Red Bulls

Red Bull tells the story of the 34th Infantry Division, one of the first American divisions sent overseas in the Second World War and one of the hardest-used formations in the Mediterranean theater. It originated from a series of lectures given my Nelson McKeeby in 1993 and 1994 called Iowa Boys about the seven members of his family who served in this division.

Drawn from National Guard units across the Midwest, the division left home before the United States had fully learned how to fight a modern war. Its soldiers trained in the United States, crossed the Atlantic, landed in North Africa, and entered combat against German and Italian forces in Tunisia. At Faid, Sidi Bou Zid, Kasserine, and the hills beyond, the division paid heavily for inexperience, poor preparation, broken communications, and hard enemy blows.

The war did not end there. The Red Bulls fought on through Italy, from the landings and mountain roads of the mainland campaign to the long struggle near Cassino, the Anzio beachhead, the drive toward Rome, the northern Apennines, and the Po Valley. Their war was fought in mud, rock, heat, snow, shellfire, narrow roads, ruined villages, and ridgelines where every movement had to be earned.

This book follows the division through training, command changes, battlefield mistakes, endurance, recovery, and repeated combat. It gives the reader the men, the units, the roads, the orders, the failures, and the fighting that shaped the Red Bull Division's long war.

Red Bull is a history of a division that carried the burden of the Mediterranean campaign from its first hard lessons in North Africa to the final months in northern Italy.