Dying Hard
Company B, 39th Infantry Regiment, 9th US Infantry Division in WWII
French L. MacLean Schiffer Books, 2024, 360 pages
Book Review published on: December 8, 2025
In the twenty-first century, the U.S. military says it trains to fight and win in large-scale combat operations against a peer adversary. While today’s military leaders have faced combat, none have experienced large-scale, peer-to-peer battles like those who fought in World War II—making Dying Hard: Company B, 39th Infantry Regiment, 9th US Infantry Division in WWII an essential study. Dying Hard brings home to the reader the type of fortitude, resilience, and leadership necessary to fight and win in sustained high intensity combat against a skilled enemy who has similar or superior technology and is equally determined to win in battle. The men of B Company, 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division had those qualities in abundance as author French MacLean describes in fascinating and riveting detail.
MacLean, a seasoned combat officer and military historian, brings over a decade of meticulous research and personal connection to B Company, vividly capturing their daily struggles and heroism. Two things set Dying Hard apart. One is MacLean’s use of previously unpublished letters and reports, offering readers a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the daily lives and challenges facing B Company’s soldiers. The second is the subject. This is the only book on the U.S. Army in World War II that focuses on a single ordinary infantry company. B Company is not an elite unit, not on a special mission, but just an infantry company; arguably, it is representative of the over six hundred regular infantry companies that were organized by the U.S. Army to fight World War II, following orders and trying to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible.
Dying Hard describes in unvarnished detail the drudgery, the misery, and most importantly, the lethality of the close combat fight against a skilled opponent. Approximately 180 men made up the authorized strength of B Company and from 1943 to 1945, the company sustained 813 casualties, including eighty-eight killed in action. The company was in the middle of the toughest fights in the European theater: North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, the Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and crossing the Rhine under fire on the Remagen Bridge. Hawk DiRisio, the mess sergeant, described crossing the Rhine:
When crossing the bridge, the enemy shells ripped over and under our kitchen truck. When a shell hit the girders, it was like lightning had struck. The driver had to be careful he didn’t run the wheels into the open holes in the bridge’s floor. When we got to the end, we found … a jeep burning like an inferno, a direct hit.
B Company faced not only German artillery but also nature’s fury—knee-deep snow, subfreezing temperatures, and constant exposure in their foxholes. Frostbite, trench foot, and pneumonia proved as debilitating as enemy shrapnel.
When the war ended in 1945 the men of B Company had earned twenty-six Silver Star Medals. After surviving months of relentless combat, the men of B Company returned home—forever changed by their experiences but determined to rebuild their lives. The survivors returned home to raise families and enjoy the hard-won freedoms they fought for—freedoms paid for by the sacrifice of the eighty-eight men laid to rest in military and hometown cemeteries.
Dying Hard is a unique one-of-a-kind book about war and soldiering, sacrifice and comradeship. It is a foretelling of the type of courage, leadership, and endurance it will take to overcome a skilled and motivated enemy on a future lethal battlefield. For anyone who studies World War II combat, honors the Greatest Generation, or prepares to lead soldiers into future battles, Dying Hard is a must read.
Book Review written by: Lt. Col. Louis A. DiMarco, PhD, U.S. Army, Retired, PhD, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas