Citizen Soldiers: The U. S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany [Paperback]

I'm sure this book, because of its faithful portrayal of reality, will appeal to those who were there as well as those who were not. For me it brought to life the adventure as well as the overwhelming fear and hardships that my own father must have lived through as a soldier in Patton's army in North Africa and post D-Day Europe. I imagine the stories he never told would have been much like the hundreds of stories in this outstanding book. I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially when comparing it to Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation." Brokaw's book is interesting and enjoyable but shallow compared to Ambrose's far more thorough account. Both books are good reading, but if I could only choose one of them, "Citizen Soldiers" wins hands down. It will give you an deep and abiding appreciation of what the WWII generation did for our nation and the world at great cost to themselves.

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In this volume he concentrates on the drive from Normandy all the way into the heart of Germany, and covering as much ground as the Allies conquered in that fateful year is a considerable accomplishment. This makes for fascinating and entertaining reading. A great deal of ground is covered, from the consolidation of the beachheads in Normandy to the relatively quick liberation of Paris, from the ill-fated Operation Market-Garden assault into Holland in September to the disastrous bloodbath in Omar Bradley's catastrophic excursion into the Hurtigen Forest, from the desperate clashes around Bastogne in the wintry Battle of the Bulge to the long, costly drive that unusually cold and snowy winter into Germany itself. As a result, we don't find the level of detail or strict chronology he employed in "D-Day", for example, or the kind of comprehensive coverage of specific events like the Battle of the Bulge that one finds in books like John Toland's "Battle".

This does not mean one doesn't learn a great deal about all these events transpiring during that fateful year; on the contrary, there is much in the way of provocative information and startling perspective offered here on each of these events. Yet it is unfair to expect a book addressing itself to the totality of the Allied campaign to do so comprehensively in less than 500 pages. Certainly anyone reading the corpus of all the Ambrose works on the year 1944-45 as is represented by the books mentioned above gets a very comprehensive feel for the progress of the war effort in Europe. Still, to gain the kind of comprehensive and strictly chronological information a complete history requires, one must look elsewhere, to tomes such as "A World At Arms", or "A War To Be Won", or even the comfortable, veritable, and well-worn "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich", my own personal favorite.

Mr. Ambrose has become a virtual cottage industry in the World War Two section of your local bookstore, while he has also published works such as his recent best seller on explorers Lewis and Clark. Meanwhile, he has become phenomenally successful because many of his books have captured the public's imagination by being so readable, entertaining, and informative. While popular success doesn't always equate to critical worthiness, in his case it consistently seems to. This is a wonderfully worthwhile, eminently researched, exhaustively documented, and superbly narrated book on the most critical last year of the war in Europe. Enjoy!

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This book made an indelible impression on me because of the way the author described the physical environment in which these men, Americans and Germans alike, fought for their lives and their comrades.

The author provides a fairly succinct explanation of what transpired on the tactical and operational levels in Western Europe after D-Day. For example, the book cleared up my sketchy understanding of what actually took place during the Battle of the Bulge.

More importantly, through hundreds of interviews including, among others, Pvt Kurt Vonnegut, Mr. Ambrose shows us what we could never really imagine what it must have been like fighting our way across France, Belgium, and Germany. Never before have I experienced such a vivid, lucid (if one could be) description of the bitter cold, the mud, the confusion, and the fear.

Finally, while providing a candid, relatively unbiased view of the war from certain German soldiers' perspectives, he also shows us the pure, unmasked evil of the SS, the Hitler Youth, and the Nazi propaganda machine that brainwashed a generation.

This book de-glorifies war while glorifying the valor of the soldiers who fight. Also recommended: "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge, and "Goodbye Darkness" by William Manchester. These books provide an equally gripping account of WWII in the Pacific from the Marines' perspective.

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