#Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

ENTERTAINERS AND NEWSMEN on deadline can talk all they want to about tension, but they wouldn’t know tension if you dipped it in a bucket of water and hit them in the face with it—unless they had spent five days in a marshaling area, waiting to start the Invasion of Europe. The only comparable sensation would be those last five days in the death house, when everybody is quiet and considerate and they feed you well and let you sleep late and write letters and give you little favors and comforts. The chaplain comes around to see you, the warden makes a speech, and maybe you write a letter to your mother. If you have a mother and she still cares. Or you write your girlfriend, who is probably going steady with somebody else by now, as ours were. Finally there isn’t anything more to do. You eat your last meal and put on your clothes and walk down the corridor to the big flash. You go out of the world the way you came in: surrounded by people and utterly alone.

~ David Kenyon Webster

[ww2yaoi]

kind of already rolling my eyes at the bill and babe memoir but we’ll see. I have a feeling every single band of brothers book I read I’m going to be like well it’s no Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich by David Kenyon Webster published in 1994 by Random House Publishing Group

[sea-changed]

"We are disciplined, so we lie here and take it, because, in the end, we are more afraid of defying the authority of an officer, backed up by the whole Army and a court-martial composed of officers like him, than we are of death by shell fire. Discipline is fear, not leadership, and we are afraid--not of Peacock but of the irresistible force that he represents. Afraid for our lives, we are more afraid of the system that holds us in thrall, and so we lie here and wait to be killed, because an officer tells us to lie here."

- David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

[shelyue99]

I came across BoB only last year (thanks Netflix the best thing you have done to me) hence 22 years late. I wish I had done it earlier (I definitely heard about the title, maybe in the 2000s, but I was too young at the time to take interests in it and I forgot about it), but because of it there are already a lot of resources and materials (and numerous fanfics) to dig into. I love research and meta and here are something I found interesting and relevant to BoB (with a focus on Winters and Nixon) :

Documentary:

Ron Livingston's Band of Brothers Video Diary

We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company

He Has Seen War

Book:

Band of Brothers, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoir of Major Dick Winters, by Dick Winters, Cole C. Kingseed

Biggest Brother: The Life of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led the Band of Brothers, by Larry Alexander

Conversation with Major Dick Winters: Life Lessons from the Commander of the Band of Brothers, by Cole C. Kingseed

Hang Tough: The WWII Letters and Artifacts of Major Dick Winters, by Erik Dorr, Jared Frederick

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, by David Kenyon Webster

Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, By James Andrew Miller

Podcast:

HBO's official Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Podcast

The Ross Owen Show, this blog has all the BoB cast interview recordings.

Dead Eyes

Other Materials:

"Band of Brothers" 20th Anniversary Symposium, the video can be found here.

Re the symposium, I love some of the trivia stories the cast shared, like when some replacement guy (I remembered it's Rene Moreno who played Ramirez but my memory could be fuzzy) were having dinner with the OG Easy men at this posh restaurant after shooting. Someone asked Moreno what he did today and he said he cut his hair and got to shoot the gun something like that, and Neal McDonough (Compton) asked him to drop and gave him 20, Moreno looked at Ron Livingston for help, who he thought was the only normal person at the table, but Ron was like yeah you had to do it, and so he dropped and did 20 push-ups and startled the waitress and other customers.

The other interesting episode is that when they were shooting for the river crossing scene in Ep 8, a replacement guy (Ramirez or Hashey?) who wasn't in the bootcamp and wasn't that immersed, jokingly told Dexter Fletcher (Martin) to fuck off, everyone went quiet like how dare you say to that to the officer, and Ross McCall (Liebgott) asked, "Permission to throw him off the boat, sir," Fletcher said let him think about it. They didn't throw him off the boat but I find the comparison between those who went to the bootcamp vs. those didn't and thus didn't have a clue is so interesting. Oh, and Matthew Settle still scared the other cast and staff because Speirs is so scary lol.

[wecomrades]

Master List War Material

Hello everyone!

I decided to make my own list about war stuff and share it with you lots. These are all of the movies and TV shows that I've ever watched and books that I read; it's going to be WWI, WWII (with Holocaust as well), Vietnam War and Iraq War related. What can I say, I'm a slut when it comes to matters of war and soldiers, mostly. I'll keep updating it with new stuff every now and then. 

