WORLD WAR II was the largest military conflict in the history of the world.  Its many locales included the whole of Europe, North Africa, The Atlantic Ocean, The Pacific Ocean, the East Indies, Japan, and many parts of Asia.  The conflagration began in the Pacific in 1936 and ignited in Europe by 1939.  The United States became involved on that fateful December 7, 1941.  Some estimates suggest that 50 million people perished in the war.  An amazing one in forty servicemen gave their lives.  Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent said of the American soldiers, “Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly — but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.”  Pyle himself would be one of the war’s casualties.