I think it is so important for memories to be shared and passed down. Thank goodness Charles George did that for those who shared many of his experiences. Those of us who are children and grandchildren of these brave men will cherish this snapshot of time for the rest of our lives. Though quite academic in nature, the facts were well presented. I found the book interesting and well worth reading.

I have enjoyed the book because my father was a member of the 692nd TD Battalion, Company A. On page 172 it tells of the time Dick Potts was nearly killed. He was pulled to safety by my father, the driver of Potts tank, and his assistant driver.

Parts of the book are a little hard to follow and I too would have liked to hear more of the day-to-day details of this "journey". My father told me some of his experiences but there is much more I would like to know. He passed away last June so I am searching other sources to find information.

In these Orwellian times of permanent war, arbitrary arrest, denial of habeas corpus, pre-emptive strikes, suicidal attacks, and ephemeral truth--reading George's Journey to Dachau sustains one's faith in the American soldier. The American soldier in the person of C.H. George becomes a sensitive, enlightened, Marxist defender of civilization. George's book is "a very American story"--an eloquent, scholarly, fascinating account of 200 days of combat that ended in the liberation of Dachau.
Educated in France, fluent in French and German, "a pro-Communist and anarchist ideologue"--George was a 20-year-old college-student when the US army called him out of enlisted reserve to fight in the 692nd Tank Destroyers. He viewed "the Soviet and Allied war against fascism not only as a great and necessary tragedy, but also as class-dominated violence dictated by a capitalist and imperialist world order, a continuation of the horrors of 1914-18." George discovered that there were "no words or pictures to express the utterly isolated otherworldliness of combat. That feeling of entering a zone of being that in both life and death insulates one thereafter from all that has been familiar--family, friends, music, movies, sports, pets, edible food, the beauties of nature, laughter and conversation, the possibility of love--all are lost, perhaps forever...." He knew the "infuriating truth" of Nazi Germany, that "the low intelligence, bad education, and culturally corrupt perceptions of one politician could in one decade lead decent, reasonably well-educated people into making of their nation the most gruesome torture machine and graveyard ever executed in the long bloody history of our civilization." And he saw Dachau and the death train, "hundreds of uncrated, thrown-away, anonymous human cargo piled in rotting masses in some fifty or more freight cars awaiting disposal in the 'famous old concentration camp' at Dachau."
Charles H. George's Journey to Dachau is essential for anyone interested in the Second World War. His philosopher son-in-law is right. "They'll love it--it's positively postmodern!"