The Steel Wave
Page 57
Gavin remains in command of the Eighty-second Airborne until 1948, and throughout the 1950s becomes an outspoken advocate for a strong military, at a time when prevailing sentiment calls for downsizing. Frustrated that his is merely a voice in the wind, he nonetheless energizes various projects and the development of technology that advances a more mobile American army, including the utilization of helicopters, a practice that becomes the norm during the Vietnam War. But Gavin is not a man who flows with the tide, and despite earning his third star in 1958, he retires, believing the army has deteriorated because of infuriating interference from self-serving politicians, armchair strategists, and policy makers, all of whom Gavin despises.
He enters the world of private industry, serves eventually as chairman of Arthur D. Little & Company, a research and consulting firm, which he heads with great success until 1977. In 1961, he takes a brief leave of absence from the company, at the request of President Kennedy, and serves his country once more as ambassador to France, a post that thrusts him back into the world of political wrangling that he can tolerate for little more than a year.
Gavin writes several books that deal both with his personal experiences in the war and with his very opinionated take on the war in Vietnam, as well as various political and foreign-policy issues. Regardless of the controversy and the enemies that he creates by his outspokenness, he is beloved by the paratroopers who served under him.
He dies in 1990, at age eighty-two, and is buried at West Point.
WALLACE UNGER
Corporal Unger serves until the end of the war and makes his final combat jump into Holland during Operation Market-Garden. He is discharged in May 1945, and returns to his family home in Iowa. Like Jesse Adams, Unger finds civilian life unsettling, until he meets a woman who will unsettle him even more. He marries Rachel Todd in December 1946, and the couple has two children. Unger remains on his family farm and retires in 1996 at age seventy. Despite persistent efforts by his former sergeant to relocate Unger and his wife to a milder climate in California, Unger occupies his time by guiding pheasant hunters on his property and is, to this day, a crack shot.
And, from these pages: George Patton, Omar Bradley, Dwight David Eisenhower, Gerd von Rundstedt, Winston Churchill, Bernard Montgomery, Adolf Hitler, and many more:
After the enormous struggles of 1944, these men must still confront the war, which will continue for nearly a year after the Normandy invasion. It is a different story, of heroes and horror and the bloody collapse of a madman’s twisted dream. Another story for another time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFF SHAARA is the author of seven bestselling novels, critically acclaimed historical epics that cover the American Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War, and World Wars One and Two. He has also penned a nonfiction guide to America’s Civil War battlefields. Shaara was born into a family of Italian immigrants in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, where he graduated from Florida State University. After many years in Montana and New York City, he now lives in Sarasota, Florida.
Contact the author at www.jeffshaara.com.
ALSO BY JEFF SHAARA
Gods and Generals
The Last Full Measure
Gone for Soldiers
Rise to Rebellion
The Glorious Cause
To the Last Man
Jeff Shaara’s Civil War Battlefields
The Rising Tide
The Steel Wave is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey M. Shaara
Maps © 2008 Mapping Specialists, Ltd.,
Madison, WI, U.S.A.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shaara, Jeff
The steel wave: a novel of World War II/Jeff Shaara.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50726-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—France—Normandy—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H18S74 2008 813'.54—dc22 2008004813
www.ballantinebooks.com
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