To the Last Man

The novel begins in the air war over France, where Manfred von Richthofen and pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille fight in machines whose speed and armament are changing rapidly. On the ground, French commanders struggle to hold an exhausted army together while the United States prepares to send an independent force under John J. Pershing rather than disperse American troops among Allied formations.

As American soldiers enter the fighting at Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse–Argonne, individual courage is tested against artillery, machine guns, aircraft and industrial-scale casualties. Shaara links commanders and combatants to show how the arrival of fresh American manpower helped sustain the final Allied offensives without making the war’s ending clean or triumphant.