The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens by Chris DeRose
The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens by Chris DeRose
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES..... Bill White and the young men of McMinn County answered their nation's call after Pearl Harbor. They won the freedom of the world and returned to find that they had lost it at home.
A corrupt political machine was in charge, protected by violent deputies, funded by racketeering, and kept in place by stolen elections -- the worst allegations of voter fraud ever reported to the Department of Justice, according to the U.S. Attorney General.
To restore free government, McMinn's veterans formed the nonpartisan GI ticket to oppose the machine at the next election.
On Election Day, August 1, 1946, the GIs and their supporters found themselves outgunned, assaulted, arrested, and intimidated. Deputies seized ballot boxes and brought them back to the jail. White and a group of GIs, "The Fighting Bunch" -- men who survived Guadalcanal, the Bulge, and Normandy -- armed themselves and demanded a fair count. When they were refused the most basic rights they had fought for, the men, all of whom believed they had seen the end of war, returned to the battlefield and risked their lives one last time.
For the past seven decades, the participants of the "Battle of Ballots and Bullets" and their families kept silent about that conflict. Now, in The Fighting Bunch, after years of research, including conducting exclusive interviews with the remaining witnesses and reviewing archival radio broadcast and interview tapes, scrapbooks, letters, and diaries, Chris DeRose has reconstructed one of the great untold stories in American history. THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES.....
St. Martin's Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020