Product Description

No Less Than Victory is the crowning achievement in master storyteller Jeff Shaara’s soaring World War II trilogy, revealing the European war’s unforgettable and harrowing final act.

After the success of the Normandy invasion, the Allied commanders are buoyantly confident that the war in Europe will be over in a matter of weeks, that Hitler and his battered army have no other option than surrender. But despite the advice of his best military minds, Hitler will hear no talk of defeat. In mid-December 1944, the Germans launch a desperate and ruthless counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest, utterly surprising the unprepared Americans who stand in their way. Through the frigid snows of the mountainous terrain, German tanks and infantry struggle to realize Hitler’s goal: divide the Allied armies and capture the vital port at Antwerp. The attack succeeds in opening up a wide gap in the American lines, and for days chaos reigns in the Allied command. Thus begins the Battle of the Bulge, the last gasp by Hitler’s forces that becomes a horrific slugging match, some of the most brutal fighting of the war. As American commanders respond to the stunning challenge, the German spear is finally blunted.

Though some in the Nazi inner circle continue the fight to secure Germany’s postwar future, the Führer makes it clear that he is fighting to the end. He will spare nothing–not even German lives–to preserve his twisted vision of a “Thousand Year Reich.” But in May 1945, the German army collapses, and with Russian troops closing in, Hitler commits suicide. As the Americans sweep through the German countryside, they unexpectedly encounter the worst of Hitler’s crimes, the concentration camps, and young GIs find themselves absorbing firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust.

Presenting his riveting account through the eyes of Eisenhower and Patton and the young GIs who struggle face-to-face with their enemy, and through the eyes of Germany’s old soldier, Gerd von Rundstedt, and Hitler’s golden boy, Albert Speer, Jeff Shaara carries the reader on a journey that defines the spirit of the soldier and the horror of a madman’s dreams. No Less Than Victory further solidifies Shaara’s reputation as this era’s most accomplished author of historical military fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #146 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-03
• Released on: 2009-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345497925
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Jeff Shaara on No Less Than Victory

In all the stories I’ve written, from the American Revolution, up through World War Two, one of the most gratifying comments I have received from readers has been, "I didn’t know that." Whether writing about Benjamin Franklin or The Red Baron, Robert E. Lee or Black Jack Pershing, my favorite moments have come when a discovery is made, when I can offer the reader some tidbit or episode of history that is an entertaining surprise.

By any pure definition, I am not a historian. My job is not to bathe you with the raw facts and figures, all those things many of us dread when opening the high school history text book. Instead, my goal is to tell you a historically accurate story through the eyes of those special characters, by digging deeply into their memoirs and diaries, letters and the accounts of those who stood beside them. The most satisfying part of that to me is that I do not have to "fudge" history. Unlike Hollywood, where too often filmmakers seem not to trust that an honest historical tale can be sufficiently entertaining, I have been surprised by how the characters themselves, so many of them familiar names, can tell us a true story that not only entertains but reveals something of our past. My job is to be the storyteller, to bring these characters out of their world and into ours. History is not about numbers, but about us.

When I began to tackle the subject of the Second World War, I was concerned that I would be unable to find a story to tell that you did not already know. This is one subject that even Hollywood has (sometimes) treated with an honest hand, magnificent stories that may or may not be genuine history, but at least are honest in their ambitions. What can I add to that? What can I tell you about George Patton or D-Day or the Holocaust that you don’t already know? The answer to that was a surprise to me, and it is my fervent hope that in the trilogy I’ve just completed, it is a surprise to you.

Heroes come in strange packages, and often, the decent and the honorable emerge in places we don’t expect to find them. Throughout my research on World War Two, I was caught off guard many times by the strength of character that came not just from the familiar names, the leaders, but the unfamiliar: the men of the Airborne and the tanks and the men who carried the rifle. I was surprised as well by the enemy, in this case, the Germans. Not every man who obeyed Hitler was simply a goose-stepping monster, and so, some of them, Rommel and Kesselring and von Rundstedt and Speer... add to these stories in ways I did not expect.

Ultimately, the stories I write must entertain, which, when writing about war, can seem terribly inappropriate. World War Two gave us more horror than most of us can possibly absorb. But we must not forget that many did absorb it. Many carry those stories still, often unspoken, unrevealed, those aging GIs whose memories have always been stirred by the sights and smells and the horrific loss. And throughout the horror there are different memories, the uplifting, the humorous, and alongside the tears and the screams there is laughter. It is after all, how the veteran survives.

