Germany is not merely a route across the closing battles of the war in Frank Sheeran’s account. It is where his unit retreats, regains ground, and reaches Dachau and Munich—and where the violence of combat later returns in dreams entangled with his postwar criminal life. The book presents this terrain through Sheeran’s retrospective testimony, making the German campaign both a sequence of military episodes and a source of unresolved memory.

Retreat and the exposed southern front

Sheeran recalls that, while his unit was in Alsace-Lorraine, German forces launched the counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied troops were transferred north to reinforce the threatened front, leaving his company to cover the division’s southern sector. In his estimate, 120 men were left to defend ground that might ordinarily have required 10,000 or 15,000.

The immediate consequence, he says, was retreat. His account follows the unit through a night march on New Year’s Eve of 1945. He remembers residents pulling American flags from their houses and raising German ones again; after reinforcements arrived, the Americans rebuilt their strength and pushed back into the German part of Alsace. The shift from withdrawal to renewed advance sets the pattern for the account of the campaign that follows.

The Harz Mountains and the cost of advance

From Alsace-Lorraine, Sheeran says, his unit fought its way to the Harz Mountains, where German forces held the summit. One night, the Americans intercepted a mule train carrying hot food to the German troops above. They ate what they wanted and spoiled the remainder. Sheeran distinguishes the women who had prepared the food from the soldiers driving the teams: the women were left alone, while the soldiers were made to dig shallow graves. He follows the episode with a terse acknowledgment that, by then, he thought little of doing what he believed necessary.

The account then turns south, through Bamberg and Nuremberg, toward Munich. Sheeran recalls Nuremberg as nearly destroyed by bombing and says that surviving Nazi symbols were systematically demolished. The route gives the narrative a physical direction, but its repeated encounters with destruction also make the march a record of violence carried out and witnessed.

Dachau and the end of the European war

Before reaching Munich, Sheeran’s unit stopped at Dachau concentration camp. The book cites a combat report describing roughly 1,000 bodies, with the gas chambers and crematoria beside one another and clothing, shoes, and bodies arranged in piles. Sheeran recalls that rumors had not prepared the soldiers for what they encountered. The scene and its stench, he says, stayed in the mind.

In his telling, the camp commander and officers were driven away in jeeps, and gunfire was heard at a distance. He says that about 500 remaining German guards were dealt with by the Americans; some prisoners who were strong enough borrowed weapons and acted for themselves. The narrative does not present the liberation as a clean separation between witnessing violence and committing it. It places the soldiers’ actions alongside the victims’ response, then moves directly to the capture of Munich. About two weeks later, Germany surrendered unconditionally, ending the war in Europe.

Germany as remembered experience

The German campaign reaches the reader through a history built from interviews with Sheeran, most of them recorded. The first interview took place in 1991 and ended when Sheeran withdrew from the questioning; interviews resumed after he later sought them out and continued for four years. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then the manuscript as a whole. That process supplies the form of the Germany episodes: remembered scenes shaped through repeated questioning and subsequently approved by their narrator.

Their significance in the book extends beyond military chronology. Sheeran says that, years later, stirring up memories brought back dreams of combat, mixed with things he had begun doing for certain people after the war. Germany thus returns not only as a place he passed through but as memory joined to later violence. The recollections do not dissolve that connection; they leave the reader with the persistence of the scenes and the narrator’s own admission of how little the acts seemed to weigh at the time.