Currahee A Screaming Eagle at Normandy. Donald R. Burgett is a real Screaming Eagle, who jumped with that famed division at Normandy and survived to tell the tale. His memoir vividly portrays the tragic chaos of war: the blood and sweat, the glory and tears of one of the greatest battles of all time. Currahee (this was the battle cry and motto of his regiment) begins with jump training and explodes in drama as they are parachuted into Normandy with orders to take and hold the high ground behind the beaches. It contains unforgettable incidents. The author's almost dispassionate tone goes a...

Following their epic combat in Normandy (the paratroopers were finally pulled out of the line on June 30, 1944, after being in virtually constant combat since their night drop in the early morning of June 6) the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division returned to battle on Sept. 17, 1944 as part of Field Marshal Montgomery's audacious plan to seize a Rhine River bridgehead and help bring the war against Germany to a swift conclusion. The plan was simple: A three airborne division air assault would secure key bridge sites along the sixty-mile road to the Rhine River town of Arnhem...

The Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division had just finished the battle for the bridge too far, Field Marshal Montgomery's ill-fated Operation Market Garden. As Christmas 1944 approached, the division was settling in for some hard earned rest and recuperation. Despite its failure to hold the Rhine River bridgehead at Arnhem a few weeks earlier, Eisenhower's Allied juggernaut appeared unstoppable. Then, Hitler ordered a massive Nazi counterattack through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest. The overwhelming armor-heavy Wehrmacht forces cut through the thinly-manned Allied...

Donald R. Burgett and the rest of the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne had fought long and hard since the Normandy invasion. They fought through seventy-two days of continuous combat in Holland, and thirty days of frozen hell in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. War weary, tired, and bloodied, Burgett and other Screaming Eagles of A Company were heading for the last battle, the drive that would carry them through Alsace, Germany's Ruhr Valley, the Rhineland, Austria, and the end of the war in Europe. The last push across Germany did not hold the full-scale fanatic resistance the U.S....