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

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Book Review: Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
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This is perhaps the best-written book I have read about the men in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. These men are recognized as the soldiers from the HBO series Band of Brothers. Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper’s Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich by David Kenyon Webster (2008-03-01) is written by David Kenyon Webster, an original Taccoa man. Webster was a very gifted writer who has brought his part of the story to life.


Webster was part of Easy Company from the beginning of the U.S. involvement to the end of WWII except while he was recovering while Easy Company was surrounded in Bastogne.

This 379-page book focused only on the combat operations of Easy Company. He did not discuss the training, which has been a focus of other books nor does he describe what happened after the war finished. The book is arranged into the following sections:

  • The Jump into Normandy
  • The Windmills Were Wonderful
  • Our Home Was Secure
  • Hitler’s Champagne
  • After the Fighting
  • Winding Down
  • Letters Home

Webster’s writing was quite rich and full of detail. He must have kept amazing notes of his experiences. When Webster enlisted into the paratroopers, he did so as a Harvard literature major. As someone who was learning to write as an observer, he was keenly aware of his environment and what transpired around him. This is reflected in his writing.

It is obvious throughout the book that Webster did not care for the bureaucracy of the Army nor did he care for many of the officers with whom he interacted.

Webster was not afraid to admit he was scared and found relief when he was wounded in the Netherlands. Unfortunately or fortunately, this wound kept him out of Bastogne. However, members of his company criticized him when he did not join the company ahead of his recovery. This was also reflected in the Band of Brother series. He had to regain the trust and respect of his comrades, which he did in Hagenau.

While it appears, Webster was a competent soldier during combat, when combat ceased he became more disruptive. Alcohol fuel his rebellious nature. When combat ceased, Webster wanted nothing more to do with the Army. This definitely showed up in his writing.

I really appreciated the collection of letters he had sent home. They were all quite detailed and frank. He certainly did not pull any punches as he expressed himself.

In light of our current environment, I thought I would share this with you. Webster was quite reflective about why we were fighting the Nazis. He wrote,

Wherever a P.W. enclosure or slave-labor lager had been liberated, the ragged, hungry inmates poured onto the highway that a maniac had built to enslave them and their children and their children’s children. “Deutschland kaput!” they cried to us. No matter how tattered their clothes, the freed men had all taken pains to fashion tiny ornaments of their national colors for their buttonholes. They wore them as proudly as a medal for bravery: the red star of Russian; the tricolor of France; red and green for Italy; blue, white, and gold for Yugoslavia. There were Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Belgians, Dutch, Magyars, Slovenes, Lithuanians, and many others, all former slave laborers or prisoners of war.

I was glad, when I saw them, that I had come back to the outfit and gone into Germany, for the trip, with its views of the lagers and prison camps, had finally convinced me of the need to drive the Germans from the face of Europe. How could a civilized nation run concentration camps and murder millions—and still fight for that way of life? How could a man fight for a nation that broke up millions of families, that put old women and little children to work in slave-labor lagers? The Third Reich was a cancer on the face of Western man. I was glad now that I played a part, however small, in helping to remove that cancer. (p.235)

Today, I heard the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security defend the separation of families because they were just enforcing the laws. Guess what? WWII occurred in part because “good people” were just enforcing the laws. There are legal laws and morals laws. Our history is littered with legal laws that were not just, right, or moral. I prefer when my nation is a moral one.

We need to learn from our past history. By reading Band of Brothers and other books written by the men of Easy Company, I get a sense of what it took to stand up to such tyranny. It also provides a glimpse into why they had to fight in the first place. The question is how can we prevent the need to fight on this scale.

If you are interested in Easy Company of the Band of Brothers series, I would strongly recommend that you read Parachute Infantry. It shares quite a bit of descriptive detail of what it was to be fighting in these major campaigns.

Additional Reading

File:Pfc david webster 506.jpg. (2018, June 1). Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. Retrieved 19:40, June 24, 2018 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Pfc_david_webster_506.jpg&oldid=304219132.

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