When Eternities Met - E-book - ePub

When Eternities Met is the true story of the wartime odyssey of five young lives, two boys and a girl coming of age in a small town in the American Midwest and another teenage boy and girl mired in the 'bloodlands' of Central Europe. Their vantage point illuminates a Second World War not found in the great histories, a war of ambiguity and ambivalence. It is the war as it was for many, if not for most.
When Eternities Met delivers a fresh and bracing perspective on the familiar, from the Allied bombing campaign to the Ardennes and the crossing of the Rhine at Remagen. A ground-level spotlight is cast on the war's lesser-known, including an American massacre of thousands of civilian refugees that takes less than an hour, a mutiny by Ukrainian Waffen-SS troops in France who then join the local resistance, and a young death that turns a brash joke over some beers into a lifetime promise.
A wartime chroncile with a particular twenty-first century resonance, When Eternities Met is drawn from numerous interviews, hundreds of letters and other personal documents, and archival research in France, Germany, London, and Washington.