In December of 1944, the seemingly defeated Germans secretly mustered 600,000 battle-hardened troops, including whole SS Panzer Divisions, into an all-out offensive to capture Antwerp, the heart of the Allied supply chain. What the Germans couldn't have anticipated was the courage and can-do against the odds of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion.

Everything went wrong in America’s first test of whether the Japanese-held islands of the Pacific, the key steppingstones to the doorstep of Japan, could be captured by across-the-beach infantry assaults.