Taking Berlin
The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
From Martin Dugard, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Bill O'Reilly's Killing series, comes a nonfiction thriller about the race between the Allies and Soviets to conquer the heart of Nazi Germany.
“Gripping, popular history at its page-turning best.”—Alex Kershaw • “With the precision of a smart bomb, Martin Dugard puts the reader directly into the campaign to destroy Hitler.”—Bill O’Reilly • “Spectacular . . . Taking Berlin is certain to be a massive hit with fans of both history and thrillers alike.”—Mark Greaney, bestselling author of the Gray Man series
Fall, 1944. Paris has been liberated, saved from destruction, but this diversion on the road to Berlin has given the Germans time to regroup. The American and British armies press on from the west, facing the enemy time and again in the Hurtgen Forest, during the Market Garden invasion, and at the Battle of the Bulge, all while American general George Patton and British field marshal Bernard Montgomery vie for supremacy as the Allies’ top battlefield commander.
Meanwhile, the Soviets begin to squeeze Hitler’s crumbling Reich from the east. Led by Generals Zhukov and Konev, the Red Army launches millions of soldiers, backed by tanks, artillery, and warplanes, against the Germans, leaving death and scorched earth in their wake, pushing the Wehrmacht back toward their fatherland. As both the Anglo-American alliance and the Soviets set their sights on claiming the capital city of Nazi Germany, Churchill seeks to ensure Britain’s place in a new world divided by Roosevelt’s America and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
With a sweeping cast of historical figures, Taking Berlin is a pulse-pounding race into the final, desperate months of the Second World War and toward the fiery destruction of the Thousand-Year-Reich, chronicling a moment in history when allies become adversaries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Dugard follows Taking Paris with a kaleidoscopic account of the Allies' campaign to capture Berlin in the final months of WWII. Opening the narrative with Gen. George S. Patton's famous May 1944 speech before the D-Day invasion ("No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"), Dugard interweaves the experiences of a colorful cast that includes Patton, Gen. James Gavin, Winston Churchill, journalist Martha Gellhorn, and German field marshal Erwin Rommel. Among the highlights: Gavin parachuting behind German troops guarding Omaha and Utah beaches on D-Day; Gellhorn stowing away on the hospital ship HMS Prague to observe the Normandy landings from offshore; and Patton's rivalry with British general Bernard Montgomery. Documenting the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, Rommel's death, the taking of the Siegfried Line on the border of Germany and France, the Yalta Conference, and other turning points, Dugard enriches the account with colorful if shopworn gossip about Gellhorn's romance with Gavin; Eisenhower's rumored fling with his driver, Kay Summersby; and more. Dugard's terse prose ("Engines cough. Catch.") and use of present tense ("James Gavin is a dangerous man") keeps the action humming, and he skillfully mines his subjects' personal writings. This fast-paced history is well worth the read.
