Book Review: Images of War: Hungarian Armoured Fighting Vehicles in the Second World War, Eduardo Martinez

Spanish WWII history buff Eduardo Martinez shines a light on the AFVs of the Hungarian army, during WWII. Hungary, reacting no doubt to the initially apparently unstoppable territorial expansions of Hitler's Germany, decided to ally itself to the Nazi empire.

Csaba armoured cars.

The most one usually hears about the Hungarian and Romanian allies of Germany is that they were poor and unreliable, more a liability than an asset, in Germany's quest for lebensraum on the Ostfront. So it's refreshing to encounter a book that looks at the subject from the Hungarian perspective.

The Nimrod, capable of both AA and ground target combat.

Martinez seems impressed by the fact that Hungary was able to supply itself with its own materiel, despite the fact that it was never either good enough in itself, or sufficient to the tasks in hand. I.e. it was hopelessly outclassed by the Russian forces it was up against. This pretty inevitably lead to the Hungarian armed forces being re-equipped, to some extent, with German gear.

Turán IIs captured by the Soviets, loaded on flatcars.

Tragically for Hungary, once part of the formerly great Habsburg empire, the combination of their own poor materiel, and the insufficient quantities of better German gear, added up to a hopeless situation. Plus they were now fighting nervously alongside Romania, a long-term enemy who had, like them, thrown in their lot with the Nazis.

40M Turán, 1943.

The text of this book isn't the best, the prose being a little lumpen - perhaps due to translation from Spanish? - and littered, alas, with minor but annoying typos or editorial errors (e.g. fairly frequent use of the term Panzer when I think the author's actually referring to Panthers). But this book does shed light on an interesting and little covered area of an otherwise much covered part of the war. And as befits titles in this series, the pictures do a good job of illustrating the subject, with both the German stuff, but even more so the Hungarian AFVs being very well illustrated.

This Zrínyi II has perforated side-protecting skirts.

I feel I learned a good deal reading this, and became better acquainted with Hungary's own materiel, which is very interesting. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone interested in this aspect of the enormous war on the Eastern Front. 

Book Review: The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer

Guy Sajer was a nom du plum of Guy Mouminoux. Interestingly and confusingly Sajer/Mouminoux also worked under the name Dimitri. In the decades after WWII Mouminoux/Sajer/Dimitri was chiefly a bandes dessinées artist, what we'd call a comic book illustrator or cartoonist, whose Rififi character appeared in the Tintin Journal for about a decade, winning its creator a prize

Rififi, the 'turbulent sparrow'.

My researches thus far find no mention of his passing. And his most recent work, as far as I know, was the 2000 Kursk, Tourment D'Acier - roughly Kursk, Storm of Steel - which you can read more about (in French) here. I also found a fascinating interview with him, also in French, here, in which he mentions having been in discussion with Paul Verhoeven about filming The Forgotten Soldier. I do hope that film does eventually get made!*

Anyway, as I suspect most folks who might wind up reading this would probably already know, there's been a lot of long-running debate as to whether Sajer's accounts are true, with people coming down on both sides. As already noted, Sajer was in fact a nom de plum, and possibly even nom de guerre as well, for Guy Mouminoux, Sajer being his mother's maiden name; Sajer's father was French, his mother of German origins. 

All I can really say is that it all seemed very genuine and convincing to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Forgotten Soldier. As military history nuts many of us read a lot of non-fiction accounts of war, and this book is like being dropped into the midst of the horrors that such books worst passages describe. Only where they often give us more of an overview, Sajer tells the horror story of his own decade fighting for the Nazi war-machine from within, a minor player embedded in a world of pain and brutality that seems like it will never end.

Gripping visceral stuff, it's also relentless. Sajer, who as mentioned above became a cartoonist after the war, says in numerous places how far short words are doomed to fall from capturing the starkly brutal inhumanity he witnessed and was part of. But, all things considered, and giving him the benefit of the doubt on the veracity front, he does a pretty convincing job of evoking hell on earth on the Eastern front.

An intriguing footnote to all this is that in several interviews in his later years he has said - and more than once - that, despite the horrors and hardships, it was actually a great time in many ways, and a period of his life that he was glad to have lived through and didn't regret. Interesting!

