On the ledge. I can see the coast coming near one of our planes. A thunderbolt. Plunging down and up again. Seconds later we heard the rattle of machine guns. That night we lay among hedgerows. The night was black. There was thrashing in a hedgerow. A burst of firing in the morning. A dead cow. A plane droned overhead. One of theirs diesel with a rhythmic sound. Then the bombs came whistling down. We were strung out on an embankment. Side by side. In a straight line. Like infantry in World War One. Waiting for the whistle to blow. The Germans knew we were there. And were firing everything they had. Bullets passing right above. I knew that in a moment the …

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Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louis Simpson served in the 101st Airborne Division in World War Two, and has written memorably about his experience in one of the war’s bloodiest. Battles in the battle of the Bulge at Bastogne. I remember it vividly as though someone were putting on an enormous panorama for me. I’m grateful to have seen it. A horizon ringed with fire here and there, and the outfit to which I belong in the middle of that, and being threatened with annihilation. And to me it was in retrospect, not not when it was actually going on. So much. It seemed to me that it was like an enormously planned thing to look at. And of course, I was glad when …

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Poet Marilyn Nelson was raised on military bases and developed a unique literary perspective as a daughter of a Tuskegee Airman. Here, Nelson reads from the fields of praise. Star fix for Melvin M Nelson, captain, United States Air Force, retired 1917 to 1966 at his cramped desk under the Astrodome. The navigator looks thousands of light years everywhere but down. He gets a celestial fix. Measuring headwinds, checking the log, plotting wind speed, altitude, mood drift in a circle of protractors slide rules and pencils. He charts in his how goes it? The points of no alternate and of no return. He keeps his eyes on the compass. The two altimeters, the map he thinks. Do we have enough fuel? What if …

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Former US Poet laureate Richard Wilbur saw ferocious combat in both Italy and France as an infantryman during World War Two. Here is Wilbur describing the genesis of one wartime poem. After we had done the Southern France invasion. We worked our way up through France to Alsace, where we experienced an unusually bitter winter. And this poem, of course, comes out of that first snow in Alsace. The snow came down last night like more burned on the moon. It fell till dawn. Covered the town with simple clubs. Absolute snow. Lies rumpled on what shell bursts scattered and deranged and tangled railings for a vast lawn. As if it did not know they’d changed. Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes. …

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