The famed "Battle of the Bulge"-the beginning of the end of Germany's Western Front offensive-was waged by thousands of mostly untested young American GIs. A last-word account of Hitler's final desperate gamble draws on fresh research and features rare combat photos. Four critical weeks in December 1944 and January 1945 unfold in day-by-day, yard-by-yard combat. The complex battle course becomes clearer than ever before, as an expert with more than 40 books on World War II painstakingly points to the decisive actions (some intentional, some accidental) that broke the back of the Nazi effort to stop the Allied drive from Normandy to the Rhine. In the years since that fateful December of 1944, at least two dozen books have appeared, devoted solely to telling this story. Yet it can be told again and told well. Forty, retired director and curator of the Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset, and author of numerous books on tank warfare in World War II, applies his well-honed narrative skills to a reexamination of this well-known battle. With an attention to detail that informs but does not bore, Forty reveals his remarkable knowledge of the intricacies of German and U.S. armored and infantry tactics in the Ardennes. Greatly assisting the reader is an abundance of battle maps and the charts showing the size, organization, and equipment of all the opposing forces.