Stephen Ambrose passed away last night.   A bio from FoxNews is here.

An excerpt:

"He was saying, 'There's all this obsession with high command, but the real story is these citizen soldiers who still live in every town and hamlet in the United States,"' said Douglas Brinkley...

Ambrose was incredibly prolific and I've seen a lot of him on TV in recent years.   I remember an interview where he summed up one aspect of WWII by saying:

They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought.

They were soldiers of democracy.

They were the men of D-Day.

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he bet that the young men brought up in the Hitler Youth would outfight the youngsters brought up in the Boy Scouts.

Ambrose, made his mark by probing the deep, internalized motivations of Citizen Soldiers in the US Army.  Pivotal events like D-Day more often than not involved a private here, a sargent there, or a captain rounding up the individuals around him and forming a squad to take an objective spontaneously and in the heat of battle.  

Hitler was half way correct about his characterization of US soldiers -- they were more interested in baseballs.   Ambrose, however, told us that Hitler was flat out wrong about how courageously American soldiers would engage & apply themselves towards victory to defend Freedom -- and therefore the pleasantries of democratic life.