Maurice Rose was a lean and handsome man, a warrior, and the son of a rabbi. He never seems to have mentioned his religion to his fellow soldiers, and his grave is marked by a Christian cross in the Dutch cemetery where he came to rest, the highest-ranking American officer killed by enemy fire in Europe. Few Americans have heard of him, though thousands of Cold War soldiers ought to remember his name from the troopship General Rose that carried them overseas in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gen. Rose’s story is now wonderfully told by Daniel Bolger, himself a three-star general who in retirement has become a masterly historian. “The Panzer Killers” has a tantalizing subtitle: “The Untold Story of a Fighting General and His Spearhead Tank Division’s Charge Into the Third Reich.” For once, the phrasing is fully justified.
The book begins without its central character, in the bocage (farmland) of Normandy in June 1944, soon after D-Day. The fields were separated by berms up to 4-feet thick and 15-feet tall, topped by thick shrubs and trees. Each hedgerow was defended by unseen Germans with fast-firing MG34 and MG42 machine guns—“the best in the war,” Mr. Bolger tells us—backed by cannon and rocket. The inexperienced Americans took terrible casualties. Each square they conquered led to another, and another after that, through July 1944. Never has the bocage been more vividly described: “this chess board from hell,” as Mr. Bolger calls it.
