Armageddon : The Battle for Germany 1944-45 - Softcover

Hastings, Max

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9780330490627: Armageddon : The Battle for Germany 1944-45

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330490621 ISBN 13: 9780330490627

Publisher: PAN BOOKS LTD (ENGLAND), 2005

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One of the greatest military feats during the Second World War was the transformation of the German force's activities in the weeks following the battles in Holland and the German border, where the Allies had finally inflicted the greatest catastrophes of modern war on them. Somehow the Germans found the strength to halt the Allied advance in its tracks and to prolong the war to 1945. This book is the epic story of those last eight months of the war in northern Europe. 'As a military historian Max Hastings has few equals' Times Literary Supplement 'Max Hastings now stands in the first rank of writers on modern war' Financial Times

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From the Inside Flap:

Armageddon is the epic story of the last eight months of World War II in Europe by Max Hastings–one of Britain’s most highly regarded military historians, whose accounts of past battles John Keegan has described as worthy “to stand with that of the best journalists and writers” (New York Times Book Review).

In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler’s army was beaten, and expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But the disastrous Allied airborne landing in Holland, American setbacks on the German border and in the H�rtgen Forest, together with the bitter Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered that timetable. Hastings tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, and paints a vivid portrait of the Red Army’s onslaught on Hitler’s empire. He has searched the archives of the major combatants and interviewed 170 survivors to give us an unprecedented understanding of how the great battles were fought, and of their human impact on American, British, German, and Russian soldiers and civilians.

Hastings raises provocative questions: Were the Western Allied cause and campaign compromised by a desire to get the Soviets to do most of the fighting? Why were the Russians and Germans more effective soldiers than the Americans and British? Why did the bombing of Germany’s cities continue until the last weeks of the war, when it could no longer influence the outcome? Why did the Germans prove more fanatical foes than the Japanese, fighting to the bitter end? This book also contains vivid portraits of Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the other giants of the struggle.

The crucial final months of the twentieth century’s greatest global conflict come alive in this rousing and revelatory chronicle.

About the Author:

MAX HASTINGS, author of eighteen books, was editor of the Daily Telegraph for almost a decade, then for six years edited the Evening Standard. In his youth he was a foreign correspondent for newspapers and BBC television. He has won many awards for his journalism, particularly his work in the South Atlantic in 1982. He was knighted in 2002.

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