The Last of the 357th Infantry

Harold Frank's WWII Story of Faith and Courage

Mark Hager

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781684512454
• eBook ISBN:
  9781684512850
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

For those who loved Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers andE.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Drawing on toughness and skills forged in hardscrabble Depression-era North Carolina, Bronze Star recipient and expert B.A.R. rifleman Harold Frank invades Normandy, fights Germans, and endures a grueling stint in a German POW camp where he witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden. From D-Day to Dresden with a Crack Shot B.A.R. Rifleman D-Day 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle, Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a rapidly advancing Russian military—and the danger of thousands of Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden. Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank's journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young manHarold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America's hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Maps of Normandy
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Construction of a Man
• Chapter 2: “Save Everything but the Squeal”
• Chapter 3: The Art of Turtle Meat
• Chapter 4: Hard Times in the Cotton Patch: Christmas 1935
• Chapter 5: Hunting with Uncle Pharris
• Chapter 6: Faith, Sports, Walter Winchell, and That Damn T-Model
• Chapter 7: Harold Is Drafted into the Army
• Chapter 8: One Last Visit and Staff Sergeant Frisco
• Chapter 9: PFC Esworthy and Joe Lewis: Harold Becomes a Cook!
• Chapter 10: D-Day to Gourbesville: Rendezvous with the 357th Infantry
• Chapter 11: Holding the Peninsula: “Yeah, It Doesn’t Burn as Bad Now”
• Chapter 12: “Now We’re Going to See What Tough Really Is!”
• Chapter 13: Poetic Justice
• Chapter 14: Train to Stalag IV B
• Chapter 15: Karl the German Supervisor
• Chapter 16: Slingshot
• Chapter 17: Bombing of Dresden
• Chapter 18: The March of Death: Evacuation and Escape Attempt
• Chapter 19: General Eisenhower and Lucky Strikes
• Chapter 20: Coming Home
• Chapter 21: The Love of His Life: “Hey, Red!”
• Chapter 22: Thanks for the Memories
• Chapter 23: A Day to Remember
• Chapter 24: Until We Meet Again: Soaring Valor
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright