[books i've been reading]

I'm nearing the end of Jeff Shaara's World War Two series, this last book (No Less Than Victory) tracing the war from the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes to the fall of Berlin and the unconditional surrender of Germany. As a companion book, I read Stephen E. Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, following the Western European Theater of Operations from the battle of Normandy on through to the end of the war in Europe. Ambrose paints a striking portrait of the Allied push across France following the German retreat through the Falaise Gap; the Allies overextended themselves and found themselves thrust against the stout Siegfried Line. In an epic and absurd gamble, the Germans launched an offensive--"The Watch on the Rhine"--into the thinly-stretched Allied troops in the Ardennes. The push, meant to reach the Meuse, failed, and the Germans found themselves stuck in a bulge (hence the name of the battle: "The Battle of the Bulge"). The Allies pushed the Germans back, and the Germans tried again in Alsace to the south, and failed once more. That was the last of the major German counteroffensives, and the Allies broke the Siegfried Line, pushed up against the Rhine in the Battle of the Rhineland, and after crossing the Rhine, they swept towards Germany, stopping at the Elbe River. The Yalta Conference gave Berlin to the Russians closing in from the east, and the Allies halted since (and this makes sense) there was no reason for the Americans, British, Canadians, French, and all the others involved in the west to spill their blood in Berlin only to hand it over to the Russians. Interestingly, the end of World War Two in Europe paved the way for decades fighting against communism, setting up the stage for the Cold War and paving the way to the Korean War and Vietnam.

An interesting quote from Citizen Soldiers (pg 47): "A common experience: the guy who talked toughest, bragged most, excelled in maneuvers  everyone's pick to be the top soldier in the company, was the first to break, while the soft-talking kid who was hardly noticed in camp was the standout in combat. These are the cliches of war novels precisely because they are true."

Next up is Shaara's The Final Storm, tracing the last year of the war in the Pacific Theater. The companion book will probably be Eagle Against the Sun, a history of the Pacific theater from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of the Japanese. It should be atomic (pun intended).