Close

Soldiers of Freedom by Samuel Marquis

The WWII Story of Patton's Panthers and the Edelweiss Pirates

soldiers of freedom
Add to Goodreads

Winner American Fiction Best Book Awards and Readers' Favorite Book Awards

SOLDIERS OF FREEDOM is the true story of the 1944-1945 War in Western Europe and the final Allied struggle to conquer Nazi Germany. The story is told through the eyes of William McBurney, a tank gunner in the 761st Tank Battalion, the first African-American tank unit in U.S. history; dynamic General George S. Patton, Jr., commander of the U.S. Third Army; and Angela Lange, a sixteen-year-old German resistance fighter with the anti-Nazi Edelweiss Pirates in Cologne. While Patton's forces liberate France and Belgium, fight in the grueling Battle of the Bulge, and cross the Rhine to conquer Germany, U.S. tanker William McBurney and his Black Panthers must fight two wars at once: one against the German army, the other against the racism of their fellow white soldiers. Meanwhile, as the Allies drive into Germany, Edelweiss Pirate Angela Lange must survive the Allied bombing of Cologne while she engages in fierce resistance against the Hitler Youth and Nazis and is hunted down by the Gestapo.

Fans of Beneath A Scarlet Sky, Adam Makos's Spearhead and A Higher Call, and the WWII novels of Ken Follett (Winter of the World, Jackdaws, Eye of the Needle) will enjoy the real-life heroism of the 761st Black Panthers and legendary Patton to liberate Europe, and the Edelweiss Pirates to combat Nazism, in this historically accurate tale of the final epic struggle in WWII Western Europe.