*Plunder: The Last of the War in Europe, 1945*

By Max Hastings, an excellent book, I benefited from every page. One recurring theme is simply how hard the Germans fought on the way down, and how unusual that behavior was. Here is one interesting passage of many:

In World War I, 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death for serious crimes, of which a mere forty-eight were executed. In World War II, thirty thousand death sentences were decreed by military courts, of which two-thirds were carried out, in addition to many more that took place without any judicial proceeding. By contrast the British executed forty men, the French 103, the Americans 146, almost all the condemned Allied soldiers having committed capital crimes as defined in civil law, rather than being sentenced for dereliction of military duty. Meanwhile the Japanese executed 22,253 of their own men, and the Russians at least 150,000, possibly as many as 300,000.

As I like to say, you can never read too many books about WWII.

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