One of seven children born into a missionary family deep in central China, the young Littell voyaged to far-flung corners of the globe, eventually leaving a tumultuous China in the 1920s for the idyllic landscapes of Hawaii. His father, the Episcopal bishop of Honolulu, and his high-spirited mother played host to some of the day's most notable luminaries, including Thornton Wilder and Henry Luce.

But the young Littell's cosseted life came to an abrupt halt with a sibling's suicide, and soon afterward, enrollment at boarding school in far off Delaware. Chosen to spend a semester in Germany at the brink of World War II, he graduated, remarkably, with a diploma signed by Heinrich Himmler.

.

Four years later, the specter of Germany loomed again, this time Littell would revisit it as a soldier of the 106th Division in the U.S. Army. Thrown into the Battle of the Bulge, these fifteen thousand fearfully unprepared men would see more than half their young compatriots killed, wounded, or captured in four days.

Drawing on his wartime diary, Littell offers a vivid firsthand account of their horrific trials: his serendipitous escape from a P.O.W. camp and eventual recapture, incarceration in a camp (its existence largely unknown and untold until now) intended exclusively for American Jews and defiant American prisoners, solitary confinement in Buchenwald, and finally sweet liberation by Patton's Third Army.