Don Banta gave a gift to his family and historians by writing down his vivid memories of serving in World War II, including being in the middle of Operation Varsity, the largest airborne assault in a single day in military history, when 17,000 Allied paratroopers rained down from the skies over Germany on March 24, 1945. Nearly 3,000 of them would die.

Mr. Banta made it through the hellish fighting. He lived to be 89 and went on to become a respected Chicago labor lawyer. He died at Weiss Memorial Hospital March 30 after suffering a stroke.

Daredevil war correspondent Robert Capa jumped with Mr. Banta’s 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the Army’s 17th Airborne Division. He “hit the ground very close to me. Capa calmly went on shooting pictures in the middle of all the firing,” Mr. Banta said in his memoir.

At one point, he was so close to Gen. George S. Patton, he could see the general’s famed ivory-handled revolvers. He wasn’t a fan of the pugnacious Patton. Echoing dialogue from the George C. Scott film about the commander, Mr. Banta wrote, “He is called ‘Blood and Guts’ for a reason. But it has been the regiment’s guts.”

He also recalled the marrow-freezing misery of the Battle of the Bulge.

In Germany, Mr. Banta said, the “Displaced Persons” used as Nazi slave labor rose at night, like avenging ghosts, from underground coal mines they lived in. They inflicted nocturnal retribution on their former captors by killing cows and vandalizing property.

Young Don Banta grew up on a farm outside Joliet during the Great Depression. His father lost his job, and for a time wound up selling and installing burglar alarms “for farmers afraid of chicken thieves,” he wrote. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse with 40 other children.

Read the full obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times