I really hope you find this interesting and useful! If you have any suggestions or questions or whatever, my DMs are always open ❤️

MOVIES:

WWI

1917

War Horse

Testament of Youth

1918

All quiet at the Western front

The Eagle and the Hawk

WWII

Dunkirk

Hacksaw Ridge

Midway

Inglourious Basterds

Fury

Flags of Our Fathers

Unbroken

Saving Private Ryan

Schindler's List (Holocaust)

The Thin Red Line

Pearl Harbour

The Longest Day

The Dirty Dozen

The Pianist (Holocaust)

Anthropoid

Train de vie

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) (Holocaust)

Hurricane

Black Book

Saints and Soldiers

The Darkest Hour

The Monuments Men

T-34

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Holocaust)

Life is Beautiful (Holocaust)

Elle s'appelait Sarah (Holocaust)

Jakob the Liar (Holocaust)

The Zookeeper's Wife (Holocaust)

Sobibor (Holocaust)

The Photographer of Mauthausen (Holocaust)

At War with Love

Jojo Rabbit

Kapò (Holocaust)

Perlasca: the Courage of a Just Man (Holocaust)

A Bag of Marbles

Where Hands Touch (War/Holocaust)

Naked Among Wolves (Holocaust)

Company of Heroes

From Hell to Victory

The Big Red One

Son of Saul (Holocaust)

U-Boot 96

Uprising

Downfall

A Bridge Too Far

Defiance

The Resistance Banker

Greyhound

My Honor Was Loyalty – Leibstandarte

Ghosts of War

Goodbye Children

Jonah Who Lived in the Whale

Atonement

The Sound of Music

Another Mother’s Son

Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

Into the White

Nancy Wake: Gestapo’s Most Wanted

Resistance (2020)

Lancaster Skies

POST WWII

Reunion

Operation Finale

The Truce

Sophie's Choice (Holocaust)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Denial

The Windermere Children

VIETNAM

Hamburger Hill

Good Morning, Vietnam

The Last Full Measure

Danger Close: the Battle of Long Tan

We Were Soldiers

Apocalypse Now

Full Metal Jacket

Platoon

The Deer Hunter

Da 5 Bloods

Tunnel Rats

Rescue Dawn

IRAQ

12 Strong

The Hurt Locker

Sand Castle

American Sniper

Jarhead

The Yellow Birds

OTHER

Triple Frontier

War Machine

Black Hawk Down

The Siege of Jadotville

TV SHOWS:

WWI

Birdsong (2 episodes)

WWII

Band of Brothers (10 episodes)

The Pacific (10 episodes)

Catch-22 (6 episodes)

Generation War (3 episodes)

Colditz 2005 (2 episodses)

The Liberator (4 episodes)

AU

The Man in the High Castle (4 seasons/40 episodes)

SS GB (5 episodes)

POST WWII

Close to the Enemy (7 episodes)

Restless (2 episodes)

IRAQ WAR

Generation Kill (7 episodes)

BOOKS:

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

La banalità del bene di Enrico Deaglio (for my italian fellas)

L'impostore di Giorgio Perlasca (same as before)

Reunion by Fred Uhlman

D-Day by Larry Collins

The May Beetles by Baba Schwartz

Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorehead

The Diary by Anne Frank

Lilac Girls: A Novel by Martha Hall Kelly

The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told by S. Dando-Collins

If This is a Man by Primo Levi

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

The Truce by Primo Levi

A Bag of Marbles by Joseph Joffo

Dunkirk by Robert Jackson

Dunkirk by Joshua Levine

Unbroken by Laura Hillembrand

Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose

The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters by Dick Winters and Cole Kingseed

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends by Edward Heffron, Robyn Post, and William Guarnere

Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II's "Band of Brothers" by Don Malarkey

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich by David Webster

Un anno sull'altipiano di Emilio Lussu (sadly this one is only in italian)

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoss

The Sergeant in the Snow by Mario Rigoni Stern

Shifty's War: The Authorized Biography of Sergeant Darrell "Shifty" Powers, the Legendary Sharpshooter from the Band of Brothers by Marcus Brotherton

Biggest Brother: The Life of Major Dick Winters, the Man Who Led the Band of Brothers by Larry Alexander

Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne by Martin King

A Company of Heroes: Personal Memories about the Real Band of Brothers and the Legacy They Left Us by Marcus Brotherton

The Combat Story of Ed Shames of Easy Company by Ian Gardner

Liberation by Imogen Kealey

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

How Easy Company Became a Band of Brothers by Chris Langlois

[winnix85]

He was thrown into a chair and beaten senseless. “I’ve killed better men than you,” Captain Speirs had cried, smashing his face with a rifle butt. One of Grant’s buddies had burst into the C.P. with a pistol in hand to finish him off, but four men grabbed him and held him back.