Their numbers are fewer every day, and as they leave us, many will carry the stories with them. Often, as we watched them grow older, we dared not ask for the tales, cautioned by a parent perhaps, warned against prying or digging too deeply into the old veteran’s silent horror. Even in the name of research, it is not my place to probe where I am not invited. But the history is there for us to explore, the events real, the people true to life, the heroism and the horror a part of their legacy, a legacy we must not forget. It’s the least we can do. --Jeff Shaara

(Photo © Adrian Kinloch)

From Publishers Weekly
Firmly straddling the ground between war novel and military history, the conclusion to Shaara's WWII European theater series contains the usual mix of real life military leaders and fictional soldiers in combat, recapitulating the last five months of the war, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of concentration camps. Shaara's real-life figures (generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt) mostly appear in stilted scenes to discuss strategy, while fictional characters carry the narrative by doing the fighting. Thanks to Shaara's visceral descriptive powers, we ride on a bombing mission with bombardier Sergeant Buckley as his B-17 flies through the flak-filled skies over Germany. With Private Benson, we feel the cold, deprivation and sense of dislocation of the Ardennes. And we sit in an observation post right on the Germans' doorstep as Captain Harroway calls down artillery fire on the enemy. In the end, Shaara delivers nothing we haven't already read in Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers or Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle, but fans of military fiction will definitely gobble this up. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Jeff Shaara is the New York Times bestselling author of The Steel Wave, The Rising Tide, To the Last Man, The Glorious Cause, Rise to Rebellion, and Gone for Soldiers, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure–two novels that complete the Civil War trilogy that began with his father’s Pulitzer Prize—winning classic The Killer Angels. Shaara was born into a family of Italian immigrants in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and graduated from Florida State University. He lives in Sarasota.

Customer Reviews

Shaara Completes His WWII Trilogy with 'No Less Than Victory


Jeff Shaara's "No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II" (Ballantine Books, 480 pages, $28.00) completes the prolific author's WW II in Europe trilogy that began with "The Rising Tide" and continued with "The Steel Wave." "No Less Than Victory" begins with The Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and ends with the German surrender in May 1945.

Like Shaara's other novels, "No Less Than Victory" combines historical figures -- Eisenhower, Gen. George S. Patton, Gen. Omar Bradley, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedel "Beetle" Smith, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Albert Kesselring, Albert Speer, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and many others -- with fictional fighting men in the front lines, doing the grunt work of war and standing in for the millions of soldiers that served in the war. Two of them, Pvts. Eddie Benson and Kenny Mitchell, are particularly well drawn, while another, Sgt. John Buckley, a bombardier in a B-17 shot down by the Germans and sent to a Luft-Stalag prisoner of war camp, shows how dangerous it was in the Allied bombers that blasted much of Europe to rubble.

Mitchell and Benson owe their lives to another fictional soldier, Sgt. Bruce Higgins. In an "afterward" the author tells us what happens to the real and fictional characters.

The fictional characters have a "Willie & Joe" ring about them, with a reference to the bedraggled front line "dogfaces" portrayed by Army cartoonist Sgt. Bill Mauldin. Shaara provides a scene with Gen. George "Blood & Guts" Patton ranting about Mauldin's cartoons in Stars & Stripes. Shaara does a fine job with the historical figures and I recognize some of the details from my extensive reading about the war. His thorough research shines through and the book should serve as a useful introduction to the final six months of the fighting in Europe. Missing in Shaara's novel is any account in depth of the Russian advance on the Eastern Front, although there is a reference to the Soviet Army's halt outside Warsaw in August 1944 that gave the Germans the chance to destroy the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising.

Perhaps the best portrayal of German leaders is Shaara's depiction of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who was in charge of Wehrmacht forces facing the Americans, British, Canadian, French and other Allied forces in France, Belgium, Luxemburg and later in the German Homeland. Shaara also does a fine job with Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, who was in charge of war production and slave labor efforts and who somehow escaped the hangman's knot at Nuremberg to serve a lengthy term in Spandau Prison.

