No Less Than Victory

September 21, 2009
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.

Starred review from October 15, 2009
The final volume in Shaaras trilogy about World War II in Europe employs the same technique as the first two: he focuses on individuals to tell the story, historical figures including Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery, Von Rundstedt, and Kesselring, as well as heretofore anonymous GIs such as Eddie Benson and Bruce Higgins. The events covered extend from the Battle of the Bulge to Germanys surrender. Shaara highlights the ironic similarities between Eisenhower and Von Rundstedt, both nominally in command of all their forces but forced to tolerate the egos, enmities, and limitations of subordinates as well as the many other vagaries of war. Both men are portrayed as honorable, but the fatalistic Von Rundstedt is more sympathetic because he must answer to the increasingly delusional Hitler. GIs Benson and Higgins provide a visceral sense of total war. Members of an inexperienced unit, they were placed in the Ardennes Forest precisely because the Allies expected little combat there. But they were run over by the daring German assault that became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Their entire regiment disappeared, and they spent days evading Germans as they searched for organized Allied resistance. No Less Than Victory is a grand achievement, historically accurate yet utterly compelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)