What the bestsellers Flags of Our Fathers was to Iwo Jima and Duty to the mission of the Enola Gay, Honor Untarnished is to the World War II tour of duty of young graduate of a West Point. Whether it was fighting Rommel's fierce Afrika Korps hitting the beaches of Normandy on D Day, surviving the Battle of the Bulge, or just being in the next room during the infamous "slapping incident" of Blood-n-Guts General George Patton, Donald Bennett experienced the fiery crucible of World War II and survived to tell about it. As a recent graduate of West Point, First Lieutenant Bennett was given the charge of training inexperienced and scared recruits, and leading them into battle against the Axis forces. From orientation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma through the fiercest battles of the war right up to the liberation of the death camps and our complicit confrontation with the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe, Don Bennett, not yet thirty, preserved the honor of the corps, and the liberty of the free world. Lindbergh, Patton, Bradley, and Eisenhower are just names in a history book to most-but to Don Bennett they were personal acquaintances.

"Gabriel Temkin, an eighteen-year-old Jew, was living in Lodz, Poland, in September 1939 when the Germans invaded. Following their swift conquest of Poland, the Nazis unleashed a campaign of terror against the Polish Jews." "Facing Nazi persecution, Temkin and his young fiancee Hanna fled to the Soviet-controlled eastern part of Poland. (Temkin's entire family, who could not get out of Lodz, was killed during the Holocaust.) On June 22, 1941 German panzers rolled across Soviet borders. Three weeks later Temkin was drafted into the Red Army. Distrusted by the Soviets because he was a refugee, Temkin was assigned, along with other refugees, to a military labor battalion to dig antitank ditches. In July 1942, during the Wehrmacht's Stalingrad offensive, Temkin was captured by the Nazis and sent to a POW camp. The Nazis were rewarding prisoners with bread to betray the Jews among them, but Temkin was not turned in. He eventually escaped, now remembering fondly the courageous, ordinary Russian and Ukrainian villagers who risked their lives helping him - a fugitive POW - with food and shelter. When he was able to reenlist, as the result of a bureaucratic fluke Temkin signed up not as a laborer but as a soldier in the regular Red Army. In May 1943, joining the scout/reconnaissance platoon of a rifle regiment, he fought the Nazis across Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary, reaching Austria by the war's end in April 1945." "Temkin is one of the only known Polish Jews to have fought as a combat soldier in the Red Army. He was awarded the Medal of Valor and distinguished himself in battle on several other occasions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In January 1943, not long after his nineteenth birthday, Ralph Sirianni was drafted for active duty by the U.S. Army. Ordered to the European Theatre of Operations in February 1944, Sgt. Sirianni served as the right waist gunner on a B-17. On his seventh mission over Germany, the plane--severely damaged by German fighters--crashed near Wildeshausen. With shrapnel in his legs and shoulder, Sirianni bailed out, and he spent the following 15 months in the infamous Stalag Luft I prisoner of war camp. This memoir offers harrowing stories of combat, including detailed descriptions of each of Sirianni's combat missions; reveals the horrors of confinement and the despair of skin-of-the-teeth survival; and remembers camaraderie in the face of German abuse. Valuable for its vivid account of aerial warfare and imprisonment, this memoir is also a story of postwar reconciliation, both psychological and social. Appendices offer excerpts from Sirianni's POW log book and pilot George McFall's firsthand account of the ill-fated final mission.

" William R. Buster, born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, knew a soldier's combat experience and left a first hand account of it. He graduated from West Point in 1939, just in time to serve through one of the most crucial periods in national and world history. His story includes accounts of the incredible expansion, arming, and training of the US Army, as well as his experience in the great conflict itself, from North Africa and Sicily to the hedgerow country of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and on to Berlin. For his service, he received the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, and the French Croix de Guerre.

In 1943, 18-year-old Robert Ellis joined the elite U.S. Army Ski Troops of the 10th Mountain Division. This division has been called the most elite and publicized American military unit in World War II. While a member of the unit Ellis maintained a detailed battle diary and conducted extensive wartime correspondence. Upon their arrival in Italy, the U.S. Army Ski Troops played a major role in the defeat of the Germans in Italy. They also faced some of the bloodiest combat of the war; the 10th Mountain Division suffered the heaviest casualties relative to time-in-combat of any U.S. division in the Italian campaign. While the author details the exceptional service of the unit, he also explores the brutal reality of infantry service and reveals how the battles were falsely represented by the media.