Author Description

Sudden Victory is an Historical account of the development of battlefield warfare, from the bloody trenches of World War I to the highly mobile warfare that stunned the world with the Blitzkrieg in September 1939. General Erich Ludendorff, the German commander, called August 8 the "black day of the German army." Although it was not yet obvious to the Allied commanders as the fighting went on for another three months, the German generals knew that they had not only lost the war but that the German people were doomed to years of suffering. Sudden Victory focuses on four men who played pivotal roles in the transformation of the battlefield, and looks at the use of tanks in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the highly successful use by the Americans of the new Abrams tank in the first Gulf war of 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sudden Victory is the latest in a series of books, mostly on military history, by Orr Kelly. He is a veteran Washington newsman who has covered the Pentagon as well as the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Orr Kelly is a veteran Washington newspaper and magazine reporter. As a staff member of the Washington Star and U.S. News and World Report magazine he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA. He is the author of ten books, most of them on military history, and two works of fiction. He divides his time between his home in Chevy Chase, MD and the family farm in Washington County, MD.