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Alumni Profile Chester
Brooks ’42: Saving the real 'Private Ryan'
A history major from Augsburg, Brooks deferred the draft in January of 1942 to finish his degree. After graduating in June of that same year, he enlisted in the Army and completed 13 weeks of training in Camp Wheeler, Ga. He volunteered to become a paratrooper and joined the 501st Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, which required an additional month of training. "I volunteered because it was something different," Brooks says. "I thought if I was going to be in the Army, I wanted to do something new." Brooks, responsible for training new paratroopers, was assigned with his 501st regiment to parachute into Normandy the night before the infamous invasion. Because their jump occurred in the middle of the night, their intended target, just north of the Douve River in France, became obsolete, when the brigade landed 25 miles south of the Douve. Not aware of their physical location, Brooks recalls leading his 14 men south on the river—the opposite direction of their unit headquarters located in Carentan, France. Hiding his troops in the hedge of a church graveyard, Brooks sneaked into a nearby town to determine their location. A priest at a local church instructed Brooks to take his troops north where the Germans had flooded the fields. Hiding out until dark, Brooks and his troops crossed the open fields and were soon met by the captain of the French underground, who then took the men to his farm. During a patrol of the grounds, Brooks' men discovered that other American troops, the 506th regiment, were nearby. This regiment, which included Sergeant Fritz Niland, returned to the farm with Brooks and his men. For several days, listening to BBC Broadcast radio, the men soon learned that Carentan had been taken over by ally troops. It was then that they knew it was safe to cross back to their unit. While waiting to return to England in July, a declaration to avoid the wipeout of an entire family during war was made. Sergeant Niland, one of four children, was approached by Chaplain Sampson and informed that two of his brothers had been killed and the third taken prisoner. Niland would be returning home. Niland insisted that he wanted to stay, that his family was with the paratroopers. As Brooks describes it, in the paratroopers, you depend strongly on one another. Brooks, an Augsburg Distinguished Alumnus, retired in 1983 after 33 years with the National Park Service. He and his wife, Ebba (Johnson) ’42, recently celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. They live in Duluth, Wis., and have four children (two of whom attended Augsburg), 12 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. — Cherie Christ is a communication specialist in the public relations office
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| Copyright 2007.
Augsburg College all rights reserved. |
1999,
Chester Brooks ’42 attended a paratrooper reunion in Green Bay, Wis., where
he learned he had participated in a World War II mission that led to the recovery
of soldier Fritz Niland—the real 'Private Ryan' from the film Saving
Private Ryan. 
After
the reunion, Brooks began researching WWII. His research culminated in a book,
The Last 'Good' War. Although not published, his book includes his personal
experiences during the war, and was written primarily for his family.