Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army From the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany.

• Author: Bailery, Charles W.

Stephen Ambrose has written a lot of good books, including a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon and no fewer than six books about Dwight D. Eisenhower as soldier and president. Last year his account of the Lewis and Clark expedition won high critical praise. Now, with Citizen Soldiers, the story of the defeat of Germany in 1944 and 1645, he completes a magisterial two-volume account of the climactic year of World War II in Western Europe.

Most Americans today are too young to remember first-hand that final year of the European war. Older people tend to think of it in terms of the successful landings on D-Day, followed by the liberation of Paris and the surrender of Germany. Some also recall the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last great counteroffensive in December 1944.

But almost no one except the surviving participants has any comprehension of the vicious, unrelenting, blood-stained conflict that continued through every day and every night of the 11 months from D-Day to the German surrender on V-E Day. Citizen Soldiers fills that gap. In the process, Ambrose has produced not only m authoritative history but a powerful and painful anti-war testament as well.

As the title suggests, Ambrose tells his story through the eyes and voices of the front-line troops -- the captains and lieutenants, the sergeants and corporals and privates who did all of the fighting and most of the living. These young men, many of them less than a year out of high school, are the heroes of this book. Ambrose sets out his main themes at the very beginning:

Normandy was a soldier's battle. It

belonged to the riflemen, machine

gunners, mortarmen, tankers, and

artillery-men who were on the front lines. There

was no room for maneuver. ... There

was a simplicity to the fighting: for the

Germans, to hold; for the Americans, to

attack. Where they would hold or

attack required no decision-making: it

was always the next village or field ... .

Ambrose is deservedly kind to his front-line subjects. On the other hand, he is coldly critical of some strategic judgments by top commanders -- including Eisenhower -- and of the intelligence staffs at higher headquarters whose misjudgments and omissions unnecessarily raised the bloodshed in the front lines.

Ambrose is particularly critical of what he labels "one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time." The failure of planners to warn the Allied assault forces that the Normandy countryside they were about to enter was...