Siegfried: The Nazis' Last Stand (A Leo Cooper book)

London: Secker & Warburg. Very Good/Very Good. 1983. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0436570939 Dust jacket in clear protective sleeve, unclipped. Black cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Photographs on plates. 268 pages clean and tight. viii, 268 pages clean and tight. Early in the evening of September 11, 1944, four American soldiers from the US 5th Armoured Division crossed the River Our and entered the Third Reich. They were the first enemy soldiers to enter Germany in wartime since the days of Napoleon. Above them on the heights they found the bunkers of the vaunted Siegfried Line on which the British had, somewhat optimistically, boasted they'd hang out their washing four years before. The bunkers were abandoned. It seemed that the West Wall, as the Germans called it, was open for the taking. But the situation was not that simple, and by October American troops were bogged down in their most bitter battle in Europe. There, where the Siegfried Line ran through the green hell of the Huertgen Forest, three American divisions were crippled in their heroic assaults. And then the Wall struck back. Out of the Siegfried Line the Germans launched the Ardennes Offensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. Even after Patton and Montgomery turned the tide and broke through the Nazi defences in February 1945, two thirds of the line still held firm in German hands. Only a sea of blood could overwhelm the Great Wall of Germany. .