Crumbling Empire: The German Defeat in the East, 1944

By late 1942, Hitler had annexed an area more than 20 times the size of pre-war Germany, most of it in the East. But in the summer of 1944, Stalin sent six million men, 9,000 tanks, 16,000 fighters and bombers and over 12,800 guns and rocket launchers into battle against the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. In Crumbling Empire: The German Defeat in the East, 1944 Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. (Why Hitler?), a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot and professor of geography at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, covers the battles that ensued on a division-by-division, tracking troop movements and setbacks, and through to the battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of Budapest. ( July 30)