Dick Winters, the CO of Easy Company, whose exploits in Europe during World War II formed the basis for Stephen Ambrose’s book “Band of Brothers” (and later the HBO miniseries of the same name, Damian Lewis playing Winters), has published his war memoirs. Apparently this is actually old news, but I just found out about it and thought I’d share.

My Amazon search also revealed another set of memoirs — Parachute Infantry : An American Paratrooper’s Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich co-written by David Kenyon Webster and Stephen Ambrose (although Webster would’ve been dead for decades by the time Ambrose got the material, so I don’t know why he’s getting co-credit). Webster, a Harvard English Lit major, joined the paratroopers and was portrayed by Eion Bailey in the HBO miniseries. If memory serves, Webster went to sea in the 60’s to research a book on sharks and was never seen again.

One of my favorite WW II movies is HBO’s “The Gathering Storm.” Okay, okay, so it’s actually a pre-World War II movie as it isn’t until the end that Poland gets blitzkrieged. The movie follows Albert Finney as Winston Churchill, a disgraced member of the British Parliment, as he struggles to regain the glory of past years. Various government officers, aware and wary of German rearmament, try to alert the British people — through Churchill — of the growing threat to the east, but most British politicians, tired of the last war, afraid of the next, and feeling guilty over the punishing Treaty of Versailles, are too willing to give Germany a pass. Churchill, of course, won’t make this easy for them, garnering enemies within his own government, while across the Channel, Germany gathers her forces.