Bücher von Mark Zuehlke

On June 6, 1944 the greatest armada in history stood off Normandy and the largest amphibious invasion ever began as 107,000 men aboard 6,000 ships pressed toward the coast. Among this number were 18,000 Canadians, who were to land on a five-mile long stretch of rocky ledges fronted by a wide expanse of sand. Code named Juno Beach. Here, sheltered inside concrete bunkers and deep trenches, hundreds of German soldiers waited to strike the first assault wave with some ninety 88-millimetre guns, fifty mortars, and four hundred machine guns. A four-foot-high sea wall ran across the breadth of the beach and extending from it into the surf itself were ranks of tangled barbed wire, tank and vessel obstacles, and a maze of mines.Of the five Allied forces landing that day, they were scheduled to be the last to reach the sand. Juno was also the most exposed beach, their day's objectives eleven miles inland were farther away than any others, and the opposition awaiting them was believed greater than that facing any other force. At battle's end one out of every six Canadians in the invasion force was either dead or wounded. Yet their grip on Juno Beach was firm.

For the Allied armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944, Rome was the prize that could be won through one of the greatest offensives of the war. The Liri Valley was a long, flat corridor through miles of rugged mountains. At one end stood the formidable Monte Cassino, at the other, Rome. In May 1944, I Canadian Corps drove up this valley toward the Italian capital, facing the infamous "Hitler Line" a bastion of concrete bunkers fronted by wide swaths of tangled barbed wire, minefields, and "Tobruk" weapon pits. The ensuing battle resulted in Canada''s single bloodiest day of the Italian Campaign. But the sacrifice of young Canadians during the twenty-four days of relentless combat it took to clear the valley paved the way for the Allies to take Rome.

In this third volume of his critically acclaimed trilogy tracing Canada''s involvement in World War II''s Italian campaign, Mark Zuehlke vividly recounts the Battle of the Gothic Line. The line was meant to be impregnable, a final fortified position that would enable the battered German divisions to bring the Allied advance up Italy''s boot to a decisive halt. On August 25, 1944, it fell to the soldiers of I Canadian Corps to spearhead the British Eighth Army''s attempt to rip a hole in the line. For the next twenty-eight days, the men of 1st Canadian Infantry Division and 5th Canadian Armoured Division slugged their way through a rugged killing ground in the most costly battle of the campaign. The Gothic Line portrays the horror, the fear, the courage, and ultimately the glory that Canadians won on this remote battlefield.