Bøker av Edward G. Lengel

Uncover the larger-than-life story of World War I's "Lost Battalion" and the men who survived the ordeal, triumphed in battle, and fought the demons that lingered.In the first week of October, 1918, six hundred men attacked into Europe's forbidding Argonne Forest. Against all odds, they surged through enemy lines—alone. They were soon surrounded and besieged. As they ran out of ammunition, water, and food, the doughboys withstood constant bombardment and relentless enemy assaults. Seven days later, only 194 soldiers from the original unit walked out of the forest. The stand of the US Army's "Lost Battalion" remains an unprecedented display of heroism under fire.Never in Finer Company tells the stories of four men whose lives were forever changed by the ordeal: Major Charles Whittlesey, a lawyer dedicated to serving his men at any cost; Captain George McMurtry, a New York stockbroker who becomes a tower of strength under fire; Corporal Alvin York, a country farmer whose famous exploits help rescue his beleaguered comrades; and Damon Runyon, an intrepid newspaper man who interviews the survivors and weaves their experiences into the American epic. Emerging from the patriotic frenzy that sent young men "over there," each of these four men trod a unique path to the October days that engulfed them—and continued to haunt them as they struggled to find peace.Uplifting and compelling, Never in Finer Company is a deeply moving and dramatic story on an epic scale.

On September 26, 1918, more than one million American soldiers prepared to assault the German-held Meuse-Argonne region of France. This book offers accounts of combat, studded with portraits of remarkable soldiers like Pershing, Harry Truman, George Patton, and Alvin York.

With volume 24 of the Revolutionary War Series, the conflict enters a new decade. New Year's Day 1780 finds Washington in winter quarters at Morristown, N.J., having established his headquarters at the Ford mansion there one month earlier. During the weeks covered by this volume, the Continental army experienced the harshest winter of the war.

November 1917. The American troops were poorly trained, deficient in military equipment and doctrine, not remotely ready for armed conflict on a large scaleand they'd arrived on the Western front to help the French push back the Germans. The story of what happened nextthe American Expeditionary Force's trial by fire on the brutal battlefields of Franceis told in full for the first time in Thunder and Flames.Where history has given us some perspective on the individual battles of the periodat Cantigny, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood, the Marne River, Soissons, and little-known Fismettethey appear here as part of a larger series of interconnected operations, all conducted by Americans new to the lethal killing fields of World War I and guided by the battle-tested French. Following the AEF from their initial landing to their emergence as an independent army in late September 1918, this book presents a complex picture of how, learning warfare on the fly, sometimes with devastating consequences, the American force played a critical role in blunting and then rolling back the German army's drive toward Paris. The picture that emerges is at once sweeping in scope and rich in detail, with firsthand testimony conjuring the real mud and blood of the combat that Edward Lengel so vividly describes. Official reports and documents provide the strategic and historical context for these ground-level accounts, from the perspective of the Germans as well as the Americans and French. Battle by battle, Thunder and Flames reveals the cost of the inadequacies in U.S. training, equipment, logistics, intelligence, and command, along with the rifts in the Franco-American military marriage. But it also shows how, by trial and error, through luck and ingenuity, the AEF swiftly became the independent fighting force of General John "e;Blackjack"e; Pershing's long-held dreamits divisions ultimately among the most combat-effective military forces to see the war through.

This comprehensive annotated bibliography includes over 1,400 references to memoirs, diaries, and letters by soldiers and civilians from all belligerent nations during World War I.