To Die with Such Men: Frontline Stories from Ukraine's International Legion (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781911723899)

To Die with Such Men is a true story account of the foreign volunteers who served in the Ukrainian International League fighting the Russians. Gripping and raw, the book is narrative in style and follows a core group of six men, mostly Americans, who fought together from the early days of the battle for Kyiv to a rearguard action outside Mariupol, through the last stands of Severodonetsk and Bakhmut. They came individually, but formed a family, from the early days fighting outside of Kyiv, where no one bothered to learn names because they all expected to die, to the last days of the Russian attack on Bakhmut, where one of them was one of the last men to leave the city in the final days of May. They fought in assaults, cleared buildings, infiltrated behind enemy lines, and drove into a closing pocket in the last days of Severodonetsk and hit the Russians so hard that the enemy thought that they had been attacked by an entire battalion. By the end of the first year of the war, two of them would be killed in action.

What the reader will take away from this book is the almost-first-person experience of modern war, the closest most people will ever come to feeling what it is like to be there, what it means to really be part of a team, and what it is actually like to see your friends killed in combat, and to carry their bodies out under fire. For historians, academics, and defense professionals alike, it provides an invaluable primary source, one that brings the immediacy of a single war memoir but which tempers the usual flaws of such sources (bias, the subject's limited visibility of the larger picture, etc) by using the backstop of a professional academic historian.

Author: Shannon Monaghan
ISBN-10: 1911723898
ISBN-13: 9781911723899
Publisher: Hurst & Co.
Language: English
Published: 04/15/2025
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover