he would be alive at daybreak. From those first frightening, confusing days in combat until the end of the war five months later, Gene Garrison saw many of his buddies killed or wounded, each loss reducing his own odds of survival. Convinced before one attack that his luck had deserted him, he wrote a final letter to his family, telling them goodbye. Garrison gave the letter to a buddy with instructions to mail it if he died. From the bitter fighting west of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge to the end of the war on the Czechoslovakian border, Garrison describes the degradation of war with pathos and humor. Gene Garrison's story is told through the eyes of the common soldier, a man who might not know the name of the town or the location of the next hill that he and his comrades must grimly wrestle from the enemy but who is willing to die in order to carry the war forward to the hated enemy. He writes of the simple pleasure derived from finding a water-filled puddle deep enough to fill his canteen; a momentary respite in a half-destroyed barn that shields him from the bitter cold and penetrating wind of an Ardennes winter; the solace of friendship with a core of veterans whose lives hang upon his actions and whose actions might help him survive the bitter, impersonal death they all face. The rich dialogue and a hard-hitting narrative style bring the reader to battlefield manhood alongside Garrison, to each moment of terror and triumph faced by a young soldier far from home in the company of strangers.

UNLESS VICTORY COMES: Combat With a Machine Gunner in Patton's Third Army

Casemate

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