Nothing Less Than Full Victory: Americans at War in Europe, 1944-1945

Edward G. Miller

Jul 2013 · Naval Institute Press

About this ebook

At the onset of World War II, the U.S. Army was a third-rate ground force of 145,000 with some generals who still believed in the relevance of horse cavalry. Its soldiers were untrained, its doctrine out of date, and its weapons hopelessly obsolete. Four years later, the U.S. Army was engaged in a global war with a force of more than 8 million men armed with modern weapons and equipment. Nothing Less than Full Victory is the story of how American ground troops in Europe managed to defeat one of the most proficient armies in history. The author, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, draws on his twenty years of experience in military logistics and eight years of scholarly research to examine the Army s remarkable transformation. Focusing on areas rarely considered in other books on World War II, Edward G. Miller analyzes the performance of American soldiers in the 1944 45 campaign in western Europe against a background of logistics, organization, training, and deployment. In doing so, this groundbreaking work refutes decades of assumptions to reset the historical framework for comparison of U.S. and German performance over the course of the campaign. Lieutenant Colonel Miller s skillful melding of little-known individual and small-unit combat action with the various facets of generating, deploying, and projecting power allows the reader to understand as never before the true significance of what took place. This book is published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army.

About the author

Edward G. Miller is a retired army logistics officer and Department of the Army designated military historian. Prior to his retirement, he served for twenty years in a variety of planning and operational assignments, including posts in Germany and the Pentagon. His first book, A Dark and Bloody Ground: The Hurtgen Forest and Roer River Dams 1944-1945, won the 1996 Forest C. Pogue Award from the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and was a featured selection of the Military Book Club. He has published several magazine and journal articles and has appeared on national TV.