Combat Jump: The Young Men Who Led the Assault into For

By the first light on D-day, July 10, 1943, it looked as if their mission to hold the beaches of Sicily for General Eisenhower's landing forces might fail. Inexperienced pilots, lost or blown off course, dropped 80 percent of the troopers miles from their targets. Just a few hundred men -- of 3,400 -- landed near their objective, and soon they discovered that the Germans had tanks. The lightly armed paratroopers, with their rifles and hand grenades, were not equipped to take on the forty-ton panzers. But against all odds, they did -- and without Sicily, there might have been no airborne invasion of France in June 1944.

With Combat Jump, Ed Ruggero has written the definitive account of the extraordinary contributions these young men made when their country called them to war.