The Final Crisis: Combat on Northern Alsace, January 1945

A multi-faceted book built around an intensely personal and vivid memoir of infantry combat in the last brutal winter of WWII. The author combines these carefully-verified recollections with an insightful description and analysis of the social dynamics within an incompletely-trained infantry platoon thrown into combat unexpectedly and prematurely in the face of Operation NORDWIND, the last German offensive on the Western Front in WWII. Framed by a comprehensive and detailed account of the US Seventh Army's tenacious struggle to halt a combined German force including Tiger tanks, Luftwaffe paratroopers, previously-undefeated SS mountain infantry, and the last of Germany's manpower reserves, The Final Crisis provides credit to the American infantrymen and tankers who halted the last threat to the Western Alliance. Long overshadowed by the Ardennes Offensive, the so-called "Battle of the Bulge," which barely preceded it, the struggle to halt the NORDWIND offensive comes to life at every level from foxhole to field army.

8.5" x 11" format; 25 original maps; 20 original pen and ink drawings, rendered by Colonel (then-Lieutenant) Ted MacKechnie, 42d Infantry Division, WWII; index