To Hell and Back

Audie Murphy recounts his combat experiences from 1943 to 1945 in this memoir, tracing his path from a teenage infantryman in Sicily through roughly two years of fighting across Italy, France, and Germany.

Murphy opens on a hillside in Sicily in July 1943, where his unit had come ashore behind the initial assault waves. A soldier named Griffin was killed by a shell, Murphy's first encounter with death in combat. Murphy flashes back to his childhood in rural Texas, where a World War I veteran's stories planted the desire to become a soldier. He grew up in poverty as one of nine surviving children of a sharecropping family. His father abandoned them, and his mother worked herself to illness and died when Murphy was 16, after which the youngest children were placed in an orphanage.

On his 18th birthday, Murphy tried to enlist in the Marines but was rejected for being underweight. He visited the paratroopers, but when the recruiting sergeant suggested he load up on bananas and milk before weighing in, Murphy stormed out. The infantry accepted him, though he passed out during his first drill and earned the nickname "Baby." Officers repeatedly tried to reassign him to non-combat roles, but he refused each time. In early 1943, he arrived in North Africa as a replacement.

In Sicily, Murphy shot two Italian officers fleeing on horseback, his first kills. He reflects that he felt no pride or remorse, only a weary indifference that would follow him through the war. His company commander transferred him to headquarters as a runner because of his youthful appearance, but Murphy kept sneaking to the front until the commander returned him to the lines and promoted him to corporal.

The narrative shifts to the Italian mainland near Salerno, where Murphy led a three-man assault—with squad members Steiner and Brandon—on a machine-gun emplacement at a blown bridge. Steiner was killed, but Brandon grenaded the position and destroyed it. Murphy introduces Novak, a Polish immigrant who dreamed of buying a farm and who hated the Germans with fierce personal passion. At the Volturno River, the squad occupied an abandoned dugout as a decoy for three days. When water ran out, Antonio, a squad member, crawled toward a pipe and was killed by a machine gunner. Novak tried to rush out, and Murphy physically restrained him.

The fighting intensified around Mignano, where steep mountains guarded the approach to Cassino. Murphy's squad occupied a quarry on Hill 193 and tended three wounded Germans for two days without medical support; all three died. After the valley was cleared, the exhausted company was pulled from the lines.

During a training period near Naples, Murphy met Maria, a thin 18-year-old whose brother had been killed in Africa. During an air raid, Murphy refused to take shelter, and Maria stayed with him. They talked in the darkness, and Murphy fell asleep. At dawn she insisted he leave, predicting he would never return.

Murphy had a severe malarial attack and was hospitalized, missing the departure for Anzio. When he reached the beachhead, he learned the company was down to 34 men. Novak was dead, killed by a direct hit from an 88mm shell. Swope, a Cherokee and expert machine gunner, had lost his right leg and part of a hand. Murphy was promoted to staff sergeant.

Anzio became a months-long ordeal of static warfare and relentless shelling. Over three days of failed assault, the company was decimated. Murphy took command of the platoon after Beltsky, the platoon leader, lost part of a leg. Thompson, a replacement Murphy had mentored, disappeared during a patrol, was court-martialed for desertion, and sentenced to 20 years. As Murphy shook his hand, Thompson observed that Murphy's sentence, returning to the lines, might be worse. Hospitalized again, Murphy met Helen, a nurse from Omaha, whose conversations over several days provided rare emotional intimacy. He later heard the hospital area was bombed but never learned Helen's fate.

In late May, the breakout from Anzio began. Horse-Face Johnson, known throughout the company for his tall tales, was killed by a shell fragment and died in Murphy's foxhole trying to tell one last story. In Rome, the men felt hollow rather than triumphant.

The company shipped out for the invasion of southern France, landing in mid-August. During an assault on a wooded hill, Brandon was shot dead by Germans who had waved a white flag. Consumed with rage, Murphy picked up a German machine gun and single-handedly stormed the hill, wiping out all resistance. Afterward, he sat by Brandon's body and wept.

The company raced up the Rhône Valley. Bergman, a Swedish-American replacement from Minnesota, was shot in the leg but refused evacuation and continued fighting. Snuffy Jones, one of the original squad members, was shot in the hip near Besançon, a wound that removed him permanently from combat. Murphy and Kerrigan were now the sole survivors of the original group.

In the Vosges Mountains of eastern France, multiple assaults failed against a rock-cut quarry near Cleurie. Kerrigan was hit by a mortar fragment that took half his right hand, ending his combat permanently. Murphy was now entirely alone among the original men. He directed mortar fire onto concealed German positions, breaking the enemy defense. His foxhole companion Paderwicz was killed by a sniper, and Murphy was shot through the hip by a ricocheting bullet. Gangrene set in, requiring weeks of treatment.

Murphy returned to the front in January 1945 to help eliminate the Colmar Pocket, a heavily fortified German bridgehead west of the Rhine. Near the village of Holtzwihr, six German tanks and roughly 200 infantrymen attacked his position. The company, reduced to about 40 men, began pulling back. Murphy climbed onto the burning hull of a knocked-out tank destroyer, an anti-tank vehicle, and manned its turret machine gun while directing artillery by field telephone. He called the shells progressively closer to his own position, at one point requesting fire directly onto his own coordinates. When challenged, he replied, "I don't give a damn" (242). From the burning vehicle, he killed or wounded scores of enemy soldiers until the German tanks withdrew. When the phone line was cut, he walked off without looking back, his leg bleeding from fresh shrapnel wounds.

Murphy rallied his company and led them to reclaim lost ground. Bergman opened fire on 20 Germans at reveille; after six were hit, the rest surrendered. The division suffered over 4,500 casualties in seven weeks before the pocket was sealed. Transferred to liaison duty, Murphy disobeyed orders when he learned his old company was trapped near the Siegfried Line, the massive German fortification along the western border. He found the men psychologically broken, coaxed them out, and marched them through without a shot fired; the Germans had already withdrawn. The division crossed the Rhine as resistance crumbled.

On a train to the French Riviera, Murphy learned of Germany's surrender. The men reacted with exhaustion rather than celebration. In a hotel room in Cannes, he picked up his service pistol, admired its mechanism, then set it down when cathedral bells rang. Images of the war flashed through his mind: Novak's grave on Anzio, Horse-Face's unfinished stories, Brandon dead under a cork tree, Kerrigan shuffling cards with half a hand. Murphy asks whether the war has stripped him of all belief. He concludes that he believes in the men who fought beside him and in what his country considers right and decent. He resolves to find love, to have faith, and to learn to live again.