Last Roll Call
Joseph Balkoski--hailed by USA Today as "the top living D-Day historian"--concludes his monumental series on the U.S. 29th Infantry Division in World War II with this triumphant book following the division through the war's final months, a period during which the crumbling of German resistance did not mean the going would become easy for the 29th. In January 1945 the 29th Division occupied a static position along the Roer River just inside Germany--400 miles and seven months from Omaha Beach, where the Blue and Gray had landed on D-Day. A month later, the 29th was back in action, this time as part of Operation Grenade, one of the Allies' largest and most successful offensives of the war--and also one of the most difficult, involving the crossing of the icy, flood-swollen Roer against an enemy that had been entrenched on the far bank for months. Following that assault, the division participated in the U.S. Ninth Army's weeklong blitzkrieg to the Rhine River.^ Held in reserve during March, the division occupied Joseph Goebbels's castle before crossing the Rhine and helping to reduce the Ruhr Pocket, where the 29ers got their first taste of military-government duties. In mid-April, as the northernmost U.S. Army division in the West, the 29th swept toward the Elbe River, halting there to wait for the Russians, even though Berlin was only 40 miles--a mere day or tow--away. After VE-Day, the 29th held Bremen while the soldiers began to trickle back home. The last contingent, including commander Charles Gerhardt, did not return to the States until January 1946. The Last Roll Call stands alone as an exciting, emotional narrative of men at war. At the same time it completes Balkoski's unique fear of scholarship and storytelling" the start-to-finish account, broad as well as deep, of the 29th Infantry Division's experience in World War II and the story-in-microcosm of the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II, from D-Day to VE-Day.^ This is World War II history at its finest. -- Inside jacket flaps.
