Patton's Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division

 

The greatest single combat force in American history? With all due respect to every other fighting unit since 1776, when thinking back over all of the United States military involvements, any historian would be hard pressed to remember a body of fighting men who were comparable. World War I certainly did not see any, nor did Korea nor Vietnam nor the nineteenth-century wars. Certainly, the 4th Armored Division was the best World War II detachment in Europe as far as celerity and persistence were concerned.This, then, is one soldier"s attempt to show why, in fact, Patton said: "There has never been such a superb fighting organization as the 4th Armored Division." And why Bradley and MacAuliffe and Maxwell Taylor woudn't have argued. Nat Frankel"s purpose was not to write a formal history of the division but to give the fighting man"s account of World War II, to render the texture of war in general and more specifically to give some feeling of what it was like to follow the 4th Armored from Normandy across the Western European Front into Prague.

 

Nat Frankel & Larry Smith

Hardcover with d/w 198pp Hawthorn Books/Book Club Edition 1978

 

Vg/Near vg

Book Code:  SH1722