"All hell broke loose and we met the enemy head on".

books:

	• The Battered Bastards of Bastogne: The 101st Airborne and the Battle of the Bulge, December 19,1944-January ... George Koskimaki Presidio Press, 2007 - 560 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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"All hell broke loose and we met the enemy head on".

PFC Donald J. Rich "The bazooka section had not set up yet when someone yelled' There comes a German tank!' I grabbed my bazooka and told one man to come with me. We ran up the street and into a house. I told the man with me to take the bazooka and stay at a window. I went into the next room to watch and told him to wait till the tank went by and then fire at it. He must have stuck his head up before the tank went by because the tanker fired into the house and blew a hole about three or four feet in diameter. I went rolling across the floor. I jumped up to see how my buddy made out. He came staggering out of the room. I rushed him to the medics. I never knew if he had serious wounds or if he made it. I ran back to the house to retrieve the bazooka. It was bent, with the barrel opening sealed. Someone else got that tank father on."
George E. Koskimaki, Division Signals Company, 101st Airborne. continues with his awesome series on the actions of the 101st through their only words. His research and interviews with 530 airborne soldiers of the Sceaming Eagles who fought at Bastogne makes for a unforgetable and amazing work!
I salute you George. This is a great and new "classic". A must read for World War Two historians and readers.

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Chaos at Bastogne

This third book in Koskimaki's series relating the personal experiences of the men of the 101st Airborne Division continues with the same strong style of his previous books. The main interest in these books is that Koskimaki drew on the personal reminiscences and action reports of the men who were there. It gives a great sense of just how chaotic the battle would have been for the troops.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the "worms eye" view of the battle for Bastogne and learned from the book, I do have a couple of caveats. First, this book is not for people who are not familiar with the battle as the connecting narrative between the personal accounts is weak and the author sometimes drops some very interesting and important threads. Second, unlike the previous two books where Koskimaki contributes a lot of his own accounts to the mix, he shows up very little in this one which leaves a slightly clinical touch to the book.

Those two reservations aside, I highly recommend this and the other two books by Koskimaki about the 101st Airborne during World War II. They provide a much different view than people get from the very good narrative found in "Band of Brothers."

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