Battlefield Action #40

Alfred H. Dalton is a soldier with a conscience—a man who can't bring himself to kill, even in war—but when his platoon is pinned down and running low on ammunition during the Korean conflict, he volunteers for a suicide run to resupply them. As Al races through enemy territory with grenades in hand, his soft heart finally meets its match against the brutal arithmetic of combat. A tragic meditation on what it costs to hold onto your humanity when the world demands you become a killer.

In August 1942, Emperor Hirohito dispatches his elite Imperial Marines—the cream of Japan's military machine—to Guadalcanal to crush the American foothold on the island, confident they will deliver swift victory. But the battle-hardened, desperate American Marines dug in on the island prove far tougher than Colonel Shigaku Samarachi and his men anticipated, and repeated assaults against determined defenders in the jungle reveal a hard truth about the limits of training and ideology on the battlefield.

In November 1944, Sgt. Gantless and his fifty men must defend the French village of Ste. Anne against a Nazi counterattack—not just for the town, but for over five hundred wounded French Resistance fighters and support personnel hidden in a vast cavern beneath it. As German tanks and infantry close in through the night, Gantless and his exhausted soldiers face an impossible choice: hold the line with dwindling supplies and mounting casualties, or abandon those sheltering underground.