Rating: 
Summary: VERY DETAILED ACCOUNT OF BULGE
Review: The detailed account of the Battle of the Bulge is well written and exhaustive. The description of the personalities involved are excellent particularly given the author's personal connection to most of them. Overall an outstanding read. The only drawback is that at times I found the geography and the various unit displacements hard to follow even with the sector maps provided.
Rating:
Summary: A very thorough account of a complex battle
Review: The detailed account of the Battle of the Bulge is well written and exhaustive. The description of the personalities involved are excellent particularly given the author's personal connection to most of them. Overall an outstanding read. The only drawback is that at times I found the geography and the various unit displacements hard to follow even with the sector maps provided.
Rating: 
Summary: Stirring & Interesting Look At The Battle of The Bulge
Review: There is certainly no shortage of excellent and detailed titles dealing with this subject, from Stephen Ambrose's own "Citizen Soldiers" to John Toland's "Battle" to Charles B. MacDonald's "A Time For Trumpets", yet this, too, is an excellent and inspiring cover of the events leading up to and including the Battle of the Bulge. This book follows in the vein of detailing at the unit level what the war was like for the man on the ground, and incorporates a lot of first person testimony a la Stephen Ambrose. Thus, the reader is treated to a very thorough look at what the moment-to-moment experience was like from a number of the men who were there to fight it. As Col. Eisenhower was also a career military man following in his famous father's footsteps, he speaks with obvious authority and knowledge about the multitude of factors leading to the engagement on both sides, and one gains an appreciation for his expertise if not for his somewhat pedantic and limited writing skills. Still, the book is an interesting and accessible reading experience. Of course, since I had already read a number of other titles covering the same ground, much of the material was repetitive, but my impression after finishing it was that "The Bitter Woods" is a very authoritative single volume on the campaign, and that it competes favorably with all the others, although I should not want to so limit myself to a single such source for this, one of the finest moments in American war history. It is stirring to read about the first hand experiences of the tired, overextended, and under armed units of the American forces as they first engage the overwhelming German juggernaut. Beaten to a pulp, they regroup, and surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered, in a desperate hand to hand combat, fight back with hellish ferocity and beat the German forces back. This account puts to the lie the idea that the only reason we won the war was superior number and endless logistics. Deprived of those two advantages during the extremely bad weather during the worst part of the battle, the U.S. Army simply outfought their German attackers. I personally would recommend you read this book hand in hand with the Toland book ("Battle"), for together they provide a really complete and quite varied look at all of the aspects of one of the most tenaciously fought battles on the western front of the European theater of the Second World War. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: A well-written general history.
Review: This is a very well-written history of one the most famous battles of World War II which was written for a general audience. Those looking for a David Glantz-like, academic study of the campaign should pass this one by. Eisenhower is a very skilled writer, and his description of the first weeks of the German offensive is very well done. The book does have some problems. Being the son of the former commander of the ETO and President, Eisenhower had access to interview for his research many of the top commanders who fought in the battle. However, that strength could also be a weakness because most of those commanders interviewed were friends and comrades of his father. Thus, Eisenhower is rarely if ever critical of any of the commanders despite the fact that serious errors were made on the eve of the campaign on the part of the American high command. Also the book is full of GI slang such as "burp guns," which may have been recognizable to readers in the early 60's, but not so in the 21st century.
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