Book Four
The Gunner's Line
1941 to 1946
Crown on the Potomac The Gunner's Line Book Four 1941 to 1946 December 1941. Japan strikes Honolulu, and James Wheeler, eighteen, who has never been further from Lexington than Boston, volunteers within the month. The Army puts him to loading shells for a towed howitzer, the heaviest work in the battery and the least admired, and he is quietly glad of it.
The Gunner's Line follows him from the artillery school to the counter-invasion, ashore in the Cotentin with Operation Rollo, through the hedgerows and the winter to the fall of Paris. It is written a year later, at a kitchen table on the family farm, by a man who wants to get it right, including the parts he cannot know.
Each chapter opens with a short extract from the Universal Register, the encyclopedia of the world the book is set in. The extracts are quoted from the Register as it stands; the chapters show what happened in the rooms it was not in.
Begin reading: Prologue → CharactersPart One: The Proving (December 1941 to June 1944)
Part Two: The Beachhead (June 1944)
Part Three: The Hedgerows (July 1944)
- 11 The Sunken Lane
- 12 The Pit
- 13 Numbers
- 14 A Little After Eleven
- 15 The Record
- 16 What It Did Not Ask