---- David Webster “Parachute Infantry:  An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich.”

[lorducista710155]

history of audiobooks : Parachute Infantry by David Kenyon Webster | History

Listen to Parachute Infantry new releases history of audiobooks on your iPhone, iPad, or Android. Get any BOOKS by David Kenyon Webster History FREE during your Free Trial

Written By: David Kenyon Webster Narrated By: Alan Sklar Publisher: Tantor Media Date: October 2014 Duration: 18 hours 1 minutes

[odds-to-endings]

it is 4:07 in the morning and I have finally finished transcribing quotes from “Our Mothers’ War” by Emily Yellin. I did not think to count how many tabs I had in the book but I have a hefty pile now removed and my brain is melting.

further editing will commence...later. when i can both think and type again.

HAPPY WEEKEND EVERYONE enjoy yourselves.

(up next: defying Vichy, France during WWII...and then maybe Donald Malarkey’s book which remains one of my favorites of the Easy Company publications. If you are looking for a book dealing with Easy Company in WWII and are looking for something in between Dick Winter’s highly regimented/structured (and very date/event) focused and David Kenyon Webster’s stream-of-consciousness-esque narration with a notable lack of definitive details, “Easy Company Soldier” is a great middle ground. It is at once both very factual in that he relays dates and events and specific facts around events, but also very personal in that he, in a way I find unusual of men recounting their own stories, is intensely and at times almost agonizingly honest in regards to the scope of emotion regarding those events..both in the moment, and decades after the fact.

If anyone is ever looking for me to from Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, i will likely do it but probably weep as I do. fair warning.

g’night, all. xx.

[worldwartwonursewannabe]

REST IN PEACE DAVID KENYON WEBSTER

rest in peace david kenyon webster, he ( supposedly ) died on september 9th, 1961 in santa monica, california. he was 39 years old, when he went on his boat, never to be seen again. webster was a private first class in e company , second battalionof the 506th PIR or the 101st airborne division in the second world war. webster got hit early in the war, making him miss bastogne and the battle of the bulge. he was in the battle of normandy and operation market garden. he was awarded quite a few medals and decoration, the bronze star, a purple heart, good conduct medal, the european-african- middle eastern campaign medal with an arrowhead and 4 service stars, the ww2 victory medal, presidential unit citation with one oak leaf cluster, combat infantryman badge, and parachutist badge with two jump stars. webster was a journalist for the wall street journal and los angeles daily news, he took up sailing and fishing in his later years, studying marine biology and oceanography, other than that, he wrote two books, " myth and maneater : the story of the shark ( 1972 ) " and " parachute infantry: an american paratrooper's memoir of d-day and the fall of the third reich (1994 ) " both published after his death. he was survived by a sister, a brother, his wife, and three children.

[wdbecker]

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper’s Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

Offering a remarkable snapshot of what it was like to enter Germany in the last days of World War II, Webster presents a vivid, varied cast of young paratroopers from all walks of life, and unforgettable glimpses of enemy soldiers and hapless civilians caught up in the melee. Parachute Infantry is at once harsh and moving, boisterous and tragic, and stands today as an unsurpassed chronicle of…

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

One highlight was meeting Ronald Speirs for the first time since the end of the war. Standing in yellow rain slickers on the Normandy coast, the two veterans, all smiles, embraced for photographs. Privately, Winters frowned on Speirs’ shooting of six German prisoners on D-Day, and felt his leadership style was based in part on the men’s fear of him. Yet Speirs, Winters felt, was a top-notch combat soldier and a fine officer, who led his men competently and always did what was asked of him, giving “110 percent to the company.”

~ Larry Alexander

“Above all, kill ’em! We can’t be dragging a lot of prisoners around with us at night. “You know where they are and what to do with them: the officers’ mess and billets and Company of infantry at St. Marie du Mont, the platoon on the gun batteries at St. Martin de Varreville, and all the others. “Go down there and get ’em and kill every last sonofabitching German you find.”

