Rangers Lead the Way, Italy: A Novel of the U.S. Rangers in Sicily, Inspired by True Events

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

They handed the glory to the men who drove into the liberated city. Jack Miller and what was left of his squad were the ones who held the door open.

Sicily, July 1943. Sergeant Jack Miller comes off the boat at Gela in the dark before dawn, a quiet marksman off the dry edge of the Texas Panhandle who wants nothing more than to stay invisible, and who keeps getting hauled into the light instead. A scout by nature and a squad leader by his first sergeant's design, Jack has one job now that the shooting has started: keep a handful of green replacements alive long enough to become men who can keep themselves alive.

It will not be enough.

From the tank-swept square at Gela, to a hill town taken by nothing but nerve and a bluff in the dark; across an island that put more Rangers in the hospital with fever than the enemy ever did; and up six miles of switchbacks to a rocky notch called Chiunzi Pass, where a thinned-out band of Darby's Rangers held the high ground above the Plain of Naples for three weeks against everything an army could throw at them, Jack counts the cost the only way he knows how.

One name at a time.

Because the army keeps numbers. Jack keeps the names.

RANGERS LEAD THE WAY — BOOK 2: ITALY is a boots-in-the-dust novel of Darby's Rangers in the forgotten middle of the Second World War: the summer and autumn of 1943, between the famous beginning and the hard road that waits beyond these pages. Told entirely through one ordinary man's eyes, it is about the part of war that comes with no newsreel and no parade — the holding, the counting, and the men who paid for ground that history would shrink to a single sentence.

The events are real. The men who lived them deserve to be more than a number in a column. Step into the line beside Jack Miller and find out what that sentence cost.

Perfect for readers of Jeff Shaara, W. E. B. Griffin, and anyone who has ever wondered what the men behind Band of Brothers went through before the cameras arrived.