Ten hours later, at Clark Field in the Philippines, Pfc. Jack Reed felt the brunt of another Japanese air attack and within weeks found himself a part of the gruesome Bataan Death March that was to claim the lives of hundreds of his comrades.

On another continent, four years into that unending war, Capt. Benjamin Butler led his exhausted company up a steep, fog-shrouded Italian mountain toward a well entrenched German defensive position. The odds against their survival were appalling, and worse was to come to the months ahead.

Such were the experiences of many young men plucked from their local communities all across America, trained for war, and hurled into the strange reality of combat thousands of miles from home. In this stunning collection of World War II oral histories, Arthur L. Kelly recreates the experiences of twelve young men from Kentucky who survived the seemingly unsurvivable, whether in combat or as prisoners of war. Their stories of endurance in the midst of chaos and violence tell of fear, rage, exhaustion, and despair, but also of courage, determination, and human kindness by those willing to risk their lives for others. These are the stories of men at their best in the worst of all possible times.