The Last of the 357th Infantry

by Mark Hager

• ISBN13: 9781684512454
• ISBN10: 168451245X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2022-05-31
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

For those who loved Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers and E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. Drawing on toughness and skills forged in hardscrabble Depression-era North Carolina, Bronze Star recipient and expert B.A.R. rifleman Harold Frank invades Normandy, fights Germans, and endures a grueling stint in a German POW camp where he witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden.

From D-Day to Dresden with a Crack Shot B.A.R. Rifleman

D-Day 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle, Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a rapidly advancing Russian military—and the danger of thousands of Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden.

Historian Mark Hager builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Harold Frank, sharing the intimate and heart-pounding account of Frank’s journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.

Author Biography

Mark Hager is a historian, teacher, and award-winning documentary filmmaker based in North Carolina. Hagar’s interest in living history was sparked by a childhood in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where he grew up near a military base surrounded by military veterans, whose stories fascinated him. He began recording veteran memoirs among his own family, including those of an uncle who was a WW II Bronze Star veteran of the North Africa and Italy Campaign, and a cousin who served on the USS Pennsylvania during the Pearl Harbor attack and then fought across the Pacific. Hagar joined the U.S. Army himself where he served as a field artillery surveyor. He was stationed in Germany during the Cold War and observed the evils of communism firsthand through barbed wire, concrete walls, and Soviet propaganda. Later during master’s studies at UNC Greensboro, Hagar became engrossed in public history, and began conducting interviews and documenting local history, including veteran stories. Hagar went on to a career in teaching and filmmaking. He coproduced Tele award-winning The Border States of America, a comprehensive documentary that paints a picture of the U.S.-Mexico Border through the eyes of sheriffs, ranchers, and residents in each border county. He is also coproducer of documentary The Last Gathering - The 75th Anniversary of D Day, which led him to the story of Harold Frank, the last of the 357th Infantry, whose early life was filled with the struggles of the Great Depression and the intense action and horror of WW II, but also a life rife with lessons of resilience, rugged individualism, and faith. Hagar currently serves as president of the Forks of the Yadkin and Davie County Cultural History Museum in Mocksville, North Carolina.