Allies

Dee sees Henry struggling while he helps a wounded soldier, and he rushes out from the wall to help him. Henry introduces himself and treats a couple of Dee’s cuts. To his surprise and delight, Dee realizes that the soldier Henry was helping is Sid. Dee had thought his friend was dead after the explosion in Chapter 27.

After Dee and Sid happily reunite, a commanding officer comes along the seawall and tells all the soldiers to go through a hole in the wall nearby to try and get off the beach, which he feels is a disadvantageous position. Dee realizes he doesn’t have a weapon and takes the rifle of the soldier whose body he retrieved.

The Americans rush through the seawall and up onto a bluff in front of a German bunker that they are going to try to capture. Smoke from burning seagrass keeps the Germans from hitting them, and Dee kills his first German soldier, a boy about his own age. He thinks of his heritage as a native German citizen and determines to become an official citizen of the US if he makes it out of the war alive.

The group of Ally soldiers Dee is with capture the German bunker, killing all the soldiers inside. After Dee gets his bearings, he realizes that the Allies are going to have to leave the beach and continue pushing inland.

Dee and Sid, along with the other American soldiers, leave Omaha Beach and check for civilians in an apparently deserted village. However, they are soon ambushed by German soldiers, who have a tank.

The Allies strategize about how to try and take out the tank. They cobble together small explosives to make a larger bomb, and after remembering the debt he feels to the US for offering his family a safe haven, Dee volunteers to carry the bomb to the tank, even though it’s likely that he’ll be killed. He sprints to the tank, throws the explosive, and is knocked backwards by the blast and is also hit by a bullet.

Dee survives the attack on the tank, which is immobilized after being hit. Dee crawls underneath the tank for shelter and realizes he can overhear and understand the Nazis inside, speaking in German. The soldiers give orders to set the village church on fire, which confuses Dee until he realizes that the Nazis have rounded up the villagers and trapped them inside the church. He realizes he must help the villagers escape, just as a grenade rolls to his hiding place under the tank.

The grenade near Dee turns out to be a smoke grenade, not an explosive, and Sid pulls him out from underneath the tank to safety. Dee tells Sid what he overheard, forcing him to explain to his friend that he was born in Germany. He rushes off to the burning church before he can fully see Sid’s reaction, and then finds that his friend has followed him with a rifle pointed in his direction.

Despite the menacing nature of Sid’s gesture, Dee realizes that his friend is going to use his rifle to shoot some of the church siding off to help the citizens inside escape. The two work together to get the French residents out of the church, joined by the other Ally soldiers after the Germans defending the village surrender. However, Sid ignores Dee, angry at his deception and his heritage.

The group decides to push on toward Bayeux, and Sid volunteers to stay behind with the Nazi soldiers who have been captured. Dee realizes that Sid means to execute the Germans while the rest of the soldiers are gone. He tries to persuade Sid not to murder them, but Sid only threatens to kill Dee, too, and Dee leaves dejectedly. He is brought down by a bullet on his way out of the village, implying that Sid might have shot his erstwhile friend.