David Kenyon Webster - Later Years

Later Years

He was the last of the surviving Toccoa veterans who had fought in Normandy to be sent home. He returned to work as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News and found great enjoyment sailing, studying oceanography and sea life. During those years he worked on his wartime memoirs and occasionally approached magazines with an article but deferred any wholesale treatment of the war, perhaps in favor of reflecting and trying to make sense of it.

He had a wife (Barbara), whom he married in 1951, and had three children. His interest in sharks led him to write a book on the subject entitled Myth and Maneater: The Story of the Shark. However, Webster's interest in sharks eventually may well have led to his demise, as he was lost at sea off the coast of Santa Monica in 1961.

Webster's wartime diary and thoughts remained unpublished except for a few short stories in magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post.

Unable to see a salient theme for his greater wartime experience, publishers showed little interest in another memoir. However, Stephen Ambrose, a tenured University of Louisiana System professor of history (specifically, at the University of New Orleans) who had studied Webster's writings, was so impressed by the historical value of Webster's unpublished papers that the professor encouraged Webster's widow to submit the writing package to LSU Press. This she did and with Ambrose's foreword; a book was published by LSU in 1994.

Titled Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, it presented Webster's first-hand account of life as an Airborne infantryman. His trained eye, honesty and writing skills helped give the book as well as the miniseries a color and tone not available in other G.I. diaries.

On September 9, 1961, David was lost at sea off the coast of Santa Monica, California. As his body was never recovered, it is generally assumed that Webster may have drowned.