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  • Published: 15 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9780891418399
  • Imprint: Ballantine
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Sixty Days in Combat

An Infantryman's Memoir of World War II in Europe



An Infantryman's Memoir of World War II in Europe

“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.

  • Published: 15 March 2004
  • ISBN: 9780891418399
  • Imprint: Ballantine
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

Dean Joy

Dean P. 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 for thirty years, from
1961 until his retirement in 1991, as systems analysis
manager and senior advisor at Lockheed Missiles & Space
Company in Sunnyvale, California. He and his wife life in
Los Gatos, California.