Hellocat

Brilliantly Written And Steadfastly Factual

Revisado: 11-09-23

Few historical events have been so stubbornly misremembered as the bombing of Dresden. The only parallel I can think of is the "Versailles was too harsh" myth, which has similarly been misrepresented for decades (if you want to see truly "harsh" treaty, read the terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement, which Germany forced down Russian throats not long before Versailles).

Taylor attempts to set right this misconception, cleverly and clearly laying out the facts, and weaving in historical context with the personal stories of both those who dropped the bombs and survived the bombing.

Dresden was, in fact, a major center for war production, and acted as a massive transport hub. Indeed, it was the main route through which supplies and troops reached the Eastern Front at this time. The bombing was also not unusually large or ferocious, as is often claimed. It was a pretty standard bombing run. The difference was simply that everything went right on that night, causing the kind of destruction that was not often seen.

It was terrible, of course, and the last third of the book makes for some seriously grisly reading. That Dresden was a tragedy is indisputable, but Taylor's argument is that it was not sadistic or even really very special. It was simply the victim of poor preparation, particularly good bombing conditions and, ultimately, bad luck.

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An unexpected gem

Revisado: 10-27-23

With a new work on D-Day appearing on a seemingly weekly basis, one can be forgiven for overlooking this gem from Peter Margaritis. But for once, a book's claim of offering a unique perspective on the events leading up to D-Day, is actually accurate.

The vast majority of books on the topic focus either on the Allies' preparation or events from D-Day onwards, and certainly that is where most of the action was. But this work, which focuses on the superhuman efforts that Rommel and his staff undertook to try and put up some sort of defensive front in the months before the invasion, is utterly compelling.

Hopelessly short on everything from staff to equipment, Rommel's tireless - truly tireless, the man barely ever slept - quest to shore up the Western front is an inspiring study of keeping heart in impossible and, ultimately, hopeless circumstances.

Long, detailed and filled to the brim with the kinds of minutiae that make WW2 enthusiasts dizzy with excitement, I heartily recommend this.

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As always, Lewis finds a unique angle

Revisado: 10-06-23

As so many other people, I expected this to be a brutal takedown piece of one of the most reviled figures of recent memory. I should have known better.

Lewis never tells the story you think he is going to, but somehow always ends up telling a better one, and from an angle you never considered.

Many reviewers seem to think that Lewis is somehow taken in by SBF and is way too kind to him. This is missing the point entirely. He never makes excuses for SBF and has no illusions as to his culpability in everything that has happened.

Going Infinite is a balanced, nuanced take that is just as harsh on the people who allowed themselves to be fooled by promises they knew were too good to be true. Bankman-Fried unwittingly turns out to be the ultimate bull in a china shop, and while you can be angry that the bull wrecked everything, you also have to wonder who the hell let him in there in the first place.

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A balanced account, but a little short

Revisado: 09-12-23

A worthy account of Goering's life, and it's breakneck speed should make it very digestible for people who don't want to drown in endless detail. Unfortunately for me, I am not one of these people, so the book was over all too quickly.

In published form it comes in just shy of 500 pages, and given the breathlessly eventful life that Goering lived, major events are breezed through or completely ignored. Goering's knowledge of, or self-proclaimed ignorance of, war crimes and atrocities is never discussed in any detail, which seems a missed opportunity.

Nevertheless, given the lack of modern books about Goering, who as the least ideological of the Nazi leaders is usually overlooked in favor of grimmer figures like Himmler and Hitler, we should be thankful this exists at all.

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Surprisingly interesting for such a niche subject

Revisado: 06-13-23

Leave it to Prit Buttar to make a niche subject - even by the standards of World War 2 nerds - so compelling. The little Balkan countries were so quickly steamrolled by their giant neighbours that they barely ever warrant a mention in most accounts of the Eastern Front.

But, of course, there are a million stories to tell even in such a small theater, and Buttar tells a fair number of them in this book, all with his usual thoroughness and panache.

While this is still very much a military history, Buttar does delve into the mass killings of Jews and minorities. This is the first time I've ever seen him touch on these subjects, but given that they are such a core part of the Balkan story he really had no choice.

Definitely worth a listen, especially for completionists who want to cover some new ground.

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Entertaining, but keep a pinch of salt handy

Revisado: 05-04-23

I tend to avoid personal accounts of World War 2. While they are often moving and entertaining, the tendency to rewrite history is just so great that it overshadows any merits such books may have. I am always reminded of Erich von Manstein's memoirs, and his insistence therein that everything was Hitler's fault and the Wehrmacht was composed of only angels and saints.

Recently, however, having to choose something to ready very quickly, I just more or less grabbed this without thinking, and I'm glad I did. Adventures in My Youth is the account of a young German officer as he goes from war college to front line and, eventually, into captivity.

