This is the full story of the Battle of the Ardennes. in the last weeks of 1944 the German armies in the west, after a continuous retreat since the battle of Normandy five months earlier were regrouping in what they thought was to be the last battle in defense of the Fatherland. But Hitler had other plans - to mount an offensive through the Ardennes that would deal such a blow to the Western Allies that they would be willing to negotiate a separate peace. This is the offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. Could Hitler's gamble have succeeded? Could he have reached his objective, the port of Antwerp? Peter Elstob unfolds the whole panorama of the "last offensive" which was one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World war, punctuated with many acts of individual acts of heroism and many errors of judgment by the firebrand General George Patton, the superb German generals and others. Paradoxically, all it ensured was that the Russians would reach Berlin first.
Author
Peter Frederick Egerton Elstob was a British soldier, adventurer, novelist, military historian and entrepreneur. In his writing he is best known for his lightly-fictionalized novel Warriors For the Working Day (1960) and his military history of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's Last Offensive (1971). He joined the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, and later served in the Royal Tank Regiment in World War II, in which service he was promoted to sergeant and was Mentioned in Despatches. He joined International PEN in 1962 and served first as general secretary and later as vice-president for seven years during the 1970s, rescuing the organisation from financial failure; he also secured the future of the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1946. He prospered as an entrepreneur with a facial product called Yeast Pac, with several partners. In his obituary in The Guardian newspaper, Elstob was said to be: ...one of those people born in the wrong century. With his charm and audacity, his passion for travel, and his love of risk-taking and financial gambles, he would have been more at home in the reign of Elizabeth I.
