When the Odds Were Even: The Vosges Mountains Campaign, October 1944-January 1945

In three months of savage fighting, the U.S. Seventh Army did what no army in the history of modern warfare had ever done before–conquer an enemy defending the Vosges Mountains.

With the toughest terrain on the Western Front, the Vosges mountain range was seemingly an impregnable fortress, mannedby German troops determined to hold the last barrier between the Allies and the Rhine. Yet despite nearly constant rain, snow, ice, and mud, soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Army tore through thousands of pillboxes, acres of barbed wire, hundreds of roadblocks, and miles of other enemy obstacles, ripping the tenacious German defenders out of their fortifications in fierce fighting–and then held on to their gains by crushing Operation Nordwind, the German offensive launched in a hail of steel at an hour before midnight on the last New Year’s Eve of the war.

Keith Bonn’s fascinating study of this little-known World War II campaign offers a rare opportunity to compare German and American fighting formations in a situation where both sides were fairly evenly matched in numbers of troops, weapons, supplies, and support. This gripping battle-by-battle account shatters the myth that German formations were, division for division, superior to their American counterparts.

• Operation Nordwind 1945: Hitler's last offensive in the West (Campaign Book 223)
• The Final Crisis: Combat in Northern Alsace, January 1945
• First to the Rhine: The 6th Army Group in World War II
• Eisenhower's Thorn on the Rhine: The Battles for the Colmar Pocket, 1944-45
• The Rock Of Anzio: From Sicily To Dachau, A History Of The U.S. 45th Infantry Division
• Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle
• No Better Place to Die: Ste-Mere Eglise, June 1944-The Battle for la Fiere Bridge
• Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War (Modern Military History Book 4)
• The Italian Folgore Parachute Division: North African Operations 1940-43
• Honor Before Glory: The Epic World War II Story of the Japanese American GIs Who Rescued the Lost Battalion