As the chief planner for General Marshall, and co-author of the Victory Plan, General Wedemeyer had a truly significant hand in shaping and directing the Allied War effort against the Fascist powers. In these brilliant, excellently written memoirs he reveals the planning and execution of Grand Strategy on a global scale that toppled Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. ““The Second World War,” says historian Walter Millis, “was administered.”...As a war planner in Washington from 1940 into 1943 I was intimately involved in an attempt to see the war whole—and even after I had moved on to Asia, where I served successively on Lord Louis Mountbatten’s staff in India and as U.S. commander in the China Theater, I was still close to the problems of adapting Grand Strategy to a conflict of global dimensions. It was inevitable, then, that the subject of Grand Strategy should predominate in this book. I was not deprived of my own share of war experience from close up, but my most strenuous battles were those of the mind—of trying, as we in Washington’s planning echelons saw it, to establish a correct and meaningful Grand Strategy which would have resulted in a fruitful peace and a decent post-war world. There were many obstacles in the way of developing a meaningful strategy, of assuring that our abundant means, material and spiritual, would be used to achieve worthy human ends. First, there was the pervasive influence of the Communists, who had their own plans for utilizing the war as a springboard to world domination. Second, there was the obstinacy of that grand old man, Winston Churchill, who, as we soldiers felt, could never reconcile his own concepts of Grand Strategy with sound military decisions. Because we had to contend with the machinations of Stalin on the one hand and with the bulldog tenacity of Churchill on the other, this book has had to be harsh in some of its personal assessments.”-Foreword

Hailed as "masterly" (Wall Street Journal) and a "monumental achievement" (Douglas Brinkley), this book tells the riveting, true story of the group of elite US and Canadian soldiers who sacrificed everything to accomplish a crucial but nearly impossible WWII mission. In December of 1943, as Nazi forces sprawled around the world and the future of civilization hung in the balance, a group of highly trained U.S. and Canadian soldiers from humble backgrounds was asked to do the impossible: capture a crucial Nazi stronghold perched atop stunningly steep cliffs. The men were a rough-and-ready group, assembled from towns nested in North America's most unforgiving terrain, where many of them had struggled through the Great Depression relying on canny survival skills and the fearlessness of youth. Brought together by the promise to take part in the military's most elite missions, they formed a unique brotherhood tested first by the crucible of state-of-the-art training—including skiing, rock climbing, and parachuting—and then tragically by the vicious fighting they would face. The early battle in the Italian theatre for the strategic fort cost the heroic U.S.-Canadian commando unit—their first special forces unit ever assembled—enormous casualties. Yet the victory put them in position to continue their drive into Italy, setting the stage for the Allies' resurgence toward victory in WWII. The unit, with its vast range of capabilities and mission-specific exercises, became a model for the "Green Berets" and other special forces groups that would go on to accomplish America's most challenging undertakings behind enemy lines. Knitting first-hand accounts seamlessly into the narrative-drawing on interviews with surviving members and their families; the memoirs, letters, and diaries of Forcemen; and declassified documents in the American, Canadian, British, and German archives—The Force tells a story that is as deeply personal as it is inspiring.