Audie MurphyTo Hell and Back
The classic bestselling war memoir by the most decorated American soldier in World War II, back in print in a trade paperback Originally published in 1949, To Hell and Back was a smash bestseller for fourteen weeks and later became a major motion picture starring Audie Murphy as himself. More than fifty years later, this classic wartime memoir is just as gripping as it was then. Desperate to see action but rejected by both the marines and paratroopers because he was too short, Murphy eventually found a home with the infantry.
Audie Murphy was born into a large sharecropper family in Hunt County, Texas. The seventh of twelve children. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when he was a teenager. Murphy dropped out of school in fifth grade to pick cotton and find other work to help support his family, and his skill with a hunting rifle was a necessity for feeding them. His older sister helped him to falsify documentation about his birth date to meet the minimum-age requirement for enlisting in the military.
