When the odds were even

October 1944: Allied forces have pierced the perimeter of Hitler's Festung Europa and are poised for the plunge into Germany itself. The Wehrmacht is reeling, but as the German army's lines shorten, defenses - especially in the rugged Vosges Mountains of Northeast France - stiffen. Author Keith Bonn takes the reader back to that time, a time when there was hope that the war would be over by Christmas. He focuses on the lesser-known story of the U.S. Seventh Army and its campaign to breach the Vosges Mountains defenses occupied by some of the German army's and Waffen SS's finest combat formations. Bonn compares the training and doctrine of the U.S. and German allies, the strengths and weaknesses of the commanders on both sides and provides a lively narrative account of the campaign itself. He also places the campaign in historical perspective, examining the terrain and the battles and campaigns waged over it for more than a millennium. Remarkably, Seventh Army's winter victory marks the first time in military history that an attacker, by force of arms, had vanquished a defender entrenched in the Vosges. Critics of American tactical and operational doctrine and training have long maintained that the American soldier was no match for Hitler's Aryan superman on the battlefield. Author Bonn eloquently refines this claim and shows how the GI was able to defeat his vaunted Wehrmacht opponent without the aid of fighter-bombers and massed armored formations; how, despite terrible climatic conditions and on terrain that clearly favored a numerically superior defender, he ousted Hitler's legions from their Vosges bastions When the Odds Were Even.