Boys, Just Boys: Biography of a WWII Infantry Regiment by Brian Welke – Book Discussion with author

Boys, Just Boys relates the story of the 423rd regiment of the 106th Infantry Division during and after the Battle of the Bulge through the voices of the men who experienced it. Boys, Just Boys draws upon the private accounts that some veterans wrote. Years later, the author, Kurt Vonnegut, who was among the POWs housed in Dresden’s slaughterhouse and forced to collect the dead from the cellars of the city after the Allied fire bombing, wrote the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Through eyewitness recollections of his fellow POWs, as well as through records left with Vonnegut’s family, Boys, Just Boys reconstructs the whole brutal chain of events. Boys, Just Boys draws entirely upon the author’s personal interviews with surviving veterans of the 423rd and their families, as well as upon their letters and memoirs, their obituaries, and US Army morning reports; each individual soldier in the story is unforgettable.  

We will discuss the book with author Brian Welke.