From Here to Hell: Book One: The Winter Line
About this audiobook
In September of 1943, the preliminary Allied assault on Nazi-dominated Europe commenced with Operation Avalanche, the code-name for the invasion of Southern Italy via Salerno.
It was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who considered this region "the soft underbelly" of the European continent and the key to an Anglo-U.S. spearhead, first into Nazi-occupied France, and then into the heart of Hitler's Reich itself.
Supreme Commander of Allied forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was not of the same opinion as Churchill. Ike regarded Italy as non-essential to Allied victory in Europe. The decision to invade Italy was arrived at only as a compromise solution, and Eisenhower would at first commit American troops only to a limited assault role.
What ultimately took place, however, was a series of battles that were among the bloodiest of all those fought in the European and Pacific theaters. While the Allies pushed relentlessly toward Rome, finally capturing the Eternal City in June of 1944, the price paid for victory was among the heaviest in the history of warfare. Even today, the immense toll in lives taken by this campaign is the subject of a debate that will probably never be satisfactorily resolved.
It is the campaign for southern Italy that is the subject of this book. If I have taken certain liberties with the historical record, it is because what follows is not war documentary, but war fiction.
About the author
David Alexander is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold over five million copies. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Paris Sorbonne. David Alexander's novels and nonfiction titles have won critical acclaim from USA Today, The New York Times, The London Times, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, The Wall Street Journal and many other venues in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
His prizewinning thriller, Threatcon Delta: Assault on the Pentagon, reached first place on numerous bestseller lists including those of The New York Times and USA Today. The Times called Threatcon Delta, "... surely one of the best technothrillers to come along in a great while." USA Today also praised the thriller, declaring, "Alexander once again turns newspaper headlines into riveting high-tech military action fiction with that special combination of cinematic thrills and chills and fly-on-the-wall accounts of back room crisis management in the making ..."
Dubbed "an Ian Fleming for the 21st Century" by one reviewer, David Alexander has written and published in virtually every literary category, including novels, novelettes, short fiction, poetry, essays and film scripts. Investigative journalism, technical writing on defense-related subjects and short fiction over Alexander's byline have appeared in US and international periodicals that have ranged from the glossy pages of Penthouse Magazine to the more sober leaves of the global defense journal Military Technology.