The Ardennes Offensive that began on Dec. 16, 1944 -- quickly called by the news media The Battle of the Bulge -- was Hitler's last gasp on the western front, a desperate attempt to drive a wedge between the Allied forces and allow the Germans to retake the port of Antwerp. Shaara provides maps to help the reader see the big picture of the offensive and how Patton, Hodges, Montgomery and other leaders, under the command of Eisenhower, turned the tide.

German atrocities against civilians in Belgium and soldiers at the Malmedy Massacre led to a toughening of the attitude voiced by Gen. George Patton that the only thing better than killing Germans was killing more Germans. But it wasn't until the Allies liberated their first concentration camp that the extent of German crimes against humanity became apparent to Allies. Patton ordered the civilians of the nearby towns to visit the Ohrdruf concentration camp, near Gotha, Germany, part of the Buchenwald complex.

Ohrdruf was liberated on April 4, 1945 by Patton's 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division, the first camp liberated by the U.S. Army. The 89th Infantry division included Charlie Payne of Augusta, Kansas, the then 20-year-old great uncle of President Obama. In his introductory "To the Reader," Shaara relates how he was in Washington, DC at the time an 88-year-old Holocaust denier charged into the Holocaust Museum and shot and killed a security guard -- and the need to remind everyone of the atrocities committed by the Germans during the war.

Eisenhower ordered the news media to document the horrors of Ohrdruf and other camps so that no one would be in a position to deny what happened there and chalk it up to Allied "propaganda." Shaara draws on Patton's diary in his description of the Ohrdruf liberation. Here's an extended version from Patton's diary:

"In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench. When the shed was full--I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January. When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds."


"No Less Than Victory" is a powerful evocation of the war in Europe that will appeal to WW II buffs and the general reader alike. It's a book that literally impossible to put down until the very end.

As Veterans Day draws near, and the ranks of World War II veterans thins dramatically, it's important to remember what Shaara describes in this book.

Best of the Three
Although I found the two previous works on the European theater of World War II by Jeff Shaara informative and engaging, "No Less Than Victory" is the crowning achievement of the trilogy. The focal emphasis of this novel is the Battle of the Bulge and Shaara works his magic when getting into the heads of the principal combatant, namely: Hitler, Von Rundstedt, Montgomery, Tedder, Eisenhower, Patton, and the infantry grunts Edward Benson, Kenneth Mitchell, and Bruce Higgins.

Sharra writes convincingly that the Germans nearly pulled off a major reversal of fortunes on the Western Front when they amassed a surprising strength of arms, tanks, and artillary along a narrow span in the Ardennes Forest. The surprise offensive counterattack by the Germans is measured by immediate reaction of the defenders in harms way and the slow reaction of the British and American brass to the intense assault. Only the severe weather and lack of fuel thwarted more extreme damage to allied forces inflicted on them by the German thrust. Superior numbers of men and materiel would prove in the end to be the deciding factor in regaining the allied initiative and eventually lead to victory.

What makes this book such an interesting read is the revelation that in spite of the ferocious nature of combat, there is much downtime in the life of an infantry soldier. Marching, embedded in foxholes, awaiting orders, performing menial chores are major portions of existing even under the most strenuous of anticipated combat involvement. It comes as somewhat a surprise that many WW II soldiers never came into direct contact with the enemy they fired upon or killed. Military machinization accounted for most of the casulties; however, not to minimize their contrbution, it was the foot soldier that was neccesary to do the dirty work of cleaning up the mess and ferreting out those that resisted to end.

Jeff Shaara has done himself proud with this concluding labor. I, as I'm sure many others, look forward to his writing about United States' role in the Pacific theater of World War II. Hopefully it will be as rewarding an experience for both author and reader.

Great conclusion to a terrific trilogy
A truly tragic fact is that we are losing WWII vets at an astonishing rate on a daily basis, and the newest generation has almost no inkling of the greatest war ever fought. WWII was the seminal event of the last century. Its repercussions can be seen in almost all walks of life - financial, technological, social - and yet the memories of it are dying away with all of the men and women who fought so hard so long ago to guarantee us the life we have today. Jeff Shaara captures all the horrors of war and the feelings of the soldiers who sat, freezing, lonely, and hungry in their foxholes in a far off country. He tries to give us an insider view of the thoughts of the men who led the troops on both sides, and whereas there will always be disagreement on that, at least we can try to imagine what it must have been like making decisions when the fate of the world turned upon them. I am looking forward to his next books on the war in the Pacific.