Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918World War I and Its Violent Climax - Hardcover

Joseph E. Persico

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375434224 ISBN 13: 9780375434228

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 2004

Synopsis

This book tells the story of the events leading up to the end of World War 1. The author puts the reader in the trenches with ordinary soldiers as well as into the minds of Adolph Hitler, Colonel Douglas MacArthur, and Colonel George Patton, and Captain Harry Truman.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M, yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered-more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion.
Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous-among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers' lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war's last hour. Persico recounts the war's bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes "All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, and" Paths of Glory.
The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called "the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought."

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author:

Joseph E Persico was born in Gloversville, New York, in 1930. He served as a lieutenant in the Korean War, and later at Southern NATO headquarters in Naples. Subsequently he joined the US Information Agency and for eleven years he was chief speech writer for the New York Governor and later US Vice President Nelson A Rockefeller. His books include My Enemy Brother: Men and the Days of Gettysburg and Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II. His work Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial was hailed by Howard K Smith as the 'best account' of the trial. Mr Persico divides his time between homes in upstate New York and Mexico.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Large Print
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375434224
• ISBN 13: 9780375434228
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 816