The book, originally written only for his daughter's enjoyment and not for publication, is remarkably well constructed given its purpose. Originally composed in German, which William L. Shirer famously lamented as a nearly untranslatable language, Scheiderbauer's tale is so articulate I was astounded to hear it was actually a translation.

But it's important to know what to expect here. This is a personal account of the author's wartime experience, and nothing more. There is no political discussion, and German atrocities are almost never mentioned. He does mention knowledge of concentration camps, but denies knowing what went on there. This has irked many other reviewers, but if you know that this is not that kind of book, it makes it much more enjoyable.

Even so, his absolute silence on the Einsatzgruppe, which he never mentions or references, is quite strange, given that he served exclusively on the Eastern front. Since he was an officer in frontline fighting, an adjutant on Battalion and Regiment level, as well as a frequent visitor to war colleges, it's almost impossible that he would not have heard about the mobile killing squads and their activities. His avoidance of the topic does seem to imply that he knew what was going on, even if he was not part of it.

He does casually mention burning down entire civilian villages as the armies retreated in 1944, and using slave labor to dig trench systems (he calls them his "civilian" workers). But all of that he waves away as simply obeying orders.

One does not get a sense of malice at all in the book, and there are a great number of very human characters throughout.

What to take away from his account is up to the reader. A young man caught in an impossible situation? An eager participant in an illegal war with no regrets about his actions?

I recommend you read Adventures in My Youth and decide for yourself.

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The fall of man

Revisado: 04-26-23

I have read many books about Nazi atrocities. Books recounting acts so unspeakable and singular in their sheer brutality and inhumanity that the mind struggles to even comprehend them. It writhes and recoils and feigns misunderstanding, wraps itself in a fog and tries to resort to sheer disbelief that such things can happen.

These books are hard to read. Sometimes you have to take a break just to prevent yourself from hyperventilating from the sheer horror of it. But, what ultimately gets you through these accounts is the belief that this is pure evil at work. The men who performed these acts were not men, but animals, completely removed from the rest of humanity. They were on the other side of history, the Bad Guys. And while all this was happening, the Good Guys were coming. And once they arrived, it would end. And they would show the world what happened and the world would say: this is not us. We are not like them.

What makes After Nuremburg harder to read than any of these other books is that it shatters this last illusion. The world saw what happened, what the Nazis did. The Allies arrested hundreds and thousands of those who committed these atrocities. They tried them. Convicted them. Many were sentenced to death, and the rest spent decades in prison for their actions. Germany shunned these people, carried their shame.

This, at least, more or less what I thought. In all my reading I had assumed that the war criminals mostly got what they deserved, as Goring and co. did at Nuremberg. The truth, unfortunately, is worse. So much worse.

The final Nuremburg tribunals had not even wrapped up when the calls for clemency started. From the prisoners themselves to politicians and the church, Germans from every walk of life railed at the unfair tribunals and the victors' justice they meted out. These were good Germans just following orders in service of the fatherland. Or so many believed.

Until 1950, these pleas went unheeded. But when John J. McCloy was appointed as the new Commissioner, he decided all the sentences needed to be reviewed. The reasoning behind this decision, the massive subsequent sentence reductions and the domino effect it would have on all detainees held by each Allied nation, is laid out in detail in this book. And the devil, I fear, is literally in the details in this case.

Consider these excuses offered by some of the condemned when appealing for clemency. One commander protested that he had made a mistake in his confession, and that he had overseen only 2000 civilian executions, not the 3000 he had originally reported. For this he demanded mercy. Another, and I weep to even say it, claimed that he murdered two female children because they "looked like they were about to form a resistance group." He was therefore only engaged in the lawful suppression of partisans.

That such nonsense was offered up as grounds for mercy would be amusing if it were not accepted, almost wholesale and without question, by the appeals panel. No follow-up or questioning took place, no input from the original prosecutors was sought and, unbelievably, the original case records and evidence were not consulted in any way. The panel relied entirely on the summaries of each case, and routinely ruled on multiple cases each day. Cases that took months when originally tried, were sometimes dismissed in half an hour.

A decade after the end of the war, nearly every German prisoner had been released.

Throughout the book Hutchinson is methodical, clear and above all measured. While I wanted to throw my phone out the window in disbelieving rage, Hutchinson lays out the facts with calm language and clear logic. His work is exemplary, and this text deserves to be as widely studied as any other on the period.

But be warned, this is a soul-crushing endeavor. The reader is confronted not only by the men who stared into the devil's soul and embraced all they found there, but by the ones who ultimately decided their fate for doing so. They, too, stared into that soul, and declared: "nothing to see here." That, I am afraid, is so much worse.

