From Brittany to the Reich (The 29th Infantry Division in Germany, September-November 1944)

By the fall of 1944, the 29th Infantry Division was a veteran division, one of the U.S. Army’s best. It had been tested and blooded on Omaha Beach on D-Day and in the hedgerows of Normandy and streets of St. Lô and Vire. Most recently, the guardsmen of the Blue and Gray Division had battled elite German para troopers for the port of Brest. In less than four months of combat, the 29th had suffered more than 100 percent casualties, with replacements now filling the ranks alongside the survivors, and after the fall of Brest, the troops took a much-needed break, which, their commanders hinted, might last up to two weeks. It was not to be: the Allies’ situation to the east, along the German border, had become volatile, and the division’s presence—and hard-earned experience—was desperately needed.

In From Brittany to the Reich, Joseph Balkoski resumes his epic history of the 29th Infantry Division, following the unit out of its shortened respite in France and into new positions in the woods, villages, and farm fields of Holland and western Germany. Here, for six weeks beginning in early October 1944, the division faced a different and more difficult war against a resolute enemy who, defending the border of his homeland, refused to quit. Tasked with conducting diversionary activities north of Aachen while the main American effort focused on taking the storied German city, the 29ers soon found themselves locked in a battle of attrition with entrenched Germans whose strength had been underestimated.

This is a story of men at war, soldiers like Maj. Glover Johns, the bold former cavalryman who commanded a battalion in the 115th Infantry; Capt. Waldo Schmitt, who turned down a rear-echelon job after a severe wound to return to his beloved regiment; and Sgt. Edward Humphrey, the English-born foxhunter and falconer who ended up a simple GI in the 29th and won two Silver Stars before perishing that autumn. Over them all loomed their division commander, Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt, an old-school martinet whose obsessive enforcement of seemingly trivial rules— for example, helmet chin straps had to be buckled at all times—helped turn the division into a cohesive fighting unit.

In a narrative at once deeply researched and colorfully written, Balkoski depicts these courageous soldiers and their battles during the brutal fall of 1944, highlighting the valor, sacrifice, and heartbreak of the American GI in World War II.