WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., May 14, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- In the spring of 1944, 170,000 Army students were sent from colleges and universities to units destined, after D Day, for front line combat in Europe. William B. Bache has written a memoir prompted by that under publicized event. On the Road to Innsbruck and Back (now available through 1stBooks) puts his combat experience in its proper wartime context.
Bache chronicles his wartime experiences from 1942 to 1946 in 16 short stories. The first two stories deal with his precombat life. The next eight stories concern his life as a scout sniper and as a jeep driver in a regimental intelligence and reconnaissance platoon. The title story recounts his being shot four times by small arms fire, saving himself from being murdered by one of his captors, and then escaping to safety. The final four stories relate his post war hospital experience and then his introduction to post war civilian life.
Bache "writes from the perspective of a private, an ordinary dogface. His is one of the very few memoirs by an enlisted man about infantry combat. It is the only war memoir presented as a series of short stories, each with its title, its subject, its theme. Think of him as being a witness to the horrors of World War II." There is nothing glamorous or noble about infantry life. The other branches of the service may have these glories and these virtues. The infantry has none, the author writes.
Bache attended Cornell University and Penn State University. After receiving his doctorate from Penn State, he taught English at Purdue University for 40 years. The last surviving founder of Modern Fiction Studies, he has published more than 150 articles, essays notes, poems, reviews and stories. He also has written three books on Shakespeare: "Measure for Measure" as Dialectical Art; Design and Closure in Shakespeare's Major Plays; and Shakespeare's Deliberate Art. Bache has also received numerous teaching awards.
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