Fighting with the Screaming Eagles: with the 101st Airborne from Normandy to Bastogne

Military Review,  July-August, 2003  by Ted J. Behncke, Sr.

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Robert M. Bowen, Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2001, 256 pages, $29.95.

In 1943 Robert Bowen did what most patriotic Americans were doing--he enlisted in the Army to serve his country. Like many young men, he served faithfully until the war's end, wanting nothing more than to return home alive. Bowen's war experiences changed him forever physically and psychologically, yet in a pattern commonly seen among veterans of that era, he quietly slipped back into the fabric of postwar America. In a nation full of veterans, all with personal, private war stories, Bowen did not feel his experiences were all that unique. Some might be compelled to agree with Bowen if they did not know he had served with the 101st Airborne Division in Normandy, in the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden, and in the defense of Bastogne. Fortunately, 50 years of reflection and a box full of saved wartime letters changed his opinion and now he tells his story.

In Fighting with the Screaming Eagles, Bowen tells the familiar story of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II from the less familiar perspective of glider components. Glider troops were an experimental wartime concept. Pilots endured incredible hazards in peacetime training and suffered tremendous casualties in combat employment. They fought stubbornly in the well-known battles of the 101st Airborne Division across Europe but were routinely overlooked in favor of their more glamorous brothers in the airborne regiments. Bowen dispels the unfair second-class stigma attached to glider troops and successfully tells their story.

Bowen also does several other things well in this work. His version of history uniquely captures the thoughts and emotions of a soldier from the 1940s; his narrative reads like a diary instead of a history. His accounts are largely drawn from his own wartime letters, dutifully saved by his wife. The letters, which provide first-hand accounts written within hours of each event, are a treasure of facts and emotions not subject to memories 50 years faded. They are, quite simply, a lime capsule of the emotional culture of the period.

Bowen shares several perspectives about combat that are useful and purposeful to the student of warfare. He adroitly identifies that all combat is an individual experience. This is the reason why participants in the same battle, often only a few feet away from one another, recall the same event differently. Also, Bowen points out that just being a survivor in war is an achievement. His amazing story, from historic pitched battles to prisoner-of-war experience, easily supports that testament.

I highly recommend Bowen's book for several reasons: it is good recreational reading for the historical student; it is a good historical reference of World War II glider troops; and it is an excellent resource for understanding the period experiences of the common infantry soldier.

MAJ Ted J. Behncke, Sr., USA, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

COPYRIGHT 2003 U.S. Army CGSC
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