Received this review from John Fallon, 36th Combat Engineer:
"I just finished a book that I recommend highly to all of you, "First to the Rhine" by Yeide and Stout by Zenith Press. You have all read more than one book about the 7th Army from the landing in Southern France to the end of the war but this is about the entire 6th Army Group . It details the trials and tribulations of the French 1st Army as it grew after the landing and it combines it with the 7th Army. AS you read it you can understand that the two of them have to be studied at the same time because of the many ways they intermingled Divisions and Corps. Both the 540th Engineers and the 36th get a brief mention but that is more than we usually get. F Company of the 540th is mentioned as being a part of a Task Force and the 36th as it replace the 179th Infantry. If I have to find any fault with it it is the lack of maps but after all we have been looking at maps of southern France and Alsace for a long time now. Our French friends will especially like it because it is actually more detailed than any other books which normally pass the French 1st off. Read it!"
36 Engineers are rugged......John Fallon II. Capt. USA Ret.
I was very excited when First To The Rhine came out because I thought it was high time someone produced a history of 6th Army Group. While reading the book, I was a little disturbed at the number of small factual mistakes made by the authors, and the more I read the more disturbed I became.
What really set me off was the intentional misrepresentation of Eisenhower's standing orders to his army groups in the fall of 1944. In their discussion of Eisenhower's decision not to allow 6th Army Group to cross the Rhine in early December 1944 the authors represented his standing orders as not including a specific mandate to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine. Instead they reworded the orders to something like seizing bridgeheads across rivers. This allowed them to circumvent the difficult and complex issue of Eisenhower's error in not allowing 6th Army Group to cross the Rhine when it had the opportunity.
As I have some of the same primary sources used by the authors, I went back and began the laborious task of checking their citations, and discovered that a good many were simply wrong. The source either did not say what the authors claimed, or said something fundamentally different such as the wrong unit, the wrong day, the wrong order of events, etc. Taken in toto these errors represent fatal flaws and render the book far less useful than it otherwise might have been. It is the product of sloppy research, and I cannot recommend it.
While not perfect, Colley's Decision At Strasbourg is a far more reliable examination of Eisenhower's fateful decision not to allow 6th Army Group to cross the Rhine in December 1944.
Jim