Has Anyone...?

[fudgums]

Started reading "D-day" by Stephen Ambrose, I am not sure how I will like it but should be interesting. Just finished "We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories of Easy Company" by Marcus Brotherton. I really enjoyed that one and especially how Herbert Sobel's family describes how they felt about how Ambrose(and the series) portrayed their father.

Contemplating reading "With Wings Like Eagles" by Michael Korda or "Clash of Eagles" by Martin W. Bowman. Anyone read either of them?

[Soulyss]

Finished "Helmet For My Pillow" last month and really enjoyed it.  I posted this excerpt in another thread but I thought Leckie really had a way with language.


This bit is taken from the assault on the airfield at Peleliu.

I got up and made for the airfield. About twenty yards away was a burning tank.  Some of the enemy dead were inside.  The snipers hung in their nests like dolls stuffed in a Christmas stocking.  I turned to go, and as I did, nearly stepped on someone's hand.  "Excuse me," I began to say, but then I saw that it was an unattached, hand, or rather a detached one. It there alone - open, palm upwards, clean, capable, solitary.  I could not tear my eyes from it.  The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart.  A man has no faculty more human than his hand, none more beautiful nor expressive nor productive.  To see this hand lying alone, as though contemptuously cast aside, no longer a part of a man, no longer his help, to see war in all it's wantonness; it was to see the especially brutal savagery of our own technique of rending, and it was to see men at their eternal worst, turning upon one another, tearing on another, clawing at their own innards with the maniacal fury of the pride - possessed.

The hand saddened me and I offered it a respectful inclination of the head while recovering my balance and making a careful circle around it.

Here he witnessed a naval night engagement off the coast at Guadalcanal.

I think of Judgment Day. I think of Gotterdammerung; I think of the stars exploding, of the planets going off like fireworks; I think of a volcano; I think of a roaring and an energy unbelievable; I think , of holocaust; and again I think of a night reeling from a thousand scarlet slashes and I see the red eye of hell winking in her wounds -- I think of all these, and I cannot tell you what I have seen, the terrible spectacle I witnessed from that hillside.

The star shells rose, terrible and red.  Giant tracers flashed across the night in orange arches.  Sometimes we would duck, thinking they were coming at us, though they were miles away.

The sea seemed a sheet of polished obsidian on which the warships seemed to have been dropped and been immobilized, ventered amid concentric circles like shock waves that around a stone dropped in mud.

Our island trembled to the sound of their mighty voices. A pinpoint of light appears in the middle of the blackness; it grows and grows until it illuminates the entire world and we are bathed in pale and yellow light, and there comes a terrible, terrible rocking roar and there is a momentary clutching fear to feel Guadalcanal shift beneath us, to feel our Ridge quiver as though the great whale had been harpooned, as thou the iron had smacked into the wet flesh.

Some great ship had exploded.

[mbailey]

Started reading "D-day" by Stephen Ambrose, I am not sure how I will like it but should be interesting. Just finished "We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories of Easy Company" by Marcus Brotherton. I really enjoyed that one and especially how Herbert Sobel's family describes how they felt about how Ambrose(and the series) portrayed their father.

Contemplating reading "With Wings Like Eagles" by Michael Korda or "Clash of Eagles" by Martin W. Bowman. Anyone read either of them?

Kordas With Wings like Eagles was an awesome book!! It not only has alot of the actual fighting but a lot of backround on the "behind the scenes" logistics that came along with the BOB Definatly not a waste buying that book!!

Fud, Ill send u my copy if ya send it back, my son wants to read it also. It would prolly be less expensive than buying it.  Let me know

Im about 265 pgs into Donald L Millers Masters of the Air...Americas bomber boys who fought the air war against Nazi Germany......good so far

<S>

Mbailey

[fudgums]

Kordas With Wings like Eagles was an awesome book!! It not only has alot of the actual fighting but a lot of backround on the "behind the scenes" logistics that came along with the BOB Definatly not a waste buying that book!!

Fud, Ill send u my copy if ya send it back, my son wants to read it also. It would prolly be less expensive than buying it.  Let me know

Im about 265 pgs into Donald L Millers Masters of the Air...Americas bomber boys who fought the air war against Nazi Germany......good so far

<S>

Mbailey

Let your son read it bailey, I have no idea how long it may take me.

Sounds like the a good one to read.

[OSU]

Started reading "D-day" by Stephen Ambrose, I am not sure how I will like it but should be interesting. Just finished "We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories of Easy Company" by Marcus Brotherton. I really enjoyed that one and especially how Herbert Sobel's family describes how they felt about how Ambrose(and the series) portrayed their father.

Contemplating reading "With Wings Like Eagles" by Michael Korda or "Clash of Eagles" by Martin W. Bowman. Anyone read either of them?

D-Day was a very good book. I enjoyed all of it. Ambrose goes into great detail all the aspect of the invasion, the Americans, British, and Canadians. He even talks extensively about the Navy and USAAF and their role in the invasion. I swear those destroyer captains were crazy to take their ships in that close. Another book about June 6, 1944 is Pegasus Bridge, also by Stephen Ambrose. This is the story of a group of British troops who captured Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, and in my opinion, one of the best accounts of small unit actions in all of WWII.