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Haunting but essential

Revisado: 02-28-23

Most writers need only worry about relating one story. Father Patrick Desbois had an entirely different problem in writing this book - how does one tell thousands of stories?

Over the past 20 years, the author and his foundation have scoured the countries of the former Soviet Union looking for gravesites and witnesses, and they found both in abundance. To date they have discovered more than 2000 execution sites, where Jews were shot and dumped in mass graves by the killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen. Many of these sites were already known to history, others were not. In the towns that played host to these massacres, Debois and his team have interviewed nearly 10 000 people who were direct eye witnesses to, and sometimes even participants in, the shootings.

So how does one tell this tale? Simply listing figures and repeating the same details would quickly get overwhelming and dull. Instead, Debois opts to tell the story of a single day. At least, a day that represents all of those horrible days. He starts the night before the typical execution, and proceeds to detail each carefully planned step right up to the day after the massacre, when the possessions of the victims were sorted and sold off. Each of these steps required many hands.

Who rounded up the Jews? Who transported them? Who dug the ditches? Fed the shooters? Supplied the ammunition? Small though each of these details were, they were essential for the overall goal the Germans had - to murder as many people as efficiently as possible.

To do that, they conscripted locals to do all of the above and more. Many did so reluctantly, other with fervour. Debois paints a picture that is both immediate and intimate, making the horrors of the day all the more terrifying.

This is not an easy read, but a necessary one. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen remain criminally understudied and little known, especially in the West. The scale and efficiency of the atrocities beggars belief.

Rudnicki is a good narrator and does the material justice, with a calm, clear tone and excellent pronunciation of many tricky Ukrainian and Russian names.

Highly recommended.

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Buttar at his best...but the narration!

Revisado: 02-08-23

Buttar is one of the most important historians working today. The Eastern front has never been a particularly sexy subject for publishers, and they would much rather focus on another brief retelling of D-Day than a voluminous exploration of a single salient of the Eastern Front. Even if that salient saw more casualties, according to some estimates, than all Western Allied losses from D-Day to the end of the war.

Buttar's detailed books on Barbarossa are even more valuable because of this unfortunate fact, representing as far as I know the only such massive, detailed undertaking for publication in English.

Meat Grinder is his best so far, not just because of his meticulous attention to detail and historical insight - these are unchanged and as good as ever - but because he has grown tremendously as a writer. Though still very much focused on the logistics and details of the various battles, he has become a much a better narrative author, and the book feels more alive as a result.

Alas, we then come to the narrator. I have nothing against Mr. Osgood, and I am sure he is a fine man, but he is in way over his head here. He certainly has the voice for this format, but his tempo, rhythm and cadence are simply not suited for this kind of book.

And his pronunciation. Oh my. Those familiar with the Eastern front will know of the many challenging names - both of people and place - that are necessary multiple times on every page. Osgood does not seem to struggle with mispronunciation so much as rejoice in it. He is utterly, supremely, gloriously off with just about every Russian word, and he often manages to mispronounce even the simplest names, like Alexi. General Brauchitsch somehow has his name butchered differently every time, and if his bad heart didn't carry him off the scene prematurely, we would have been treated to dozens of variations of this admittedly tricky surname.

Honestly, after a while it just becomes amusing. I found myself laughing out loud on various occasions, and it becomes a genuine source of comic relief. Clearly, neither Osgood nor the person overseeing the recording has any experience with this kind of book.

If you can look past the narration, and I suggest you do your best to, Meat Grinder is heartedly recommended.

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Oddly biased, but worthy account of the period

Revisado: 04-04-18

There are surprisingly few books available about the last year of WWI, and of those Toland's is often touted as the best. While it's certainly a valuable account of that critical year, purely for the fact that it exists, it's far from perfect.

Toland is not the most objective writer, and is biased in some strange ways. Chief among those is the extremely high regard he has for Douglas Haig, who is portrayed throughout as some sort of misunderstood genius whose true potential is held back only by the meddlesome politicians back in London.

I can think of few British figures as universally maligned as Haig, and you'd probably have to travel back to the days of King John to find person as widely reviled. Yet Toland is constantly going out of his way to portray Haig as eternally patient, infinitely wise and tactically brilliant.

Since no mention is made of Haig's disastrous conduct in the war preceding 1918, readers unfamiliar with the subject will no doubt take Toland's at his word. They will walk away from the book thinking Haig a hero, Lloyd George an idiot and Marshall Petain a coward. This would be most unfortunate, since all of those things are untrue.

All of that being said, there are plenty of fascinating anecdotes here about the war's final year, and the broad strokes of the events as they unfolded are for the most part accurate.

Certainly worth a read, but only with a healthy dose of skepticism regarding his portrayal of the main players.

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