Stronghold Germany

For forty years, West Germany was the staging ground for a war that never came - hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, ready to roll against the Red Army at the first alarm.

Jens Zimmer grew up right next door - in Wackernheim near Mainz, where the GIs ran past at six in the morning, where his mother's boyfriend went to the Gulf War wearing the golden eight of the 8th Infantry Division, and where missiles stood in the forest.

Stronghold Germany tells the story of the American presence from 1978 to 2001 - from the Fulda Gap to Desert Storm, from the barracks to the quiet conversion that followed: documented history and lived memory, up close.

Jens Zimmer, born in 1978, grew up in the Mainz area between German orchards and U.S. Army posts - he knew this world firsthand. He is the author of several German-language works of military and contemporary history; Stronghold Germany is his first book in English.