One Day Over the Rhine, a book by Erin Faith Allen

In March 1945, the Allies hurled everything they had at the last great barrier between them and the heart of Nazi Germany. Behind a smokescreen sixty-six miles long, beneath the largest single-day airborne assault in history, three American tankers rolled toward a shattered industrial town called Dinslaken. By nightfall, nothing would be the same.

Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson ‘Tom’ Carr, the steady commander shaped by a father's war, the man others turned to when everything came apart. Private First Class William Patrick ‘Billy’ Kane, the young New Yorker who spent his twenty-first birthday on the front line with a new bride waiting at home. Corporal Edward James ‘Eddie’ Ryan, who outran a childhood of loss in rural Minnesota and poured his heart into letters to a girl named Dody, even chalking her name across the flank of his tank.

Inside the steel hull of a Sherman, their lives became inseparable. Then the 88s found them.

One Day Over the Rhine is the true story of these three men of the 717th Tank Battalion and the single day that would bind their fates forever. Historian Erin Faith Allen traces their journey from the training grounds of Fort Knox to the mud of France, the ruins of Holland, and the burning streets of Germany, reconstructing their world entirely from letters, military records, family archives, and the very ground where they fought.

But this is more than a combat narrative.

It is the story of the civilians huddled beneath the bombs, the Jewish children who survived Kristallnacht in the same town these tankers would later enter, the airmen falling from a burning sky, and the families who carried these wounds across generations.

At once intimate and sweeping, One Day Over the Rhine reveals how a single day of war is never only one day, and how the fallen live on each time we speak their names.