Fighting With the Screamimg Eagles: With the 101st Airborne from Normandy to Bastogne - Tapa dura

Robert Bowen found himself drafted into Company C, 401st Glider Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, as World War II broke out, and went through rigorous training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Yet the training was as nothing compared to the horror of combat. Bowen's unit acted as a reserve to 4th Division during D-Day and had its first experience of war as it stormed ashore on to the Normandy beaches. He was wounded during the Normandy campaign but went on to fight in Holland and the Ardennes before being captured - and mistreated - and finishing the war as a prisoner of the Germans. Written shortly after the war - but never before published - Bowen's narrative is immediate, direct and compelling. His account, one of the few by a member of a glider regiment, is a brutal insight into the battlefields of World War II and a vivid recreation of just what life was like in an elite unit. From the horror of D-Day and the despair of captivity, to the taste of C Rations and the fear of soldiers under fire, this memoir tells the full story of one man's total war.

Robert Bowen served throughout World War II. Christopher Anderson is Senior Editor at MHQ: Military History Quarterly and an expert on twentieth-century American military history. He lives in Annandale, VA.