Fire & Steel: The End of World War Two in the West

Fire & Steel: The End of World War Two in the West by Peter Caddick-Adams

By March 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, had assembled seven armies -- including George Patton's Third U.S. Army, part of Omar Bradley's 12th U.S. Army Group, and Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group -- along the Westwall, also known as the Siegfried Line. Over 4 million men and women were poised to cross the Rhine and sweep tinto the Western reich. Victory was finally within their grasp. But if they believed it would be easy, they were swiftly disillusioned. The final hundred days of World War Two would be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town.

In Fire and Steel, the concluding volume of his epic trilogy covering the last year of the war in the West, Peter Caddick-Adams brings the final chapter of the fight against Nazi Germany vividly to life. He explores the daunting challenges the Allies faced crossing the Rhine along a 300-mile front. He recounts individual acts of resolve and heroism, of exhausted troops pressing forward against unforgiving resistance. He describes their first encounters with the barbarity of Hitle'rs regime as they reached the gates of Buchenwald, Belsen, and Dachau. He illuminates the strategic decisions made at Allied headquarters and offer pin-sharp portraits of those who made them.

Caddick-Adams draws on a vast range of memoirs and personal interviews with survivors to give a visceral feel for what happened between March and June 1945. Immersive and authoritative, this unforgettable book will become the standard work on the closing days of World War Two in the West for a Generation.

Oxford University Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2022