"Harry Yeide is rapidly becoming one of the best-known and most prolific writers of World War II history working in the field today. This collaboration with co-author Mark Stout marks what probably qualifies as Yeide's most ambitious effort to date. . . . The authors most assuredly make it clear 6th Army Group was not lallygagging while 21st and 12th Army Groups were fighting farther to the north. . . . Yeide and Stout do a good job with First to the Rhine."

Bill Stone, Stone&Stone Second World War Books

"While the authors have meticulously researched their material, they do not get bogged down in unnecessary details. Yeide and Stout’s crisp narrative style takes readers inside the strategic and operational command decisions; it also makes them feel the agonies and sacrifices endured by the common Soldiers of both sides. The authors also take great care to place the southern operations into the larger picture of the war in Europe so that the reader understands the 6th Army Group’s purpose and contributions without taking anything away from their better-known counterparts: Bradley’s 12th Army Group and Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. First to the Rhine fills a long-felt void in the European Theater’s operational histories. It is a valuable book for both the casual historical reader and the serious student of military history."

Military Review, March/April 2008

  This is the story of the Allied forces--the U.S. 6th Army Group, including the U.S. Seventh Army and French First Army--that landed in southern France on August 15th, 1944. The book follows the action from the French beaches to the Vosges Mountains, where the first Allied penetration along the entire Western front reached the Rhine River. First to the Rhine covers the vicious fighting during the German Nordwind counteroffensive in January 1945 and the French-American offensive to clear the Colmar Pocket. It then pursues the forces of the Third Reich across the Rhine to their ultimate destruction.
   Unlike the forces landing in Normandy, these American divisions were hard-bitten veterans of the war in Italy, and, in the case of the 3d Infantry Division, North Africa. The French units included many veterans of the Italian campaign and comprised Frenchmen and Africans in almost equal numbers. As the campaign went on, the French ranks were swelled by tens of thousands of Free French Forces of the Interior, the famous maquis. The German forces arrayed against the Allies included the famed 11th Panzer Division, an Eastern front veteran known as the “Ghost Division,” which would hit the Allied advance time and again only to slip away before it could be pinned and destroyed.
  This is the harrowing story First to the Rhine tells, from the strategic plane-down through the corps, division, and regimental levels to the personal experience of the men in combat, including the likes of Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated infantryman of the war. The book features little-known battles, including one at Montelimar, when an ad hoc American armored command and the 36th Infantry Division came within a hair’s breadth and several days of hard fighting of cutting off the entire German Nineteenth Army. This is the first popular work in English to explore the French role in the fighting and the relationship between the U.S. Army and the French forces fighting under American command.
   First to the Rhine draws heavily on official American and French after-action reports, other contemporary combat records such as highly detailed S-3 and G-3 journals, and interviews conducted by the Army with soldiers shortly after the actions occurred. It also features personal recollections written by key commanders in American, French, and German ranks, as well as illustrations from official U.S. Army photographers and filmmakers.