Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Excerpts From The Book
Reviews
British historian Antony Beevor begins his narrative quietly, steadily, uneasily. Moving briskly between rapidly intensifying German and Russian scenes, Beevor provides some of the historical context for the events leading toward the terrible battle of Stalingrad.
" 'When the (German) retreat started on 20 November, we (Soviet POWs) were put instead of horses to drag the carts loaded with ammunition and food. Those prisoners who could not drag the carts as quickly as the Feldwebel wanted were shot on the spot. In this way we were forced to pull the carts for four days, almost without any rest.' "
"Anger at the (prison camp) conditions led to (German) prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off their own bodies and throwing them at their (Soviet) guards. Such protests provoked summary execution."
"Anger at the (prison camp) conditions led to (German) prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off their own bodies and throwing them at their (Soviet) guards. Such protests provoked summary execution."
Reviews
Battle-scarred and shell shocked: how else to describe my condition after 460 pages of blood, sweat and tanks? Antony Beevor’s book documenting the siege of Stalingrad is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. What with bombing raids, grenade attacks, hand-to-hand combat — to say nothing of frostbite, typhoid and malnutrition — I’m lucky to have escaped with my life. It’s received a crouching ovation from critics and sold half million in the UK alone
Antony Beevor's thoughtfully researched compendium recalls this epic struggle for Stalingrad. No one, least of all the Germans, could foretell the deep well of Soviet resolve that would become the foundation of the Red Army; Russia, the Germans believed, would fall as swiftly as France and Poland. The ill-prepared Nazi forces were trapped in a bloody war of attrition against the Russian behemoth, which held them in the pit of Stalingrad for nearly two years. Beevor points out that the Russians were by no means ready for the war either, making their stand even more remarkable; Soviet intelligence spent as much time spying on its own forces--in fear of desertion, treachery, and incompetence--as they did on the Nazi's. Due attention is also given to the points of view of the soldiers and generals of both forces, from the sickening battles to life in the gulags.
Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defenses were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that "[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years." This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves.
Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defenses were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that "[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years." This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves.
Saturday, 21 June 1941, produced a perfect summer’s morning. Many Berliners took the train out to Potsdam to spend the day in the park of Sans Souci. Others went swimming from the beaches on the Wannsee or the Nikolassee....In the Soviet Embassy...an urgent signal from Moscow demanded "an important clarification" of the huge military preparations along the frontiers from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
British historian Antony Beevor begins his narrative quietly, steadily, uneasily. Moving briskly between rapidly intensifying German and Russian scenes, Beevor provides some of the historical context for the events leading toward the terrible battle of Stalingrad.
GREAT WAR BOOKS: D-DAY: The Battle for Normandy by ANTONY BEEVOR
0 comments Posted by org at 4:45 AM
by ANTONY BEEVOR
What They Say About The Book
At one point, during the fierce battle for the town of Saint-Lô, Beevor quotes a medic: "It's such a paradox, this war, which produces the worst in man, and also raises him to the summits of self-sacrifice, self-denial and altruism." Two pages later he quotes a French gendarme appalled by looting by soldiers and civilians alike: "It was a great surprise to find it in all classes of society. The war has awakened atavistic instincts and transformed a number of law-abiding individuals into delinquents."
As Beevor says, there was a sharp contrast between the Allied foot soldiers and their German counterparts. The most fanatical of the latter (and "fanatical" is indeed the word), especially those in the SS and its Hitler Jugend offshoot, had been brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine into believing that the fate of the fatherland was in their hands, and they fought with that uppermost in mind. The British soldiers by contrast had been at war for five years and were exhausted by it. Americans and Canadians were not fighting for land they could call home and thus were motivated primarily by the group loyalty so essential to military morale.
The Canadian major is quoted as saying, “The thing that shocked me was the 51st Highland Division. The Scotties threw their weapons and equipment away and fled.”
Mr Beevor said: “The fighting was indeed ferocious, far more than has been recognised, and that was one of the main themes of my book.
“But many of its battalions were badly shaken, and it took several weeks and a new commander, before its fighting spirit was restored.
“The 51st Highland Division went through a bad patch, but its morale and fighting ability was rapidly restored in late July as I emphasise in my book.”
What makes Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy worth reading isn't revisionism (at least not of the distortion-of-history type) but rather the inclusion of previously unavailable first-person accounts and, perhaps more important, a keen awareness of two seldom-discussed factors: the Germans' true motivation for fighting a seemingly losing battle and the price the French people paid in blood for their liberation. (Beevor points out at the end of the D-Day chapters that some 3,000 French men, women and children died on June 6, 1944, twice the number of GIs killed on Omaha Beach.)
Beevor is harder on the British than the Americans, perhaps because with all their experience of war to date they should have known better. And it is significant that the dustjacket shows US troops landing, not British: the Americans were preponderant on D-Day itself and became ever more so in the build-up that followed. Indeed, the book is in many ways the classic story of “young stag, old stag”. But, most important of all, from the author of Stalingrad and Berlin, the Downfall, is the re-evaluation of the “second front”, of late seen increasingly as a sideshow to the great events in the east: “The ferocity of the fighting in northwest France can never be in doubt. And despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was certainly comparable to that of the eastern front.”
Don't worry if you do not survive the assault,' was how one British officer's pep talk to troops ahead of the Normandy landings went, 'as we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.'
TO BUY BOOK CLICK HERE: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War by ANDREW ROBERTS
0 comments Posted by org at 4:24 AM
by Andrew Roberts
CLICK TO BUY - The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
Andrew Roberts (born on 13 January 1963) is a British historian and journalist.
What They Say About The Book
Gurardian
Roberts indicates how often Hitler would have done better, and even won the war, if he had made different choices. This is not an original thought, nor is it claimed as such. No one in 1940 needed to tell Churchill that the Germans stood a good chance of crushing the United Kingdom. In the long summer of 1941, as the German armies streamed as fast as their tanks could carry them towards the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, it was the belief of nearly every Soviet citizen that the USSR was on the brink of complete defeat. Such was Roosevelt's feeling that the Third Reich was about to gain definitive victory in Europe that he twisted arms in the Washington political establishment to send food and armaments to the United Kingdom even before America's entry into the war.
The central character in the book's drama, inevitably, is Hitler. Roberts's suggestion seems to be that he could only have won the war if he had not allowed it to spiral into a global struggle. Hitler missed his chance to knock out the USSR early on and provoked the US into entering the ring on the side of the opposition. He may have won the war if he had kept it as "the First European War"; the gamble that did not pay off was to make it global.
Timesonline
Ferocious measures were used to compel soldiers to go on fighting in hellish battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk. Stalin shot 135,000 of his own troops — the equivalent of 12 divisions — to encourage the others; before execution they were made to undress so that their uniforms could be reissued. To quote General Zhukov, who also wanted to kill the families of soldiers who surrendered: “In the Red Army it takes a very brave man to be a coward.” Yet Hitler was proportionately even more murderous towards his own forces. It was a tribute to the outstanding qualities of the German soldier, Roberts observes, that the Wehrmacht, retreating on two fronts and battered from the air, remained disciplined and efficient almost to the end.
Independent
The Storm of War is, in fact, a seductively easy read. You could open it at any page and it would not fail to draw you in. Stylistically, Roberts has always been very strong, and this book is happily no exception. He segues effortlessly between theatres and events, weaving a complex yet admirably comprehensible tapestry of the conflict. He also has an excellent eye for the ironies and peculiarities that serve to bring his story most vividly to life.
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