First published in Great Britain in 2018
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA
Text copyright © 2018 by Michael Grant
First e-book edition 2018
ISBN 978 1 4052 7388 6
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1656 7
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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To all the real soldier girls.
“Today we rule Germany, tomorrow, the world!”
—Adolf Hitler
“And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I’d shoot a snake!”
—General George S. Patton
CONTENTS
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
LETTERS SENT
PART TWO: PARIS
19
PART THREE: HÜRTGEN FOREST
20
21
22
23
PART FOUR: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
LETTERS SENT
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
PART FIVE: THE CAMPS
31
32
PART SIX: VICTORY
LETTERS SENT
33
INTERSTITIAL
PART SEVEN: AFTER
34
35
OBITUARIES
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IMAGE LIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1944.
World War II has raged in Europe for five long years, but the tide has turned decisively in favor of the Allies. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, the western part of the Soviet Union and North Africa have all been occupied at one time, but now the edges of the Nazi Reich are being rolled up.
In Italy, Hitler’s clownish Fascist henchman, Benito Mussolini, has been overthrown. Pro-Nazi governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and parts of Yugoslavia are looking for ways to make peace with the Allies. The Nazis are out of North Africa and southern Italy.
The Soviet Union is ruled by the paranoid monster Joseph Stalin. Having once made a treacherous peace with Hitler allowing the Soviets to stab Finland and Poland in the back, Stalin then found himself betrayed in turn by Hitler. Ignoring a peace agreement between them, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, inflicting unspeakable brutality on Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians and, of course, above all, the Jews.
But the Soviet Union has proven to be too big a meal