Panther Soup

A chance encounter with an American WWII veteran leads John Gimlette on an astonishing journey through France, Germany and Austria.

In a journey that takes the author through the last months of the war, through some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and through cities that have risen from cinders, Panther Soup is a tale as rich, bleak and absurd as war itself.

There’s a colourful cast of survivors showing the way. But it’s the American veteran, Putnam Flint, who guides the author through the emotions of that time. Now 86, he had been one of nearly three million Americans moving across the face of the continent.

It had been a journey of unimaginable scale and complexity, an armoured migration, a wheeled city rolling through Europe. For most of his life, Flint has lived with the memories of a tank-mangled sludge (the “Panther Soup”) and finds himself once again speeding up the Rhone Valley, re-living the camps, visiting the villages he’d shelled, and meeting the children of the battlefield, now elderly themselves. They find the field where Flint mowed down the flak-crew, and the Austrian village where he dueled with a Nazi fanatic.