“That was a pretty fine Army that we had in 1965. By 1973, it was in tatters. It …” — Rick Atkinson

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.

American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen.

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. That's almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.