Operation VARSITY was the largest single-day airborne drop in history, and Four Hours of Fury tells the story. I've read about Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the war in the Pacific, but hadn't ever heard of this operation which was the first push into Nazi Germany, signalling the end of WWII. Fenelon does an amazing job; facts and maps abound, but the focus on the combatants (enlisted and officers on both sides of the battle) keeps the story humanized. He has an amazing knack to toss in a sentence that seems amusing or light-hearted at first, but after more thought is covering the horrors of war. "Instructors reminded them that on an actual jump, if they didn't feel the opening shock of their chute by 4,000, they had the rest of their lives to deploy their reserve." The last sentence is flat-out heart-wrenching, capturing what every wife must have felt when getting a death notice: "There would be no fifth wedding anniversary celebration." Well-written, informative, and hard to put down—not a combination of traits I often ascribe to a history book, but they apply to Four Hours of Fury in spades.
Three months before they dropped into Germany, the troopers of the 17th Airborne entered combat for the first time in a manner entirely different from how they'd been trained.
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