~ David Kenyon Webster (speech/orders that apparently an unnamed captain gave them before D-Day jump)

[uss-edsall]

Books that I need to get (as I have all the others involving these peeps): Conversations with Major Dick Winters: Life Lessons from the Commander of the Band of Brothers, by Cole C. Kingseed Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, by David K. Webster We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers, by Marcus Brotherton Airborne: The Combat Story of Ed Shames of Easy Company, by Ian Gardner One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick Battleground Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Combat Odyssey in K/3/5, by Sterling Mace Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, by Robert Leckie Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan, by Robert Leckie The March to Glory, by Robert Leckie The Battle for Iwo Jima, by Robert Leckie Conflict: The History Of The Korean War, 1950-1953, by Robert Leckie Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II, by Robert Leckie You'll Be Sor-ree!: A Guadalcanal Marine Remembers the Pacific War, by Sid Phillips Red Blood, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima, by Chuck Tatum

[sea-changed]

first third of 2024 in books

The Magnolia Palace, Fiona Davis

The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness, Jordan Goodman [astonishingly dull considering the story it was telling]

Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

The Samantha Books, Susan S. Adler [reread, of course]

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett

Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff

The Best War Ever: America and World War II, Michael C.C. Adams

The Fall of Valor, Charles R. Jackson

Derricks, James Barr

Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery [disappointingly pedestrian]

When the Angels Left the Old Country, Sacha Lamb

Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden

The Fraud, Zadie Smith [loved it. it had a very Life Mask feel to me, and I was trying to puzzle out why as I read it--I think it must be in the narrator's voice and its way of incorporating and narrativizing real-life events and figures]

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, David Kenyon Webster

The Fascination, Essie Fox

They're Going to Love You, Meg Howrey

The Best of Jane Austen Knits: 27 Regency-Inspired Designs, ed. Amy Clarke Moore

The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark [I was totally bowled over by this; the prose alone makes me want to read it about three more times in succession]

The Godwulf Manuscript, Robert B. Parker

The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, Peter Manseau

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

For some strange, unaccountable reason, the wearing of wool-knit caps in the 101st Airborne Division was apparently considered a crime more heinous than rape. If the general caught a man taking a break in one of these knitted affairs with stiff little visors, he stopped the problem and personally scolded the bewildered miscreant and his immediate superiors. British commandos might raid Dieppe in socklike caps and British parachutists wear red berets to Sicily, but we slept in our helmets and hid our wool-knit caps under their iron lids. This was a source of constant friction, with men continually trying to wear them and the officers, goaded from on high, on the lookout to snatch them off. Wool-knit caps became a command phobia of such proportions that the colonel had to devote a large portion of his firm talk to this tender subject. D-Day was tomorrow, and he was talking about wool-knit caps. The thought of it made me laugh. “Now, men,” the colonel said, rubbing his hand over his face and moving his overseas cap back and forth, “I don’t care what else you do, but for God’s sake, don’t let the general catch you in a wool-knit cap! Steal a tank, rob a German payroll—anything but a wool-knit cap. He caught one of you wearing one on the last jump and gave me hell for it. “Now, I don’t like to catch hell, and I know you don’t, so if you have to wear a wool-knit caps."

~ David Kenyon Webster

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Webster was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, thrown into an intimate and life-dependent relationship with ill-educated hillbillies, southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and other typical paratrooper enlisted men—in short, with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life—he just would not have known them. Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others. He was wounded in Holland, in October, 1944. He rejoined his squad in January, 1945, and later he recalled his feelings: “It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust. Listening to the chatter, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who has returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest.” He went on: “You felt like part of a big family. You are closer to these men than you will ever be to any civilians.”

~ Stephen E. Ambrose

[winnix85]

“The weather had turned damp again; it was a close, drizzly night that made me think of London. I longed for it very much, as I recalled the steaming, wild, wild bars and the girls waiting outside, one pound quick time, three pounds all night. It’s been a long time since I got drunk, I mused, wishing that I were back in Piccadilly.”

---- David Webster “Parachute Infantry:  An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich.”

********

“We had some money on us, we had our Zippo lighters, and when we ran into a broad, we flipped the lighter on, put it in her face, and she says, “Ten pounds, Yank.” So I said “Ten pounds! I come to save your ass, not buy it!” We called them Piccadilly Lilies. Oh boy. Don’t even ask about those broads.”

----William Guarnere “Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends”