Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace

Beautifully blending contemporary travel writing and military history, John Gimlette travels across Europe in the footsteps of one of the greatest armies ever assembled: the United States forces of 1944-45. In 2004, John Gimlette set off across Europe with his guide Putnam Flint, an eighty-six-year-old Bostonian who had landed in Marseille in the midst of World War II with his tank destroyer battalion, nicknamed The Panthers. With Flint's help, Gimlette traveled from Marseille north to Dijon and Alsace, Paris and Lorraine, across the Rhine into Germany, and eventually south through the Alps into Austria. Gimlette provides a vivid portrait of the route as it is today, from spectacular landscapes to cities that have risen from cinders and as it was during one of the most tumultuous moments in world history.