Name: 11 Days in December
ISBN: 9780451223173

Stanley Weintraub

An account of the 1944 Battle of the Bulge between Allied forces and Hitler's surviving army describes how Germany surprised Eisenhower's generals by breaking through Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest, sparking a brutal ten-day conflict that proved pivotal to the war's outcome. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Christmas at the Bulge, 1944

11 Days in December

Darren S. Layne

Weintraub makes it clear that this is no scholarly military history of the Bulge campaign, but I can't in good conscience describe this as even an effective or successful narrative history of incidents in and around the Ardennes during Christmas of 1944. The text within the book is loosely connected by an implied timeline which is reflected in the chapter headings, but the paragraphs within are disjointed, factoid-like, and many are even just plain superfluous. I kept thinking that the book would have been better organized by bullet-points, as that would have more clearly presented Weintraub's extensively-researched notes about the relationships between commanding generals, meals eaten during Christmas on the front lines, and reflections of individual soldiers, as opposed to stringing together dozens of unrelated facts about the subject at hand. In short, I felt that every paragraph in this book was like starting a new chapter, and that made the slog through it incredibly tedious and rather unenjoyable. In addition to this, the two reproduced operational maps within the book were virtually useless to even the most scrutinizing reader, as many of the places and units mentioned throughout the book were never seen on them. This contributed to the feeling of being removed from what the author was trying to describe and obscured any clear flow of information through the text.

I understand that Weintraub is a celebrated and prolific author, but this is my first of his books and I'm not optimistic about my chances with his others, many of which have subjects that are highly interesting to me. I would commend the author on his research, but would direct him to a format that is more befitting to his presentation of information, perhaps along the lines of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke or Studs Terkel's The Good War. Both of these have disassociated paragraphs that describe pointed happenings, memories, or vignettes of the events in WWII and read much more clearly and in a satisfying manner.

11 Days in December Christmas at the Bulge, 1944