Battle for Berlin; End of the Third Reich. Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II, Battle Book, No. 6

New York: Ballantine, 1972. Third Printing. Trade paperback. Good. 21 cm. 160 pages. Wraps. Illustrations. Diagrams. Maps. Bookplate. Bibliography. Introduction by Barrie Pitt. Earl Frederick Ziemke (December 16, 1922 - October 15, 2007) was an American military historian whose work was mainly on World War II and especially the Soviet-German clash in Eastern Europe. The author served in the Marines during World War II. After learning Japanese at Camp Elliot, California, Ziemke served in the Pacific. He fought in the Battle of Peleliu and then won the Purple Heart for wounds received in the assault on Okinawa. At the end of the war, Corporal Ziemke served at Tientsin, China. After his discharge, he used the G.I. Bill to pursue higher education, and in 1951 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. From 1951 until 1955, he worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, while for the period 1955-1967, he was an official historian for the United States Army's Office of the Chief of Military History in Washington, D.C. One of the grimmest operations of World War II, the almost complete destruction of this great city. McDonald Publishing and the Imperial War Museum teamed up back in the late 1960s and early 1970s to publish this tight series of illustrated paperbacks on the history of World War I, World War II (and a few other conflicts of the 20th century), which were picked up by Ballantine in the United States. They were all divided into subjects: battles, campaigns, weapons, war leaders, politics in action, human conflict, and regalia, by color bands on the bottom, enjoying common editing and artwork, and a fairly common collection of well-known historians. The Berlin volume was one of the first, and Earl F. Ziemke, who wrote about the Russian Front for the US Army's Historical Center, condensed his previously written material for this book. He covered a lot of ground -- the failed defense of East Prussia and Pomerania, the failed German counterattacks in Hungary, the political decisions that stopped Eisenhower's troops on the Elbe River, the disintegrating German command structure, and, of course, Hitler's Wagnerian final days in the bunker. The book wraps up with the four-power occupation of Berlin, which was the beginning of the Cold War.