"This is a combat history. It is the story of a division from its first day of fighting to its last. To men who were in the line without a break for 171 days, anything in the army before combat is slightly unreal, anything after combat is anticlimax. Nevertheless, most of our men spent two years of their lives in training camps at home before they went overseas. Although the difference between training and combat is vast and sharp, like the difference between reading about dying and dying, those six months would have been impossible without those two years."....

Draper’s book is a unique account of the allied invasion of Germany. Draper was encouraged to go direct to the source, to the men themselves, from the commanding general to any private, for the most complete, firsthand information on every action.
This book is largely based on hundreds of pages of such interviews, most of them within 48 hours of the unit’s relief and many of them while the unit was still fighting.