There have been many books about D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe
that ended the World War Two. But one dramatic aspect of this story has
been almost entirely ignored. Until now. "The Liberation Line" shows
that without the incredible, indomitable work of the US Military Rail
Service, and their counterparts in the British Royal Engineers, who
overcame enemy attacks, sabotage, and booby traps to repair many
hundreds of miles of destroyed railway tracks and dozens of bridges and
tunnels, the invasion would almost certainly have foundered. But thanks
to the startling creativity and leadership of American soldier-engineers
like the General Emerson Ischtner and Colonel Sidney Bingham, whose men
achieved apparently impossible things, the Allied armies could travel
deep into Nazi-occupied territory at tremendous speed. "The Liberation
Line" tells for the first time how more than 1,000 locomotives and
31,000 carriages were manufactured in secret in the United States and
shipped to England, where they were hidden until D-Day; how, on General
Patton's orders (and under General Itschner's leadership), more than
10,000 soldier-engineers repaired 135 miles of devastated track between
Avranches and Le Mans, at times under enemy attack, in five days,
enabling the US Third Army to reconquer Paris. This was followed by the
creation of the Toot Suite Express, another staggering feat, which
enabled several million tons of essential supplies to be be transported
at speed from the Normandy coast deep into France. The engineers' final,
triumphant effort was the restoration, also at breakneck speed, of a
series of destroyed railway bridges over the Rhine into Germany and the
immediate seizure, restoration and operation of the German rail system.
None of these stories have ever been told. Drawing heavily on untouched
archival sources in the US, UK, and France, and told with the
enthusiastic support of relevant archivists and military authorities,
"The Liberation Line" is a highly original, intensely dramatic story of
American ingenuity, one which will delight readers for years to come
