His story serves as a telling reminder that few soldiers escape the power of their own pasts. Packed with groundbreaking research, Fierce Valor unveils a compelling portrait of an officer defined by boldness on the battlefield and the inherent costs of war. Uncovered by sharp scholarship, his lesser-known exploits in Korea, the Cold War, and embattled Laos also come to light for the first time. But 1945 did not mark an end to Speirs’s military adventures.

Tested by trials of extreme training, military rivalry, and lost love, Speirs’s international odyssey begins as an immigrant child in Prohibition-era Boston and continues through the bloody campaigns of France, Holland, and Germany.

But who was the real Lieutenant Speirs? In Fierce Valor, historians Jared Frederick and Erik Dorr unveil the fuller story of Easy Company’s longest-serving commander. Rumored to have gunned down enemy prisoners and even one of his own disobedient sergeants, Speirs became a foxhole legend among his troops.

Fight Like You Mean to Win His comrades called him “Killer.” Of the elite paratroopers who served in the venerated “Band of Brothers” during the Second World War, none were more enigmatic than Ronald Speirs. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers will be drawn to this complex portrait of the controversial Ronald Speirs, an iconic commander of Easy Company during World War II, whose ferocious courage in three foreign conflicts was matched by his devotion to duty and the bittersweet passions of wartime romance. Fierce Valor The True Story of Ronald Speirs and his Band of Brothersįans of Stephen E. A former park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park, Frederick is the host of Reel History on YouTube and an instructor of history at Penn State Altoona.

Fierce Valor by Jared Frederick