Sixty Days in Combat: An Infantryman's Memoir of World War II in Europe

Dean Joy

dec. de 2007 · Vendido por Ballantine Books

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“The infantryman’s war is . . . without the slightest doubt the dirtiest, roughest job of them all.”

He went in as a military history buff, a virgin, and a teetotaler. He came out with a war bride, a taste for German beer, and intimate knowledge of one of the darkest parts of history. His name is Dean Joy, and this was his war.

For two months in 1945, Joy endured and survived the everyday deprivations and dangers of being a frontline infantryman. His amazingly detailed memoir, self-illustrated with numerous scenes Joy remembers from his time in Europe, brings back the sights, sounds, and smells of the experience as few books ever have. Here is the story of a young man who dreamed of flying fighter aircraft and instead was chosen to be cannon fodder in France and Germany . . . who witnessed the brutality of Nazis killing Allied medics by using the cross on their helmets as targets . . . and who narrowly escaped being wounded or killed in several “near miss” episodes, the last of which occurred on his last day of combat.

Sixty Days in Combat re-creates all the drama of the “dogface’s” fight, a time that changed one young man in a war that changed the world.

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Dean Joy served as a combat infantryman with Patton's Third Army in France, Germany, and Austria during World War II. In 1950 he received an MS degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado, and began his aerospace industry career as a helicopter flight test engineer and aerodynamicist at Hiller Helicopters in Palo Alto, California. His forty years in the defense industry included employment as a helicopter operations consultant for the French Ministry of Defense in Paris and Algeria, and as a systems analysis manager and senior advisor at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California. He and his wife live in Los Gatos, California.