Panther Soup: A European Journey in War and Peace

by JohnGimlette (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.23

  By the end of World War II much of Western Europe was in chaos. The future of our world had been contested here, in the hinterlands of France and across the German plains. But what's become of the battlefields now? Or the people that lived on them? And is there any trace of the 2.7 million Americans who smashed their way into the Reich (or the 12 million that followed)? With questions like these, the award-winning travel writer John Gimlette, guided by WWII veteran Putnam Flint, sets off on an astonishing journey into the past.

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.23

  A chance encounter with an American WWII veteran leads John Gimlette, the award-winning travel writer, on an astonishing journey through France, Germany and Austria. This contemporary odyssey relives the last months of the war, passing through some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and through cities that have risen from cinders. Panther Soup is the story of that journey, a tale as rich, bleak and absurd as war itself. There's a colourful cast of survivors showing the way. But it's the American veteran, Putnam Flint, who served in the 824th Tank Destroyers (The Panthers), who guides the author through the emotions of that time. Now 86, he had been one of nearly three million Americans moving across the face of the continent. It was a journey of unimaginable scale and complexity, an armoured migration, a wheeled city rolling through Europe. For most of his life, Flint has lived with the memories of a tank-mangled sludge (the Panther Soup ) and finds himself once again speeding up the Rhone valley, re-living the camps, visiting the villages he'd shelled, and meeting the children of the battlefield, now elderly themselves.