In 1942, the U.S. Army trained nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and sent them to gather intelligence from German POWs. From the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling And the Sea Will Tell; with a 200,000-copy first printing.

Discriminatory laws and increasing violence forced many Jews to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Families made heart-wrenching decisions to split up, knowing they might never see one another again. Henderson (And the Sea Will Tell) tells the untold story of the sons of these families who joined the U.S. Army after the outbreak of World War II. Recruited for their knowledge of German language, culture, and psychology, these Camp Ritchie boys, as they came to be known in their training center in western Maryland, endured intense instruction in order to gather intelligence. They fought in every major battle from D-Day until the defeat of Germany in 1945. According to an army estimate, 60 percent of all credible intelligence during World War II resulted from work done by the Camp Ritchie boys. VERDICT An inspiring story about a group of men who took up arms for their adopted country against their former countrymen. Fans of Stephen Ambrose and World War II histories will enjoy this look into a little-known aspect of U.S. Army operations. [See Prepub Alert, 2/6/17.]—Chad E. Statler, Lakeland Community Coll., Kirtland, OH

Military historian Henderson (Rescue at Los Baños) shares the story of eight of the 1,985 young German and Austrian Jewish men who escaped the Nazis, emigrated to America, joined the U.S. Army, and returned to Europe to interrogate German POWs, largely during the last year of WWII. Called the Ritchie Boys after the military camp where they underwent eight weeks of intensive training, this group of young men proved highly effective in their work because of their accent-free German and knowledge of the nuances of German culture. Yet their activities were also risky because they were Jewish. For example, in December 1944 two Ritchie Boys, Kurt Jacobs and Murray Zappler, were captured in the Ardennes while fighting alongside other American soldiers and were separated from their comrades and shot. Henderson does well to humanize the story of the boys, although he occasionally gets bogged down in the details of particular battles. He also opens the book by overstating the number of victims of the November 1938 German national pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Despite these shortcomings, this is an ably researched and written account of a previously unknown facet of the American-Jewish dimension of WWII. Agent: Writers House. (July)