The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan

The Last Battle

by Cornelius Ryan

Collins, 1966, [First Edition], black and white photographic plates, illustrated endpapers (maps), hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, previous owners gift inscription on front flyleaf, clipped dustjacket shows some edge and shelf wear with some rubbing, bumping, chipping, creasing and tears (see photographs)

“On Monday, April 16, 1945, a stupefying artillery barrage signalled the opening of the Russian attack against the capital of the Thousand Year Reich.  Russian troops were then less than thirty-eight miles from Berlin’s centre.  In fourteen days, the Fuhrer would be dead.  In twenty-one days the war would be over.
Yet some forty-five miles to the west, and with the last great prize of the war within their grasp, advance units of the U.S. Ninth Army were angrily and reluctantly turning back.  ‘Berlin,’ the Allied Supreme Commander had declared, ‘is no longer a military objective.’
The Last Battle is the story of those three weeks in which the city of Berlin, gutted, smouldering, terrorized, yet still miraculously alive, was the focal point of millions of lives: the last obstacle of the triumphant Allies, the last defence for the Germans, the last refuge for the Fuhrer, and the setting for innumerable dramas of history and of ordinary lives.”