"American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were th..." — 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.

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.

The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.