Knight's Cross [Paperback]

Aaron Bank (Author), E. M. Nathanson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1995

Learning of secret Nazi plans to organize a final retaliation that, if successful, would defeat the Allied powers, OSS Captain Dan Brooks, a specialist in ambushes and guerrilla warfare, takes on an assignment to capture Hitler. Original.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this disappointingly unimaginative and mostly actionless novel, Nathanson ( The Dirty Dozen ) and Bank ( From OSS to Green Berets ) take as their plot premise a real-life OSS plan--in which Bank was involved as a young officer--to capture Hitler and his high-ranking henchmen during the final days of WW II. In late 1944, OSS captain Dan Brooks interviews hundreds of German POWs throughout Allied-occupied Europe and assembles a team of disgruntled soldiers willing to fight against their homeland. Dubbed "Knight's Cross," the project clothes the defectors and German-speaking OSS agents in captured enemy uniforms and sends them to pose as a mountain infantry company in the Austrian Tyrol, the area to which Hitler is expected to flee. The Soviets find out about the plan and launch a competing venture of their own, a complicating factor that makes it impossible for anyone--including the reader--to know for sure who's doing what to whom. Bank's knowledge of OSS procedure is evident, but slow pacing and a plot that fizzles early hobble what might have been an interesting collaboration.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

The author of A Dirty Distant War (1987), etc., teams up with a career soldier/spy on a thriller about a top-secret OSS effort to round up Hitler and his cronies before they can commit suicide or otherwise escape the crashing Third Reich. Inter- and intra-service rivalries provide the bulk of the infrequent tense spots in the last days of the war in Europe. Captain Dan Brooks has been ordered by the Office of Strategic Services to drop into the Austrian Alps, where it's believed the top Nazis are preparing a superbunker to defend themselves forever from the advancing Allies. Brooks's project is plagued from the get-go by the intelligence-collecting side of OSS, where an ambitious Navy officer and his team of German-American spies think themselves better suited to go after the Fhrer, while Brooks shrugs them off and flies to France to recruit nearly 200 hundred disillusioned Wehrmacht POWs, all but one of whom want dearly to knock off the men who have ruined their beloved Vaterland. Trained and equipped to pose as German mountain troops, the agents parachute into the Austrian Alps, then settle into barns and attics belonging to the local Nazi-haters. Brooks sends out a couple of his American lieutenants in Gestapo clothes to gather intelligence, and the fake cops quickly find that, while there aren't yet any really big Nazis in town, there are some really pesky Americans, the agents Brooks tangled with in back in London, as well as Russians who have their own plans for the German leaders. Dan gets things straightened out in time for the arrival of a mysteriously and heavily bandaged fugitive and his SS bodyguards. Is the man in the mummy suit Der Fhrer? Everything is sorted out, and justice more or less served, months later in Switzerland, where Allen Dulles makes a cameo appearance. Ponderous ``what-if?'' epic. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Leisure Books (Mm) (January 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0843937246
• ISBN-13: 978-0843937244
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 3.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,892,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Fictional novel, great book to read, June 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Knight's Cross (Paperback)

I am one of those WWII buffs since my grandfather served in the army at that time. I picked up this novel and read it within a week. A little slow in the beginning, the action picks up and you'll enjoy it. Certainly a book not many have heard of, this fictional book would have been true. Colonel Aaron Banks was given the order to capture Adolf Hitler in the closing days of the war. But our forces beat his, so that mission never took off. A great book for any body interested in history or WWII!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unimaginative, far-fetched, and complex, August 16, 2004

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Knight's Cross (Paperback)

This is one of those books that winds up being less than the apparent sum of its parts. Aaron Bank (who later helped found the Green Berets) tells us that he was involved, during World War II, in an operation to train German dissidents to wear Nazi uniforms and infiltrate the Austrian Tyrol at the end of the war, with the object of capturing Hitler or some of the top Nazi bigwigs. The operation was cancelled before it ever got off the ground, but in this version of things, it actually happens.

The plot, however, gets so complex and convoluted that it is difficult to follow. You have American soldiers dressed as Germans (and Germans fighting for the Americans, but dressed as Germans), and Russians dressed as Americans, and of course Germans dressed as Germans, Americans as Americans, etc. It's kind of hard to follow which is what is who who's fighting whom, if you see my point. It's also somehow not very suspenseful.

This was an interesting concept, and the writing is reasonably easy to read, but the plot goes nowhere, and the book as a consequence isn't very good.