Books about War World I inevitably tends toward lessons about grossly incompetent leadership. This story is set in the last year of the war and involves an American unit that was scapegoated by a few senior commanders in order to advance their careers, at the cost of thousands of lives. It's the fate of the war in miniature. Walker uncovered the scandal in the archives and has brought it to full light for the first time. There are quite a few moving parts, people of various ranks, units of different sizes, various places of battle. This is not a problem if you own the book as there are useful pictures, maps, charts as guides. However for an audiobook it is easy to become lost, despite having on of the best narrators around Robertson Dean, it helps to have a copy of the book on hand. ( )

If I could, I'd rate this book at about 3.75. Largely following the experiences of Harry Parkin in the 79th Division, who ultimately became a battalion commander in that unit, we are given a chronicle of the division's hard luck in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Hard luck because as a very green and incompletely trained formation it was given one of the hardest jobs that could be assigned, storming the fortress alluded to in the sub-title, and, amazingly, managed to accomplish this mission; only far behind schedule.

This is where the betrayal and treachery comes in. Clued in by an inscription made in a book by Parkin himself, over the years Walker rediscovered a forgotten coverup, as the 79th was supposed to have support by a more experienced formation, only Robert Bullard, an ambitious and selfish officer gunning for army-level command, had decided that the most profitable way that he could spend the first day of the campaign was to drive his corps as far and as fast as he could in the pursuit of three stars. Had Bullard followed his orders and assisted the 79th there's a chance that this might have been a much easier campaign for the American forces. That this cock-up was allowed to stand unsanctioned was due to a desire by the powers-that-be (mostly "Black Jack" Pershing) to manage the public optics of the last and most bloody American battle of the war when disillusionment was setting in fast.

Having not read Allan Millett's biography of Bullard, I don't know how much of this is old news, but for most people this will be a reminder of why the general public came out of the Great War experience so bitter. ( )