Battle Yet Unsung: The Fighting Men of the 14th Armored Division in World War II | Timothy O'Keeffe

2011 hardcover with dust jacket and 320 pages new and unread.

While headline writers in the European Theater of Operations were naturally focused on events in Normandy and the Bulge in the north, equally ferocious combats were taking place in southern France and Germany during 194445, which are now finally getting their due. The US 14th Armored Divisiona late arrival to the theaterwas thrust into intense combat almost the minute it arrived in Europe, as the Germans remained determined to defend their southern flank.
 
This book explores in detail what happened in the month of January 1945 in the snow-covered Vosges Mountains, when the Wehrmachts attempt to destroy the Sixth Army Group failed. A strategic withdrawal after ten hellish days of fiery combat allowed the Allies to hold the line until a spring offensive. In March, the division literally exploded its way through the Siegfried Line at Steinfeld and began to propel the Wehrmacht into a retreat from which it could never recover. Armored columns kept punching their way through roadblock after roadblock in town after town with powerful artillery and air concentrations that never gave the German soldiers a chance to respond.
 
As a result of the rapid advance of Seventh Army and the 14th, German POW camps like the ones at Hammelburg and Moosburg were liberated of over 100,000 prisoners, an achievement which gave the division the nom de guerre The Liberators.