This book offers the reader eyewitness accounts of the battle for Europe vividly conveying 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. - 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 - would their will to resist ever be broken as they faced overwhelming odds. - 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. - The author has assembled the fighting men's individual stories from material such as diaries, interviews and battalion journals and 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.