William Foley

William A. Foley

During World War II, Foley was a rifleman in the 94th Infantry Division “Ghost Corps” under General George Patton, whose campaign was focused on getting past the Siegfried Line, and also participated in the Battle of the Bulge.
As an eighteen-year-old, Foley began drawing sketches of events on the battlefield in a sketchbook he carried with him.
These sketches were preserved in part because they were able to be stashed in a cardboard tube that previously held a mortar shell. Later, he also drew some war scenes from memory.
Foley went on to work commercially as an illustrator and a became a fine artist, painting, ironically, mystical landscapes.

Foley’s memoir Visions from a Foxhole: A Rifleman in Patton’s Ghost Corps was published in 2007. It includes several accounts from wartime, focusing on the actions and accounts on the battlefield rather than the larger context of the war.

He notes that victories on the battlefield were not a cause for celebration, and expresses his understanding of soldiers who deserted their posts, given the difficulties of war.

Foley’s account of the war has been described as “one of the most outstanding memoirs in recent memory”, in particular his descriptions of Germany, which are compared to landscapes as described by Dante Alighieri.