OPERATION SWALLOW

How an American soldier saved his comrades … in the dying days of World War Two

By Mark Felton

Published by Icon; Dist. by Allen & Unwin
RRP $29.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781785785993

Mark Felton is the author of numerous military history books. With this latest book he has turned his sights on recounting the true story of how a small group of American soldiers, inspired by a charismatic but reluctant leader named Hans Kasten (an American born of German parents), worked to save hundreds of fellow servicemen from a Nazi plan to turn American Jewish prisoners of war into concentration camp slaves.

This story begins in the snowy forests of the Ardennes during Christmas 1944 and ends at the charnel house of Buchenwald concentration camp in spring 1945.

It is a harrowing tale of brutality that ended, finally, with liberation by American forces.

Hans Kasten was to pay a terrible price for defying his German captors.

The beatings and ill-treatment led to lifelong health problems.

What is remarkable too is that it is a story of American POWs that has been barely told, an largely unknown chapter in US military history.