World War II

World War II occupies two roles in Frank Sheeran’s account: it is the four-year span that carried him from enlistment to discharge, and the experience the book presents as training him to kill. He remembers it through precise markers—411 reported combat days, a song that followed him across the war, the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, and dreams that returned decades later. The memoir’s chronology gives those memories a formal end in 1945; its account of their persistence makes clear that the end of the war did not end their influence.

Enlistment and Mobilization

Sheeran enlisted in the army in August 1941, while the United States was still officially neutral and the war was already underway elsewhere. His basic training took place in Biloxi, Mississippi. A Southern sergeant challenged the recruits to step forward if they thought they could beat him; Sheeran did, and spent the next five days digging latrines. In retrospect, the episode appears as a blunt lesson in rank and obedience, part of the military preparation that followed. After training, the army assigned him to the military police. Sheeran recalled that recruits were not asked whether they wanted their assignments and that, before the war began, there was no way out of the MPs.

A song gives his account a parallel route into wartime memory. In 1941, while serving as an MP on guard duty at Lowry Field in Colorado, Sheeran first heard Tuxedo Junction. He credited its composition and first hit recording to the Black bandleader Erskine Hawkins, rather than to Glenn Miller, whom he said most people associated with making it famous. The song stayed with him as a kind of theme through the war. Afterward, he took Mary, his future wife, to hear Hawkins at the old Earl Theater in Philadelphia; a wartime refrain thus carried into the beginning of his life after service.

In December 1941, soon after Pearl Harbor, Sheeran won a jitterbug dance contest to Tuxedo Junction at the Denver Dance Hall. At four the next morning, he was on a troop train heading for the West Coast to defend California. He had just turned twenty-one and stood six feet two inches tall. By the time the war ended, he said, he was six feet four. He was discharged on October 24, 1945, one day before his twenty-fifth birthday. The calendar, in this small but telling detail, measures the war alongside a young man’s physical growth: Sheeran remembered himself as not yet fully grown when he entered it.

Combat in Europe

Sheeran served as a rifleman in Europe with the Thunderbird Division, the 45th Infantry Division. He contrasted his reported 411 days of actual combat with an average of about eighty days for a veteran. The Army’s figure, he recalled, qualified him for an extra twenty dollars a month. The number is both bureaucratic accounting and a measure of exposure: in his telling, he had spent far longer in combat than the comparison figure suggested was typical. He also called himself lucky. Though tall and repeatedly involved in firefights, he said, he was never struck by German bullets or shrapnel. His survival, in his account, included many prayers in foxholes, particularly while pinned down in a dugout at Anzio.

The memoir also connects combat to earlier lessons in self-reliance. Sheeran said his childhood had taught him how to take care of himself and survive. That statement does not diminish the danger of the fighting; instead, it places survival within a longer personal history, where the habits formed before enlistment met the immediate demands of the battlefield. The book’s narrator later draws a darker conclusion from Sheeran’s prolonged exposure to combat: that this unremitting service was where he learned to kill in cold blood.

The book’s account of the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page Combat Report adds another layer to the recollection. Sheeran tracked down the report, issued within months of the war’s end, to help explain his combat days. At Dachau concentration camp, the report recorded some one thousand bodies and described the gas chambers and crematoria beside ordered piles of clothing, shoes, and bodies. Sheeran remembered that soldiers had heard rumors about atrocities but were unprepared for what they encountered, including the stench. He said that the scene and smell stayed printed on the mind. His recollection therefore places the camp not only as a military episode but as an image that could not be put away once witnessed.

Dachau, Munich, and the War’s End

Sheeran’s account of Dachau moves from observation to violence. He recalled that the camp’s young German commander and his officers were put into jeeps and driven away; gunfire was heard in the distance. He then said that the approximately five hundred German soldiers guarding the camp were dealt with by the American troops. Some surviving camp victims, he recalled, borrowed guns and did what they had to do. The account’s compressed language leaves the precise sequence and individual actions unstated, but its bluntness registers a collapse of ordinary restraint in the aftermath of what the soldiers had seen.

Soon afterward, according to Sheeran, his unit marched into Munich. About two weeks later, the war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender. The sequence—Dachau, Munich, surrender—gives his recollection a rapid movement from atrocity and retaliation to military conclusion. Yet the emotional conclusion remains unsettled. His discharge date closes the service record, while the images he described as permanently impressed in memory point beyond that date.

Memory and Aftermath

The book presents Sheeran’s account of the war as difficult to obtain. The interviewer wrote that it took two years before Sheeran could accept that his combat experience was worth discussing. Even after that, the conversations were painstaking and stressful, marked by stops and starts. His reluctance shapes the reader’s access to the past: the war is not offered as a continuous, fluent narrative but emerges through delayed recollection, the official report, and repeated attempts to speak about what happened.

Years later, Sheeran said, stirring up those memories brought back dreams of combat. In the dreams, wartime experiences became mixed with things he had begun doing for certain people after the war. That blending links the battlefield to the violence of his later life without making the two identical or supplying details the account does not give. The remembered 411 days are therefore more than a statistic or a completed military term. They remain an active part of the book’s explanation of Sheeran: a past he struggled to discuss, an experience he said returned in dreams, and a formative history that the narrator connects to his later capacity for violence.