* I discovered during my researches for this post that, sadly, this potential film project was canned.

Book Review: Mortar Gunner on the Eastern Front, Hans Rehfeldt

Volume one of a two-part Ostfront memoir, subtitled From the Moscow Winter Offensive to Operation Zitadelle. Hans Rehfeldt is just 18 when he sets off on a nine day train odyssey to the Eastern Front. Personally I love firsthand accounts such as these. Even the trip to the Front is interesting in itself.

The author gives almost continual daily entries - and that's exactly how the narrative is presented - that track the progress he and his comrades, of the elite Grossdeutschland unit, make. There's a lot of detailed frontline action. I was hoping to say it probably helped his chances of survival that he was in a mortar unit, as you might imagine that they would be slightly behind the sharp end, but I've been somewhat disabused of this notion, inasmuch as mortar positions were as often as not on or forward of the front line. Not during attacks, necessarily, but very much so during the longer periods between attacks.

The rather cool looking GD shoulder boards.

Mortar ammunition runners, and such was Rehfeldt's lot, also had the risky job of to-ing and fro-ing between the mortar pits and rearward supply areas, fetching fresh ammo. Indeed, it was running this dangerous gauntlet during an attack that would earn the author an Iron Cross, second class. This book (and doubtless its companion second volume) are terrific for learning about grunt-level tactical warfare on the Ostfront.

One striking thing is that it's very early on in the book, and Barbarossa itself, that the German's reach their farthest east, with the author and his fellows southeast of Moscow, around Tula, at which point the tide turns and retreat begins. Temperatures reach -52°, and Rehfeldt is invalided out of the line twice, due to severe frostbite which, along with near ubiquitous diarrhoea and vermin, reminds one of the horrors of Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.

A typical five man mortar crew in action.

The written content is well supported by plentiful photographs, and not just generic images, but photos of Rehfeldt and his fellow Grossdeutschland soldiers. Also, in addition to his diary and these photographs, there's a further interesting graphic element, in the form of a good number of Rehfeldt's sketch-maps. I think it's great that these are reproduced as drawn, as opposed to having been redrawn professionally. Their very naïveté adds to their authenticity and interest.

Grossdeutschland, with its famous stahlhelm unit insignia, was way more than decimated. Losses were nigh on - indeed it's suggested here they exceeded - 100%! In other words more men were killed, injured or otherwise lost (captured, missing, etc.) than made up the full-strength of the unit pre-combat. As a result they are amalgamated into other units during the campaign, before being withdrawn for rest and refitting, and restored at greater strength, ready for Operation Zitadelle, the Kursk offensive.

A 2.8cm Panzerbüchse like this one knocks out at T-34 outside Schachty. [1]

I'm posting this review as I near the end of volume one. It's been brilliant, and continues to be exciting, informative and highly compelling. I'm really looking forward to the second instalment! To conclude, I'll do something I don't usually do in my reviews, and quote an extended extract, to give a flavour of Rehfeldt's writing [2].

'We heard by radio that Stukas had been called up. Now we searched the skies waiting for them to appear. Meanwhile our armoured cars had rounded up about twenty-five Ivans from the fields of wheat and sunflowers. The [Russian] cavalry troop was on the point of making an attack when the Stukas arrived, twelve of them. At this the cavalry, some mounted, others on foot, turned tail and ran for cover. The Russian fear of the Stuka appeared to be enormous. Our prisoners standing near us threw themselves down and looked up fearfully at the aircraft. We have noted this behaviour amongst the Russians so often that we consider that the Stuka dominates the battlefield. First they circle the target like vultures, then one machine after another tilts over one wing in steep downward flight at fantastic speed. The bombs are released almost directly onto the target. The howl of the 'Jericho sirens' is an additional psychological factor. The walls break and the howl gets on your nerves. It all makes Ivan deadly quiet, but for us brings – relief! The circles become tighter, the target has been identified and the nose tilts – towards us! Crippling horror! They are diving on us! Smoke signals, quick, quick! The flares hiss upwards and orange–yellow smoke is born on the wind. Our position is marked and the tank destroyer shows the swastika flag. At the last moment, already in the dive, the Stukas realise their mistake and, with a bloodcurdling wail of sirens close overhead, turn and climb in a steep curve upwards... They circled again and this time bombed the Russians; total chaos ensued, the bombs exploding in the midst of wildly zig-zagging tractors, tanks and fleeing soldiers. An ammunition truck exploded – some tanks zig-zagged off the road, bombs dropping between them: Ivan made no reply. In conclusion the Stukas strafed any vehicle in the open, and soldiers fleeing in panic. We watched the scene wordless and spellbound. Whenever a Stuka bomb exploded, we felt the shockwave a kilometre away. Thick clouds from the explosions hovered over the battlefield. Finally the Stukas made a pass over us at low-level waggling their wings, a sign of greeting and victory, and then they roared off without climbing.'

