The Americans Are Coming: Book 4 of the European War

For a year the Germans have used it as a warning. In 1943 it stops being a warning and becomes a weather report.

On the fourth of August, 1942, the first American transports come out of the dark off Cap Blanc, and a captain named James Whitfield stands at the rail and does what four generations of his family have done at the start of every enterprise. He counts. Eleven transports. Nine escorts he can identify and two he cannot. Behind him, an ocean away, an arsenal is turning itself into an army at a rate no staff in Europe believes.

The Germans believe it. That is the trouble.

In Washington, a general just returned from the Pacific takes a third star on the White House lawn, walks into the Joint Chiefs of Staff ninety minutes later, and asks to decline the assignment. The troops that are ready to sail, George Patton tells them, are not the troops that will stop the Germans. He wants a gun that works, a tank that can kill what it will actually meet, and trucks, thousands of trucks, because the enemy still moves at the speed of a horse and nobody has yet built a war on that. He leaves the room with more than he came for.

Then, on a desert track in January, a jeep overturns. No shell, no mine, just the ordinary friction of war taking the decisive man off the board at the decisive hour.

What happens next is not a defeat at the hands of a better enemy. It is worse than that. A careful, competent, entirely reasonable commander fights the battle from a tunnel seventy miles behind his own front, in a private code that nobody forward can read, and Rommel needs one afternoon to see it. At a nameless pass the Americans call the gate, a green corps is taught what it costs to be commanded by correspondence, and the men at the guns pay the difference.

And in Berlin the fear of Patton grows, precisely because his absence is what let them win.

From the humiliation comes the forging. A survivor writes fourteen honest pages that nobody with stars wants to read. A general comes back up the line standing in an open car four days out of a hospital bed, moves his headquarters to somewhere it can see the sky, and starts again. Across the Mediterranean, Rommel wins the last battle he can afford and saves an army for Europe. Across the Eastern Front, a Panzer sergeant from a Styrian valley learns the exchange rate of the war, and a Soviet officer teaches a school in the mud that will one day cross the German curve. In Kuibyshev, a girl in a hard chair keeps watch beside a dying giant who cannot speak and can still count.

By June the corps that was humbled is dangerous, disciplined, and pointed at an island. The Germans have stopped calling it a rumor. They have begun to file it as a fact of nature, load-bearing, in every calculation the Reich can still afford to make.

THE AMERICANS ARE COMING is Book Four of The European War, the alternate-history saga that runs parallel to The American War and converges with it at El Alamein. Built on the real machinery, distances, and men of 1942 and 1943, it is written for readers of Robert Conroy, Harry Turtledove, and Jeff Shaara, and for anyone who has ever wondered what an army costs before it is any good.

Every great story begins with family.