The American Rangers were always expendable. They were the Army's cestus in punch after armed punch on the slogging road across North Africa, in the invasions of Sicily and Italy. Black-haired, chunky, 34-year-old Colonel William Orlando Darby, who had organized the Rangers in Northern Ireland during the anxious summer of 1942, stayed with them through thick & thin.
West Pointer Darby was a soldier's soldier, undismayed by his command's suicidal missions, full of cool recklessness and the yeast of humor and enthusiasm. At Gela, with 18 blackfaced men, he caught 52 Italian officers holed up in a hotel, unhesitatingly went in with...
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