Follow in the footsteps of history--and experience the landmarks firsthand--with this comprehensive travel guide to the European Theater in World War II. Fascinating historical commentary is juxtaposed with insider information on what to see.

This guide brings history to life with richly detailed, engaging descriptions of the most important battle sites, museums, and reenactuments.

This indispensible guidebook leads war buffs and casual travelers alike to the 25 best battle sites, memorials, plane wrecks, and relics of World War II.

A grand tour of the secret places - some known and many unknown - where WWII history was made.

A Must for anyone planning on visiting the Concentration Camps of Europe. Contains street maps showing exact directions to the sites, walking routes, road signs, bus and train information, opening hours and what remains of the camps today. Includes 45 Street Maps Over 160 Pictures Plus...many useful Websites

THE BOOK SHOWN ON THIS PAGE IS THE UPDATED AND EXPANDED SECOND EDITION, published in December 2016. This new version adds tours of WWII sites in Sicily/southern Italy, and updates the descriptions of WWII sites in central and northern Italy. It also adds locations along the Adriatic coast, where the Eighth Army fought many battles. Altogether the new edition describes almost 200 sites. The guidebook closes with excerpts from the journal of a prisoner of war who spent months in Italian POW camps. Please note that book reviews prior to December 2016 refer to the FIRST edition, published in 2010 and no longer in print (although some first-edition copies are still for sale on the Amazon website).

“A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.