For those who loved Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers and E.B.
Sledge's With the Old Breed. Drawing on toughness and skills forged in
hardscrabble Depression-era North Carolina, Bronze Star recipient and
expert B.A.R. rifleman Harold Frank invades Normandy, fights Germans,
and endures a grueling stint in a German POW camp where he witnesses the
fire-bombing of Dresden.
From D-Day to Dresden with a Crack Shot B.A.R. Rifleman
D-Day 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his
battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off
and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As
a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle,
Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin
Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and
wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner
and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first
in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work
camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was
exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a
rapidly advancing Russian military--and the danger of thousands of
Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden.
Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with
Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank's
journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the
D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S.
where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with
the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building
a new life--a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience
and his faithful service in America's hard-fought war against Nazi
aggression.
