"Shaara, best-selling author of numerous fictional accounts of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I, opens his projected World War II trilogy in the deserts of North Africa, where Allied troops attempt to match wits and forces with the Desert Fox, wily German commander Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, and his formidable Afrika Korps. After Hitler overruns France, solidifying his position in Western Europe, he turns his attention eastward toward the vast Russian expanse. With the German focus split, the Allies sense the time is right to launch a united second front in North Africa, setting their sights on an eventual invasion of southern Italy. As plans for Operation Torch become a reality, Shaara vividly re-creates a cast of military and political heroes and villains, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, General George Marshall, General George Patton, British General Bernard Montgomery, German field marshal Erwin Rommel, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt. Interweaving these prominent historical figures with a cast of ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary circumstances, he fashions a page-turning introduction that will leave fans of first-rate military fiction awaiting the next installments."