Towards the end of a highly laudatory review by Max Hastings of The Guns at Last Light by Rick Anderson (The Wall Street Journal, May 11), a monumental military history of the U.S. role in WW2, there is this paragraph:
“The last weeks of the European war were anti-climactic because the Russians were going to get to Berlin first. Patton disgraced himself by dispatching an armored column behind enemy lines to rescue his son-in-law in a POW camp at Hammelburg. This fiasco cost scores of lives, but Eisenhower could not bear to sack a commander so close to victory.”
