The little-known saga of young German Jews, dubbed The Ritchie Boys, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came of age in America, and returned to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of the U.S. Army to fight against Nazism.
It is a story of courage and determination, revenge and redemption, grippingly told in a fast-moving narrative ... Based on interviews, oral histories, and many primary sources, this is a readable, almost novelistic undertaking that opens a window into a much-ignored aspect of the war. But it is a history with personality — and irony, the inevitable byproduct of war ... It is a magnificent story, one crying out to be told and one that is told very well.
Henderson meticulously crafts a riveting non-fiction account ... Henderson’s research and interviews with scores of veterans gives us a richly detailed story that puts readers alongside the Ritchie Boys in some of the darkest moments of history, from Kristallnacht to D-Day to the liberation of the Buchenwald death camp. In addition to providing sobering insight on how Jewish soldiers fought the Nazis, Sons and Soldiers is a spellbinding account of extraordinary men at war.
Henderson is a skilled storyteller. Sons and Soldiers records concrete acts of courage, commitment, compassion (and, of course, unspeakable cruelty) that may well move — and perhaps motivate — his readers ... his narrative invites readers to wonder whether World War II was the last 'good war,' a conflict in which the enemy was so evil, the cause so just, the stakes so high, and all the alternatives so much worse that the carnage and the 'collateral damage' was and should have been accepted. Reluctantly.
