ON TIME ON TARGET - The World War 2 Memoirs of a Paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne by McKenzie, John

Presidio, 2000, US first edition, HARD BOUND W/DJ, VG/VG condition, 6x9, xii, 240 pages, illus & maps.-------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a detailed and well written memoir by an enlisted soldier who fought with the 456th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion, a part of the 505th Parachute Regimental Combat Team. He was often employed as a foreword artillery observer, and saw extensive combat at Normandy, Arnhem, Battle of the Bulge, Siegfried Line, Huertgen Forest, the Rhine and on to Berlin. The “All Americans” of the 82d Airborne Division participated in some of the toughest fighting of World War II. As a teenager, John McKenzie joined the division shortly before the Normandy Invasion. He was one of many green, unblooded replacements drawn from the holding depots in England to help fill out the 82d’s ranks, which had been badly depleted by their losses in Sicily and Italy.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It didn't take long for Private McKenzie to turn into a hardened combat veteran as the paratroopers were used as shock troops, leading the way in Allied attempts to break out from the hedgerow country of Normandy. Finally, after being withdrawn from combat in mid-July 1944 McKenzie and his fellow paratroopers were next called on to air-assault into Holland as part of Field Marshal Montgomery’s ill-fated Operation Market Garden (immortalized in the Cornelius Ryan book A Bridge Too Far). In mid-November, the 82d was finally relieved from the frontlines after two months of virtually continuous combat.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Their respite proved short-lived as Allied strategic planning was thrown into chaos by the massive, mid-December Nazi counterattack that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.Throughout On Time, On Target, the author’s descriptions of the life-and-death struggle of frontline combat are models of clarity and drama. His book is a fitting tribute to all of the All Americans, men of the “greatest generation” who gave so much in World War II.