In April 1945 the war in Europe was nearing its end. But battles were still raging, And on April 14 one such battle left a young American 2nd Lieutenant gravely wounded.
His name was Bob Dole, a 21-year-old from Kansas who had joined the Army in 1942.
The German shell that hit him that day in Italy in 1945 was nearly fatal. Miraculously Dole survived, but it would be another three years before he was out of the hospital.
Dole, of course, went on to a long, illustrious, and successful political career, culminating with the 1996 Republican nomination for president.
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In 2005 Dole wrote a memoir of his World War II experience, a book called One Soldier’s Story. I met with him in his Washington DC office one day that spring to talk about it, some 60 years after he nearly died on that battlefield in Italy.
So here now, from 2005, Bob Dole.
Bob Dole died in 2021 – he was 98.