Customer Reviews

American Warriors: Pictorial History of the American Paratroopers Prior to Normandy

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An absolute specialists book. You have to know the story to really understand the book. The book handles the attack of the 82nd and the 101st Airborne Divisions on Normandy. The story is mainly told by pictures with very small pieces of text. It starts out with the equipment, the units involved and finally the action itself. Especially people who are interested in the 101st Airborne Division will enjoy this book very much. Its also a real treat if you are interested in new pictures on the subject. Most of them come from private collections and have never been shown before. If you order this book order it in combination with "At the Point of No Return : Pictorial History of the American Paratroopers in the Invasion of Normandy". It's from the same writer and together they are a must for the airborne specialist

I purchased this book along with "At the Point of No Return" and I was very disappointed.
For those not familiar, "American Warriors" is a pictorial history of the US paratroopers in preparation for the invasion of Normandy and "At the Point of No Return" is a pictorial history of the US paratroopers during the invasion. They are meant to compliment each other. In examining both books, it didn't take long for me to figure out that this set was designed to maximize profits for the publisher/author, taking from us readers as much of our hard earned money as possible.
I believe anyone with integrity would have published these books as one complete volume instead of two. This becomes apparent when one sees all of the filler material used to maximize the pages of each volume. For example, it is common to see multiple images of the same scene, just taken at a different angle by the war photographer. These replicated images show nothing more and explain nothing more to the reader. There is no reason to include them other than to fill the pages of the book.
In "American Warriors" the author goes even further to fill out the book by including a dozen full page photos of the same reenactors in paratrooper garb, some taken in black and white to give the appearance of being authentic. I did not buy the book to look at photos of reenactors. I bought the book to see the real thing. I did however like seeing the color examples of items from the author's collection, but it is unclear when examining some of these photos what items are part of an original identified grouping, and what items have been added by the author to complete the impression.
The author explains that his English is poor and admits that the English captions are not what they should be. I am sympathetic to this but with a price tag of $100 for the two volumes, the author should have hired an English editor to correct his sentence structure. It wouldn't have taken long due to the minimal text. Because of the repetition, the author finds little need to add captions to a large portion of the photographs and on others the captions are very short.
Another frustrating aspect of this book is that the author will show a photo of a group of paratroopers and add a caption such as "Note: Compass pouch worn on suspenders." but guess what? The photo is so small on the page that it is impossible to make out this detail. Numerous times I felt like I was reading a "Where's Waldo?" book, trying to find the piece of equipment the author mentioned only to be frustrated by the small, blurry images depicted.
All in all, this is a poorly designed and poorly written book of marginal quality. It does not deserve the price tag that is on it. For all of you true scholars out there, this is fair warning.

Michel DeTrez has had the opportunity to meet lots of airborne veterans. He shares the knowledge and pictures in this wonderful book. As allways a pleasure to watch and read about this greatest generation.