“AT THE BEGINNING of World War II, in September 1939, the Western democracies were woefully unprepared for the challenge the totalitarians hurled at them.”
From Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. This narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive and comprehensive D-Day and from Citizen Soldiers. The Victors also includes stories of individual battles, raids, acts of courage, and suffering from Pegasus Bridge, an account of the first engagement of D-Day, when a detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defense forces and paved the way for the Allied invasion; and from Band of Brothers, an account of an American rifle company from the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment who fought, died, and conquered, from Utah Beach through the Bulge and on to Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Germany. Stephen Ambrose describes the momentous decisions about how and where the war was fought, and the strategies and conduct of the generals and officers who led the invasion and the bloody drive across Europe to Berlin. But it is, as always with Stephen Ambrose, the ranks, the ordinary boys and men, who command his attention and his awe. The Victors tells their stories, how citizens became soldiers in the best army in the world. Ambrose draws on thousands of interviews and oral histories from government and private archives, from the high command - Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton - on down through officers and enlisted men, to re-create the last year of the Second World War, when the Allied soldiers pushed the Germans out of France, chased them across Germany, and destroyed the Nazi regime.
