When I was in my early 40’s I walked into the hospital room of a 99-year-old near-death relative who mistook me for my father’s brother who had been killed on the beachhead in Normandy during World War II. I was always a history buff, but this moment changed my life. I directed my energies to military history, starting with memoirs and writing a column for Armchair General magazine when it was in circulation. Published official histories (American Iliad, Aachen, Old Hickory) followed that were reliant on well-expressed memoirs written by participants, so full circle I’ve come back to my passion for writing, and reading war memoirs.
I wrote
The Journey of the Purple Heart: A First Infantry Division Soldier’s Story from Stateside to North Africa, Sicily and Normandy during World War II
I was putting the finishing touches on my book when I came across Unknown Valor in 2020. Like my book, Martha MacCallum’s was about an uncle she never knew who was killed at Iwo Jima. There was a lot of history about the Pacific Theater, as well as personal stories of those who served with her uncle. Like my book, except mine was about the European theater. Letters her uncle wrote home were sprinkled throughout the book, just like in my book. The anguish of her uncle’s death on his family was beautifully told. Just like I tried to do in my latest book.
A strong recommended read if you want to know more about the fate of soldiers during WWII in the Pacific.
In honor of the 75th Anniversary of one of the most critical battles of World War II, the popular primetime Fox News anchor of The Story with Martha MacCallum pays tribute to the heroic men who sacrificed everything at Iwo Jima to defeat the Armed Forces of Emperor Hirohito-among them, a member of her own family, Harry Gray.
Admiral Chester Nimitz spoke of the "uncommon valor" of the men who fought on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest and most brutal battles of World War II. In thirty-six grueling days, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed and…
Imagine being 20 years old, and a freshly minted lieutenant with just two weeks in the line. You are a forward observer for a 105mm artillery battalion. Your first duty position is atop a 314-meter-high hill at Mortain France. It is early August 1944 and Adolf Hitler sends four panzer divisions to Mortain to stop the Allied breakout from Normandy. First they must take that hill.
Weiss’s stunning book details how he and 700 other men held Hill 314 for five long days. Chronicled more recently by an Aurora Award-winning documentary on PBS it is one of those World War II personal memoirs one never forgets.
When the Germans launched their biggest counter-attack in France during WWII, the elite troops of the 2nd SS Panzer Division surrounded a battalion of less than 700 US infantry on top of a key hill near Mortain in Normandy. The American "Lost Battalion", equipped with very little food, medical supplies, ammunition, or anti-tank weapons, held out for sixty days. At the end of the battle, 277 of the riflemen were dead, wounded, or missing. Author Robert Weiss experienced those harrowing days of the war, directing much of the fire as a field artillery forward observer on the hill. As the…
In Europe it is a tradition to pass down from generation to generation the stories of survival during the German occupation of their countries. I have met some families that actually traveled to the United States to attend military reunions of the units who freed their homelands back in 1944-45.
Tveskov takes you into the terrifying world of Copenhagen during the war and remembers it through the eyes and experiences of a young boy. His book makes one appreciate how G.I. Joe came to be loved by so many Europeans.
On the morning of April 9, 1940, Peter Tveskov awoke to the roar of airplanes flying low overheadmore airplanes than hed ever heard or seen before. The invasion leading to the five-year German occupation of Denmark had begun. The Occupation was a dark and difficult time for the Danish people, but for five-year-old Peter, it was an exciting adventure that would in many ways shape both his future and that of his beloved country.
In Conquered, Not Defeated, Peter Tveskov blends vivid childhood memories with historical fact to tell the story of how the occupying army of the Third Reich…
I found this original edition, published in 1949, in a used bookstore back in the early 1990s. It was the first memoir I read about a soldier and the higher-up officers he reported to who fought in the same regiment as my late uncle.
Johnson contributed to two books I wrote on the official history of the 18th Infantry Regiment in World War II. His was a personal memoir up to the time his war was cut short after the Normandy Invasion. The writing style is sweeping and one of the better memoirs I’ve read about an anti-tank battalion during the big war.
This is one of the best military memoirs I’ve gotten into. Why? Because it’s about a different war. Not World War II, my passion. It’s Viet Nam this time, an experience too many in my generation didn’t come home from. Archer was a Marine during the pivotal battle of Khe Sahn, and he retells his experiences and that of his buddies in a heartfelt, necessarilygraphic, and sometimes humorous way—the latter so often used to mask the horrors of war and losing close friends.
A poignant, often humorous, recollection of the siege of Khe Sanh--a pivotal turning point in the American war in Vietnam. Under constant bombardment from the enemy, Michael Archer and his cadre of young Marines--Orr, Pig, Old Woman and Savage, just to name a few--managed to survive and, in the process, learn about manhood, sacrifice and the darkest recesses of fear and loneliness.
This memoir brings to life the challenges of an infantryman with the storied First Division during World War II, and the special camaraderie only soldiers who have fought in wars together understand.
From stopping Rommel’s best in North Africa to saving the landings on Sicily and then establishing the beachhead on D-Day in Normandy, you will feel like you are on the front lines with the mortar squad the author’s uncle served with. Sharing their pride in victories with the worries of his family back home while they await word about his war, the pages of this book will both thrill and sadden those who read this engagingly written true story.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
