Thoroughly-researched and richly illustrated, including colorized photographs the author's father brought back, What Dad Did in the War is must reading for anyone interested in the "forgotten front"--romantic Italy during WWII. Along the way, we learn about life in the Great Depression, how a nation prepared for a war unlike any it ever fought before, about ordinary soldiers in the chaos of war, what life was like on the home front, how the Army addressed its ticklish wartime manpower needs, how Hitler and Mussolini's totalitarian aggression resulted in soldiers fighting in Italy from every inhabited continent--and how the dramatic end of Mussolini's Fascism became the beginning of the end of the entire war in Europe.