THE LAST BATTLE: WHEN U.S. and GERMAN SOLDIERS JOINED FORCES in the WANING HOURS of WORLD WAR II in EUROPE (audiobook) by Stephen Harding
Published in 2013 by Blackstone Audio.
Read by Joe Barrett.
Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes.
Unabridged.
At the very end of World War II there was an extraordinary pairing of German soldiers and American soldiers to protect French dignitaries and celebrities being held in an Austrian castle prison.
How late was it in the war? Hitler was already dead. The Allies were well into Germany and Americans had pushed all of the way into Austria.
But, that does not mean that the German military was without power. They had fantastic equipment and there were still plenty of "true believer" SS troops insisting that the war wasn't over - or it it was over, the Allies should pay for every inch of territory until the last German soldier fell.
The unlikely alliance happens when a Austrian-born German officer comes to an agreement with the leaders of the local anti-Nazi resistance movement in Austria. Technically, Austria was a part of Germany but it had only been a part of Germany for 7 years when Germany absorbed independent Austria. It seemed like a popular move at the time, but World War II started about a year and a half later and it had brought disaster and ruin to Austria.
And, some members of the German military thought that killing off these VIPs would be a fantastic way to deliver one more bit of cruelty in an obviously lost cause.
****
This audiobook has some issues.
The production is fine, although I am not a big fan of the reader, Joe Barrett.
The biggest thing is the very slow pacing of the book. The title of the book is "The Last Battle" and the actual fighting is really just a few minutes of a 7 hour audiobook. I did not measure it, but my impression is that the author spent more time describing the history of the castle and various facelifts, upgrades remodels and repurposing that had been done over the years than the time he spent describing the actual fighting.
It felt like he was packing the book with filler to make it longer, like a freshman college student might do to make sure his essay is exactly a certain number of pages in length. My favorite example of this filler is the fact that the author actually took the time to note that handrails were installed on a certain staircase during a remodel in the early 1900s. That struck me as odd when I heard it (because who actually cares?) so I listened carefully for a time when the handrails might become a part of the story. I had imagined that the VIPs might have removed the handrails and used them to barricade a door or something. No luck. It was just filler.
There were long biographies of each of the French VIPs. There was no particular reason to do this. They could have been edited down because they were not important to the story except that they were the people to be rescued. Saying that they were former members of the French government and various other celebrities, including a world famous tennis star would have been enough. I guarantee that the American officers that decided to save them had less information than the author gives and those officers decided to go join forces with a German unit and go out of their way to save them.
So, I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5 because it really should have been nothing more than a very long article in a history magazine or a chapter in a book called "Improbable Stories of World War II".
This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST BATTLE: WHEN U.S. and GERMAN SOLDIERS JOINED FORCES in the WANING HOURS of WORLD WAR II in EUROPE (audiobook) by Stephen Harding.
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