BIOGRAPHY
Alex Kershaw
Born in York, England, Alex Kershaw attended University College, Oxford where he studied politics, philosophy and economics. He taught history before working as a journalist for several British newspapers, including The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times. He is the author of books on World War II and biographies of adventurous personalities. - Wikipedia
JUNE 6, 1944, 12:30 A.M.: The British troopship, the Empire Javelin, steamed steadily across the English Channel.
— from The Bedford Boys, 2003
Most acclaimed
The few
2006
This book tells the never-before-told story of the American pilots -- -idealists, adventurers, romantics -- -who joined the RAF before America entered the war and helped save Britain in its darkest hour. Eight young Americans joined Britain's Royal Air Force, defying their country's neutrality laws and risking their U.S. citizenship to fight side-by-side with England's finest pilots in the summer of 1940 -- over a year before America entered the war. Flying the lethal and elegant Spitfire, they became "knights of the air" and with minimal training but plenty of guts, they dueled the skilled and fearsome pilots of Germany's Luftwaffe. By October 1940, they had helped England win the greatest air battle in the history of aviation. Winston Churchill once said of all those who fought in the Battle of Britain, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." These daring Americans were the few among the "few."--From publisher description.
The Longest Winter
Overview: "It was a cold December morning in 1944, deep in the Ardennes forest of Belgium. Eighteen men of a small intelligence platoon commanded by twenty-year-old lieutenant Lyle Bouck were huddled in their foxholes, desperately trying to keep warm. Suddenly the early morning silence was broken by the roar of a huge artillery bombardment. Hitler had launched his bold and risky offensive against the Allies - his "last gamble" - and the American platoon was facing the main thrust of the entire German assault." "Vastly outnumbered, the platoon repulsed three German assaults in a fierce day-long battle to defend a strategically vital hill. Only when Bouck's men had run out of ammunition did they surrender." "But their long winter was just beginning." As POWs, Bouck's platoon experienced an ordeal far worse than combat - surviving in captivity with trigger-happy German guards, Allied bombing raids, and a starvation diet. While hundreds of other captured Americans in German POW camps were either killed or died of disease, the men of Bouck's platoon miraculously survived - all of them - and returned home after the war. More than thirty years later, when President Carter recognized the unit's "extraordinary heroism" and the U.S. Army approved combat medals for all eighteen men, they became America's most decorated platoon of World War II.
The Bedford Boys
2003
On June 6, 1944, nineteen boys from Bedford, Virginia--population 3,000--died in the first bloody minutes of D-Day when their landing craft dropped them in shallow water off Omaha Beach. They were part of the first wave of American soldiers to hit the sands of Normandy. Later that day, two more soldiers from the same small town died of gunshot wounds. Twenty-one sons of Bedford killed--no other town in America suffered a greater one-day loss. It is a story that one cannot easily forget--and one that the families of Bedford will never forget. It was, and still is, Bedford's longest day.The Bedford Boys is the intimate true story of these young men and their friends and families in Bedford. It portrays a neighborhood of soldiers before and during the war--from the girlfriends they left behind to the buddies they made in basic training, from anxious barracks in England to the bloody beaches of Normandy. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and relatives as well as on diaries and letters, Alex Kershaw's book focuses on several remarkable individuals and families to tell one of the most poignant stories of World War II--the story of one small American town that went to war and died on Omaha Beach.