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"Amighty God, we kneel to Thee and ask to be the instrument of Thy fury in smiting the evil forces that have visited death, misery, and debasement on the people of the earth.... Be with us, God, when we leap from our planes into the dark abyss and descend in parachutes into the midst of enemy fire. Give us iron will and stark courage as we spring from the harnesses of our parachutes to seize arms for battle. The legions of evil are many, Father; grace our arms to meet and defeat them in Thy name and in the name of the freedom and dignity of man...."

This is the story of E ("Easy") Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, told mostly in the words of the men who served in the company. Ambrose did the world a service by capturing these words and stories in the 1990s when many of the company's veterans were still alive (all but one are now deceased). Starting with two years of training, the narrative follows the company chronologically through the first action the men saw as they parachuted into France on D-Day (76 years ago today), fought in Holland and Belgium, then moved onto Germany and Austria towards the end of the war in Europe. Ambrose captures not only the historical details of the battles but also the personalities of the individual soldiers and the camaraderie that grew amongst them, surviving and thriving well after the war as they moved on to their individual civilian lives and careers. The book isn't poetic - despite the quote above, which was taken from a prayer given at a memorial service for the soldiers who died during the invasion of Normandy, and the title of the book which is taken from Shakespeare's Henry V - and at times it is even clunky, with the author occasionally pausing to insert his own opinion or pat himself on the back. The character assassinations of two officers could have been handled a bit more gracefully, but maybe that is to be expected with first-hand accounts. As history this book will be remembered as an indispensable first-hand account of an elite group of ground-level, front-line soldiers who fought in many of WWII's most notable conflicts on the European front.