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NOTES:

[1] This is one of several weapons I'd not been aware of before reading this account. N.B. the pic is not from this book.

[2] I think it's worth noting that the translation is excellent. One hears the Germanic turn of phrase, the rhythm, sentence construction, etc. But English vernacular is also well deployed, where appropriate, using such phrases as 'hell for leather' and 'hit the sack'.

A good view of the cuff-band.

The above Bundesarchiv photo, not from the book, shows the Grossdeutschland armband quite clearly. I'd expected it to look more like the top of the two examples below. But it's more like the bottom one, i.e. harder to decipher! Can anyone decipher and explain exactly what the GD cuff thing says, and why it differs from what one  might expect?

Kit Review: 1/72 Hauler Radschlepper Ost, Pt. I

This kit arrived with the mail today, from Hannant's. Including postage, of approx. £3, this kit cost just a few pennies less than £33! I think this makes it the most expensive 1/72 model I've purchased thus far.

The contents of the box.

Hauler, a one-man show from the Czech Republic, make resin kits, photo-etched detailing sets, and all sorts. This'll be the first time I'll have made one of their kits. There's a lot of grey resin parts, plus decals, clear plastic for windows (and even for the dials of the dash display... impressive!), and some photo-etched stuff.

I've had a look through all the parts, and the kit looks really great. I'm looking forward very much to building this bizarre vehicle. I actually bought a 1/35 kit of this quite a while ago (another brand that's new to me, Riich, or something like that!?). But that's sitting up in the attic, in a big box of 'pending' models. 

Damn! The rear axle broke during clean up. [1]

All the resin parts trimmed and cleaned up. [2]

Only one major bummer during the prepping stage of the resin parts. The rear axle broke whilst I was removing it from its 'sprue', or rather the residue of the casting. I tried supergluing it, but it just kept breaking again. In the end I had to remove the damaged section altogether. I wound up replacing it with a chunk of styrene sprue. Shaping that and supergluing the various parts together was a real pain. But I'm hoping it's gonna be alright come assembly time. That'll be tomorrow now, as it's late, and I'm very low on superglue, and I'm doggone tired!

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This looks like a good read. [3]

This odd looking vehicle was one of the numerous projects that Ferdinand Porsche was involved with during WWII. Skoda manufactured them. Despite poor performance in trials Hitler ordered about 200 be made. Apparently most of them were never used. And of those that were, they ended up being used in the Western and not the Eastern front! One issue was hefty fuel consumption, which with Germany's shrinking Reich and raw materials supply issues, didn't help its cause.

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Damn... another axle breakage!

That was yesterday, Feb 19th (the day my sister and her daughters arrived at my mum's, on a short visit from Spain). Today is wednesday the 20th. And work continues on the RSO. I made a right mess of the wheels. I only noticed that the front and back wheels are differing thicknesses after attaching a non-matching pair at the rear. Fortunately I hadn't glued them on. 

Getting the wheels on at all was tricky; all four required fairly extensive cutting, filing and fiddling in order to make them fit. Eventually I got them all in their proper places, and even had the tread in the right orientation. Which I hadn't on my first attempt. 

I made nicer sticks/levers/knobs, whatever, for the cabin.

And now I've made a start on the photo-etch pieces. I decided not to use the gear shift lever, etc. Instead I made my own, from stretched sprue. Much nicer, being fully rounded. The photo etch parts are both too flat and too delicate.

Gear shift lever etc. in situ.

