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The Last Battle, by Cornelius Ryan
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The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler's Third Reich.
The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater. The last offensive against Hitler's Third Reich, it devastated one of Europe's historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war's bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come.
The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan's compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, "to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to endure more militarily correct than to win."
The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.
- Sales Rank: #34423 in Audible
- Published on: 2012-04-27
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 950 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
75 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
A Fantastic Read About The Final Battle For Berlin!
By Barron Laycock
Few battles in history have been waged with greater ferocity, desperation, bravery, and atrocity than the battle for Berlin at the end of the Second World War. No one can tell a story better than Ryan, and he is at his very best here. In this book Cornelius Ryan brings his masterful powers of description and discerning eye for extraordinary detail to bear with force and elegance. This is a wonderful book, immensely informative, densely packed with facts and figures, and told in a compelling way by a best-selling author who can vividly recount seemingly countless tales of the most ordinary of individuals caught in the unforgiving and often deadly embrace of total war.
By this stage Hitler had begun to withdraw farther into the recesses of the fabled German Chancellery complex, while around and above him raged an endless barrage by Soviet artillery, British, American and Canadian bombs, and the clashes of German and Russian tanks and armor. This then, is the final epic struggle amid the ashes and ruins of a once proud and great metropolis, the chaotic and blood-curdling death throes of the Nazi regime. Fearing the terrible wrath and ritual rape and murder of rampaging Russians, German forces tended to withdraw from the western front in an attempt to either surrender outright to the Americans or British, or to let these more "civilized" western forces take Berlin before capitulating the hated Russians. Hitler had expressly forbidden any kind of surrender, intending this to be a fight to the death. Indeed, the stage was set for some of the most horrific excesses of the war.
This, then, is a riveting and well-told story told down to the final exciting detail of how this battle of titans was fought, with an amazing degree of description of the "on the ground, as it is happening" kind of story telling. Of course, Ryan excels at this, as proven with not only this book but by his other best sellers, as well. Written with compassion, it recognizes and empathizes with a sensitivity for the terrible ordeal faced by individual civilians who through bad luck and circumstance happened to be standing in the path of an oncoming maelstrom. The pages are filled with the struggle of all to survive, sometimes quite against the odds, and the pages gleam with example after example of single acts of defiance and courage, acts to help to save someone else, often at great personal risk.
The narrative of the book dramatizes the catastrophic and irreversible consequences of war, for both combatants and noncombatants alike, and helps the reader to appreciate the ways in which the events as they unfolded in the battle for Berlin, the stage of European and world history were both positively and negatively affected. This is a book all students of modern history should read, and one I highly recommend for your bookshelf.
63 of 68 people found the following review helpful.
Death throe of the Third Reich.
By Richard P. Mayhew
Mr. Ryan was the Stephen Ambrose of his time. The books THE LONGEST DAY and A BRIDGE TOO FAR stand as World War Two classics, these books were even made into 2 pretty fine movies. THE LAST BATTLE which was re-released in May 1995 to comemorate the end of the European conflict in WW2 is another of Mr. Ryan's books, it is an outstanding and hair-raising account of the final orgasm of violence involved in the death of Nazi Germany. The author presents all sides to this conflict American, British, Russian and German as the allied armies rush in from all sides to dismember the Reich. The author was able to interview personalities involved from top Soviet generals down to a simple milkman who made his daily runs through the Berlin suburbs which were to become a hellish landscape of slaughter, rape and mass destruction. The Soviets were cooperative in letting Mr. Ryan interview key personalities and view important documents, but I agree with Mr. Ryan that they likely held back several important aspects of their part in the battle such as the existence of The Rape Memo which was an instruction read to Soviet troops encouraging them to put the German in his place and claim the victors spoils by raping German women. There is almost an entire chapter filled with rape stories, horrifying stuff. The meat of the story involves the clash of Soviet and German arms. With the destruction of Army Group Center in the spring of 1945 most German commanders knew that the best thing they could do was to hold off the Soviet onslaught long enough to allow German civilians and then slodiers enough time to escape west, towards the Americans and British, some German commanders even hoped that by buying time in the east the Anglo-Allies would reach Berlin first. What they did not know was that the Anglos were not coming to the rescue, ordered to stop in an amazing chain of events that 50 years hindsight clearly shows as a mistake. In any case Hitler decided that Berlin should be a "Fortress" which was his favored term for a no surrender, no withdrawl fight to the death. Berlin had little protection, the city was never really fortified. The troops protecting it were tired, ill-equiped veterans, old men of the Volksturm or Hitler Youth, the were some well equiped and fanatic Waffen SS formations (several were foreign volunteer groups) in the area but as the command and control structure was destroyed they could do little but local holding actions. The combat descriptions are outstanding, the descriptions of the Soviet build-up for the assualt are particularly chilling, rockets, mortars, tanks even heavy artillery being used as a sniper weapon. There are descriptions of roving SS execution squads, Allied bombing raids, suicides to avoid capture and/or rape. I found the descriptions of the gigantic Flak Towers facinating, these 13 story forts complete with generators, water supply and even hospital were able to house about 10,000 soldiers and civilians. There are before and after photos which I have never seen before. One can almost imagine Hitler pounding his fist on the table "Where is Steiner? Where is Wenke?" I highly recommend the film THE BUNKER to anyone reading this outstanding book, they must have used it to produce the screen play.
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Another Ryan WWII classic
By D. Keating
Before Stephen Ambrose took center stage as the best current historian of WWII, there was Cornelius Ryan. Mr. Ryan wrote a trio of classic books about WWII: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and this book. The first two were made into movies, and are commonly known. They cover two of the most important European theatre campaigns that involved the US and British forces. If you have not read either one of those books, I highly recommend both of them.
The Last Battle is the least known book of the trio. None the less, it is a classic. In it, Ryan gives a gripping account of the battle for Berlin. He does an excellent job of introducing the scenario that lead to this truly horrifying and desperate battle. Just like his other books, he weaves a captivating narrative that takes the reader from the planning sessions of the Red Army, to Hitler's bunker, on to the streets of Berlin where the battle was actually fought. He covers this conflict from many angles (Generals, soldiers, civilians, Germans, Soviets, etc.) and gives the reader an accurate account of what happened during this battle. As always, the amount of research and personal interviews he did for this book are quite impressive.
Mr. Ryan does an excellent job of building the battle drama into the fury that erupted when the Soviets finally rolled into the city of Berlin. The payback that the Red Army gives the Wehrmacht, the city, and the civilian population of Berlin is a real eye-opener. If you have never read anything about this battle (like myself), you may be shocked when you learn the details. As Ryan points out, the Soviets saw this campaign as the one opportunity to avenge their losses on the Eastern Front (especially in places like Stalingrad), and they took full advantage of the situation (to include many heinous acts against innocent civilians). Just like when the British and Americans bombed Dresden, the Soviets wanted to teach the Nazis, and the German people, a lesson they would never forget.
I first bought this book because of the author. I had some interest about the battle because I visited Berlin as a young man back when the wall was still in place. Once I started this book I became totally engrossed with it, and finished in a few days. I highly recommend it to any Cornelius Ryan fan. If you liked his other books, you will definitely enjoy this one also. Also, this book is great for anyone wanting to learn about the battle that sealed the fate of the Nazi regime.
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