On 4 January 1945, General 'Blood and Guts' Patton confided gloomily to his diary, 'We can still lose this war.' The Germans were attacking in Eastern France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. General Eisenhower's allied armies had lost over 300 000 men in battle (with a similar number of non-battle casualties) and they were still in the same positions they had first captured three months before. Would the German will to resist never be broken? Whiting has assembled the fighting men's individual stories. From material such as interviews and battalion journals he has built up an authentic picture of the Allied fighting man, so that the reader sees and feels what it was actually like to be there. Whiting vividly conveys the experiences and responses of the ordinary soldier who knew that for some of his comrades the paths that would lead to glory could also lead to death...