Second to None: Marching Song of the II Corps.: Piano Arrangement by C.W.O. E. D. Rupert, Band Leader, 18th Infantry.ty

BURN, Col. Walter P., C.W.S., Chemical Officer, II Corps. Piano Arrangement by C.W.O., E. D. Rupert, Band Leader, 18th Infantry. II. Second to None. Marching Song of the II Corps. African Edition. 4to, bifolium, 4pp., printed in black-and-blue, unbound, as issued. [Algeria: 62nd Engr. Top. Co., U.S.A.,1943].


First Edition of Army produced sheet music, dedicated, "1st Verse Clark, 2d Verse Fredendall, 3d Verse Patton, 4th Verse Bradley," names inside white stars which are inside blue background. Page. [4] is a 36-line poem, African Interlude, headed by a 2 7/8 x 7 7/8" map of Algeria by Col. Walter P. Burn, a cartographer, with a scene below of Algerians waving goodbye to American troops on the move. The poem is about the dead, and where "death was sown in every road...But you did your job and faced it..." Praises the men who strung the wires, those who loaded deadly freight, "And don't forget the nurses/ Who have shared our risk and fare,/ Nor the medics and the stretcher teams/Who gave our wounded care;" and the engineers and cooks as well: "And Victory's due to Every man-/And woman-in the Corps. And now, farewell to Africa,/And off to other shores/ The Second Corps still second to none/ The wide world o'er!" The libretto begins: "I have picked the best of the fight-ing troops, The Gen-er-al he swore;/ In the dark o'er the moon we passed the Rock, And hit for the African shore;/ When the Brit-ish First, got stuck in the mud, An set-tled down for tea;/ When the Brit-ish Eighth had chased the Hun from Mareth up past Soussse, cream o'the crop, the tip o'the top, for the Sec-ond Ar-my Corps..." The history of the storied II Corps included initial defeats in Algeria and Tunisia, at at places such as Kasserine Pass, but their fortunes changed when command passed to General George Patton in March 1943; on to the invasion of Sicily, up the Italian peninsula, the Battle of Monte Cassino, etc., all described by Wikipedia. Col. Walter P. Burn (1894-1959) was a chemical warfare officer in WWI during which he was wounded, as he was during WWII. He was a cartographer, artist, advertising agent, and after WWII, the curator of maps at Middlebury College until 1957. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1943 he made an aerial view map of The Oasis City of Gafsa, Tunisia, Africa, object of an American attack, done at Gafsa, and also made a pictorial map of Sicily celebrating the Allied victory in 1944. Before and after the war he made a number of maps for broadcast stations and department stores. JSTOR illustrates a later "Italian Edition" printed in 1944 with the same music and libretto, but a different poem, inaccurately citing it as a scanned version of the "original manuscript" in the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, at Middlebury College, which it is not, being, in fact, a different printing than ours, printed later in Italy. See Alfred M. Beck, et al, The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany (Washington, D. C., 1983). OCLC locates one copy (Pritzker Military Library. Folded, somewhat soiled, and three small pieces of tape at vertical fold.