Peter Can

The enemy wants them dead. Their own side wants them to shape up. They’re the Rat Bastards. They steal. Lie. Kill. And they never respect the rules. The stuntman. The Indian. The gangster. The bum. The most awesomely effective fighting team in the history of man-to-man mayhem. And now they’re all that stands between the Japs and their plan to retake the bloody Pacific island of Bougainville.

While the Battle of Berlin in 1945 is widely known, the horrific story of the Halbe Kessel remains largely untold. In April 1945, victorious Soviet forces encircled 80,000 men of the German 9th Army in the Halbe area, South of Berlin, together with many thousands of German women and children. The German troops, desperate to avoid Soviet capture, battled furiously to break out toward the West, where they could surrender to the comparative safety of the Americans.