The Siegfried Line:  Then and Now

By Pen and Sword Publishing

Meeting the Author of this Book

This book is 312 pages of intriguing facts which are very fascinating to see how things played out over time since the battles in Normandy in 1944.  The book is a very solid 7X10 Inch hardback with a very thick cover.  The book has a very weighty look and feel to it, something that you notice right away when you pick it up to look at the title.  It feels substantially made with great quality.  There is a paper sleeve that fits on the inside of the front and rear covers to protect the binding covers from dirt and damage.  If you remove that cover, you are treated to some really bright, shiny, silver type face on a black book cover, very classy if you ask me.  Almost immediately, I was taken back by this book, the quality of the printers work clearly showing off in the details.

The book is chocked full of black and white, with color photos where the author wants to drive a point home about how things looked back in 1944 and how they look today.  Lost to the ravages of time out on some frontal battlefield, the homes, shops and businesses where a lot of the fighting took place are covered in this volume and the photos that are included show how, 80 years later, it's all there, still there, withstanding those ravages of time.  It's a testament to the people that lived there, their determination to not give up hope and to keep on with life, even in the face of adversity.  That is what you see a lot of in this book, images from long ago, in how they are today.

The index is displayed in the next image, and shows how the book can be followed with relative ease....

As the book title shows, there are three parts to this published work.

The parts are as covered in the index....

• The Wall in the West
• Breaching the Line
• Battlefield Guide

The following photos are from the book, in order as you will see them reading from the front cover.....

This book is really outstanding when it comes to a "where was this in the scheme of things with the war?".  As you can see, a lot of the region was involved in direct battles between the Allies and Germany.  It's really something to be able to read a book about locations, see those locations in pictures and then how those locations were impacted.  The above turret with the patching is really cool but horrifying if you think about the destruction that took place.

The book is well written, documented and is very easy to read.  Its a great volume of what was there during the invasion and how it fared in the end.  If you want a comprehensive book on what happened during the latter stages of the war.  The book is very classy to possess and a good one to have in your reference library.  I could have cut the pages out to scan them on my print scanner, but...I didn't want to cut my book apart for the scanning of the pages.  I really love this book as a jewel to have in my library.  Really love that I received this example to review it.

Highly Recommended for Beginner to Advanced builders for those that want outstanding research material.

Thanks goes out to Casemate Publishing for this review sample.

Reviewed by GLEN MARTIN

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