Siegfried; The Nazis' Last Stand

New York: Jove, 1983. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Special Action Photo Edition [stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. xix, [1], 281, [3] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Introduction. Book One. Book Two. Notes and Sources. Bibliography. Index. Several words have been blacked out. This work had been a Military Book Club selection. Charles Henry Whiting (18 December 1926 - 24 July 2007), was a British writer and military historian and with some 350 books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms including Duncan Harding, Ian Harding, John Kerrigan, Leo Kessler, Klaus Konrad, K.N. Kostov, and Duncan Stirling. He completed his first novel The Frat Wagon (1954) while still an undergraduate at Leeds; it was published by Jonathan Cape in 1954. Next followed three wartime thrillers: Lest I Fall (1956), which was awarded the George Dowty Prize at the 1956 Cheltenham Literature Festival, was optioned by Rank but never filmed, and which financed Whiting's study tour in North America and led on to a contract with the University of Maryland University College, which at that time was providing degree courses for US military officers stationed in Europe. Next, he published Journey to No End, followed by The Mighty Fallen (1958). In 1967, he began writing non-fiction books for the New York publisher Ian Ballantine. Whiting continued this work even when producing novels. Between 1970 and 1976, in a prolific burst, he wrote a total of 34 books which he described as "Bang-bang, thrills-and-spills". From 1976, he was a full-time author and would average some six novels a year for the rest of his life. Charles Whiting's account of the Allied advance into Nazi Germany focuses on the months from September of 1944, when the Allies attacked the "West Wall" defending the western border of Germany, to the Allied crossing of the Rhine in March, 1945. Whiting describes the German counterattack in December that turned into the devastating Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of the Rhineland that followed as the Allies pressed into Germany. Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Montgomery take center stage in this book, which also draws from the accounts of officers and enlisted men as they fought their way through Europe's war-torn landscape.