A powerful German counterattack in Normandy in August 1944 might have been one of the Wehrmacht's great shining moments in the Second World War. The odds were certainly in their favor. Determined to drive the Allies back to the English Channel, elements of four combat-hardened panzer divisions faced off against a single American infantry division near the town of Mortain. Instead, the Americans held their ground, enabling the Allied armies to secure the invasion and ultimately liberate France. In a vivid recreation of this pivotal battle—less celebrated than the encounter at the Falaise Pocket but just as decisive—Mark Reardon tells how the 30th Infantry Division held off the German panzer juggernaut, which was designed to drive a wedge between Allied forces. In recounting this showdown, he offers a new perspective on the German defeat in Normandy and a convincing counterpoint to the conventional view of most military analysts that Germany lost the war as a result of Allied materiel superiority or Hitler's strategic meddling. Through vigorous prose laced with compelling anecdotes, Reardon reconstructs the battle from both sides of the firing line to explain why it evolved and ended as it did. He reveals how professional rivalries and lack of accurate battlefield information hampered the efforts of German generals to execute a successful counteroffensive. He also tells how the U.S. Army profited from the bitter lessons of hedgerow fighting to gain superiority in ground maneuver, fire support, and the use of airpower, logistics, communications, and reconnaissance in the face of more experienced and better armed opponents. Reardon's riveting tale reveals that Americans GIs could fight as well as their more vaunted opponent, which gave the U.S. Army the confidence it needed to take the war into the enemy's homeland. Equally important, their victory prevented the Germans from retaking strategic points that would have kept the war bottled up in Normandy. Drawing not only on exhaustive research in Anglo-American and German archives but also on firsthand accounts by more than two hundred American soldiers, Reardon's detailed reconstruction fills an important gap in the history of World War II combat that has existed for more than half a century.

Victory at Mortain: Stopping Hitler's Panzer Counteroffensive

History

Reardon, Mark J.

Military

University Press of Kansas

Victory at Mortain: Stopping Hitler's Panzer Counteroffensive (Modern War Studies)

From the invasions of Algeria, Sicily, and Normandy, to bursting open the very gates of the Reich at Aachen and in the gloomy and bloody Hürtgen Forest, to halting the great German offensive in the Ardennes, and to sealing the fate of the German Army in the Ruhr Pocket, the soldiers of the 18th Infantry Regiment established a battle record that is, in many ways, a microcosm of the American Army’s experiences in World War II. After bloody setbacks in their first actions in North Africa, the Regiment persevered and overcame every conceivable obstacle placed in their path by their enemies, to include Panzers, elite paratroopers, and tenacious garrisons of concrete and steel stretching from Sicily to the Westwall. Not only did they uphold the honor of their regimental forebears, but they set the standard for their successors who have fought in Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991, and the current war in Iraq, where the Regiment’s 1st Battalion serves at the time of this book’s publication. 
American Iliad is, however, more than an especially complete and comprehensive regimental history. By combining information carefully culled from wartime reports with first-hand accounts provided by the riflemen and machinegunners to battalion commanders and regimental staff officers, the authors have created an exceptionally clear picture of an American infantry regiment’s tactical operations. Hundreds of actions, chronicled and analyzed at every level from squad through regiment, are woven together to create a brilliant mosaic that illustrates exactly how the 18th Infantry Regiment of the famed 1st Infantry Division—the "Big Red One"—defeated its Vichy French, Italian, and German adversaries from Algeria to the Harz Mountains. 
American Iliad is assured an important place in the burgeoning literature that documents the US Army’s WWII combat record in an analytical, factual fashion. Unlike most of the regimental and division histories published shortly after the war which were intended to be mementos of soldiers’ service and necessarily are often sentimental accounts based on unclassified information, American Iliad is an objective history based on reports not available to authors of unit histories in the immediately post-war era. The authors have artfully combined intelligence reports, captured operational documents, personal accounts by enemy participants, and myriad other facts relating to other American and Allied units to ensure the accuracy and integrity of this work. 
Most importantly, American Iliad makes a highly significant contribution to the long-running controversy about the quality of American combat units in WWII. In Citizen Soldiers, the late Stephen Ambrose argued that the Army which entered the European continent in Normandy was good, but by the end of the war, it had achieved excellence; in The GI Offensive in Europe, Pete Mansoor documented the generally superior combat effectiveness of American infantry divisions in the ETO; in When the Odds Were Even, Keith E. Bonn proved that even when the US Seventh Army did not enjoy numerical, air, or armor superiority, its soldiers succeeded due to superior cohesion, organization, and training; and in Draftee Division, John Sloan Brown illustrated the decisive strengths of the 88th Infantry Division, the first American division to see action that was overwhelmingly of conscripts. More recently, in Hell in Hürtgen Forest, Robert Rush has chronicled how the extraordinary tenacity of a regiment of the 4th Infantry Division enabled it to overcome every conceivable obstacle and prevail against an enemy enjoying innumerable advantages. 
Now, Bob Baumer and Mark Reardon show exactly how an infantry regiment achieved victory after victory against three different armies on two continents. Combining Baumer’s years of meticulous research with the professional and historical expertise that Reardon, a serving US Army officer, has previously exhibited in his book Victory at Mortain, American Iliad documents how the leaders of the 18th Infantry Regiment crafted combined arms teams and used effective, sometimes brilliant, maneuver to win battle after battle over 2 1/2 years of combat. The initiative, flexibility, and creativity these officers displayed is made abundantly evident, yet their failures and mistakes are also examined as well. Carefully crafted missions affording subordinate leaders maximum latitude were clearly the norm, and combined armor, artillery, engineer, and infantry combat teams, supported by air power (when available) were consistently preferred, in accordance with the American tactical precepts of the time. However, the authors make clear that when the tanks bogged down or were knocked out by the enemy, when the fighter bombers were grounded by bad weather or reallocated to higher priority targets, and when the artillery couldn’t shoot for lack of observation or because targets were "danger close," the 18th Infantry Regiment was always prepared to whatever it took to accomplish the mission. 
From the foxhole to the regimental command post, through firefights in dense forests and forbidding hedgerows, in desperate assaults up rocky desert heights and tenaciously defended beaches, American Iliad takes the reader through the epic journey in which 1,513 American soldiers lost their lives…and a regiment gained immortality. 
424 pages; 17 original maps; 45 photos; endnotes; index.

American Iliad: The 18th Infantry Regiment in World War II

Baumer, Robert W.

The Aberjona Press

These volumes, prepared by the Operation Enduring Freedom Study Group, present an operational-level narrative of how the U.S. Army formed, trained, deployed, and employed its forces in Afghanistan from October 2001 to December 2014. To write this history, the study group embarked on an extensive research program, conducting oral history interviews with dozens of key military and civilian leaders. These volumes contain a total of fifty maps, a wide range of campaign photography and artwork, and volume-specific indexes.

Modern War in an Ancient Land: The United States Army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 Volume II: The United States Army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014. Volume ... Army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014. Volume II

U.S. Army Center of Military History

Degen, Edmund J

Military Bookshop

Modern War in an Ancient Land: The United States Army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 Volume I: The United States Army in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 Volume II: ... 2001-2014. Volume II: The United State

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