All the Way to Berlin
A Paratrooper at War in Europe
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as “Maggie” to his fellow paratroopers, joined the 82d Airborne Division, his new “home” for the duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountains outside Naples.
In October 1943, when most of the 82d departed Italy to prepare for the D-Day invasion of France, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, the Fifth Army commander, requested that the division’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Maggie’s outfit, stay behind for a daring new operation that would outflank the Nazis’ stubborn defensive lines and open the road to Rome. On 22 January 1944, Megellas and the rest of the 504th landed across the beach at Anzio. Following initial success, Fifth Army’s amphibious assault, Operation Shingle, bogged down in the face of heavy German counterattacks that threatened to drive the Allies into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Anzio turned into a fiasco, one of the bloodiest Allied operations of the war. Not until April were the remnants of the regiment withdrawn and shipped to England to recover, reorganize, refit, and train for their next mission.
In September, Megellas parachuted into Holland along with the rest of the 82d Airborne as part of another star-crossed mission, Field Marshal Montgomery’s vainglorious Operation Market Garden. Months of hard combat in Holland were followed by the Battle of the Bulge, and the long hard road across Germany to Berlin.
Megellas was the most decorated officer of the 82d Airborne Division and saw more action during the war than most. Yet All the Way to Berlin is more than just Maggie’s World War II memoir. Throughout his narrative, he skillfully interweaves stories of the other paratroopers of H Company, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The result is a remarkable account of men at war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What World War II Lieutenant Megellas's memoir lacks in narrative force and elegance it makes up for in its unvarnished contribution to the historical record. Megellas was a senior at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis. during the Pearl Harbor attack; barely six months later, he had reported for duty and soon was enlisted in the storied 82nd Airborne Division. Landing in Italy on the eve of the Anzio invasion in the fall of 1943 and fighting his way through the mountainous Italian terrain, Megellas was wounded and then hospitalized ("I'm very fortunate to be alive," he wrote in a letter home."I'm not certain as to how many Germans I killed but in my mind the minimum is at least 10"). In September 1944, Megellas's unit parachuted into Holland to take part in the bloody Operation Market Garden, in which the Allies lost more men than they would during the Normandy invasion. Megellas's description of his unit crossing the Waal River in rowboats under point-blank German fire is harrowing; that the soldiers reached the far shore and took the German positions is nothing short of a miracle. From there, Megellas and his men proceeded into the thick of the Battle of the Bulge and onward to the Rhine, fighting as they made their way toward Germany. Just as revealing as the battle accounts are Megellas's stories of the numbing boredom that soldiers in rear positions waiting for orders to the next engagement experienced, as well as the countless small acts of bravery and the daily hardships. Foregoing the romanticized hero-worship of some wartime accounts, Megellas recalls his two years of duty in the 20th century's deadliest war with admirable restraint.