All the underside chassis stuff... looking good!

Working with resin kits and superglue is, I find, quite tiring. More so than constructing standard styrene stuff. So at this point, i.e. now, I've decided to take a brief break. Have a lie down even! Before doing so, I took a snap of the model with upper bodywork parts resting in position, but not glued, so as to see how the model's coming along. I like it!

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A couple of Milicast figures give a sense of scale.

Another short round of work on this kit is snatched. The chassis and rear body are mostly done now. The Milicast resin figures in the pics above and below help give an indication of the large scale of this vehicle. The partially painted figure below might be the driver.

Getting ready to add some inner cab detailing.

Cab floor and pedals added. Other parts prepped.

Some of the photo-etched stuff is great, being robust, or not too exposed. But some of the finer detailing is extremely delicate. The u-shaped footholds, for example, whilst lloking great, are very easy to knock off or bend out of shape. This makes handling the model tricky. I might have to come up with some kind of solution, to enable me to handle it for the forthcoming build steps.

Cabin glazed, adding dashboard detailing.

The photo-etch over clear plastic on the dash looks great.

Close of play on day two. Cabin not glued on yet.

I finished modelling at 2am! Having snatched the final hour or so after our guest went up to bed at about 12.30am. As usual, glazing the cab was a right pain, and the resulting 'glass' is dirty/messy/opaque. In this instance I glued it in place using superglue gel. Today - I'm writing this the morning after - I'll start work on painting the cab interior. 

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NOTES:

[1] The little grey disc in the upper right area is the styrene sprue replacement part.

[2] In this pic the repaired rear axle is looking ok. The split resin segment I cut out is just to the right of the fixed axle, in the bottom right quarter of the photo.

[3] Saw this at the Bovington Tank Museum shop. Should've got it there and then! Going to On Track  down in Folkestone this saturday. Maybe I'll see/get it there?

Film Review: A Time To Love & A Time To Die, 1958

A Time To Love And A Time To Die is one of a very small group of American films made during the 1950s, i.e. only very shortly after WWII itself, that explore the human side of the German experience of that epic conflict.

The only other similar film, in this particular respect, that I've seen thus far is Decision Before Dawn. The latter is a black and white movie, as much espionsge thriller as war film, set on the Western and Home Fronts, whereas A Time To Love is more melodrama and romance, is set on the Eastern and Home Fronts, and is in bright Technicolour.

Those groovy old lobby cards...

... have a certain period charm...

... don'tcha think?

Both depict decent young Germans as central characters, and both find these men back in Germany, struggling to reconcile their consciences with their roles in the war, and their relationships to the Fatherland and it's peoples. This film is based on a book of the same name by German author Erich Maria Remarcque (of All Quiet On The Western Front fame*), and director Douglas Sirk was himself also of German extraction, so it has a personal resonance for two of the key figures behind it.

A somber looking version of the book.

An earthier pulpier interpretation.

Despite their roles in the making of the film, which one hopes bring some authenticity to it, I found the choice of male lead, Frank Gavin, who plays German soldier Ernst Graeber, rather problematic. Decision Before Dawn's Oscar Werner was both actually German, and an excellent actor, making for a very convincing character. I found Gavin too hammy and all-American (he's actually of Hispanic/Latin-American extraction) to be very plausible. I was more than half expecting him to blurt out, 'Gee, ain't the Fatherland swell, baby!' at some point.

Having said this, both films explore in different ways the moral compromises and complexities facing basically decent young men fighting on behalf of a toxic ideology. In Sirk's movie this theme ought perhaps to feel even more central, inasmuch as the film starts and ends in that infernal crucible of the Nazi quest for 'lebensraum' (a horrifically ironic misnomer, as it transpired, in that it was always as much charnel-house as living space), the Eastern or Russian Front.

Gavin, good looking? Unquestionably. Charismatic? Possibly. Germanic? Nope.

Gavin and his love-bird, Lisalotte Pulver.

It's really only the poignancy of this thread that prevents this film from being somewhat cornball, thanks to the rather hammy home-front roles of several chief actors, including Gavin himself, and his female opposite lead and love-interest, Lisalotte Pulver, a Swiss actress who was at least a star of German cinema of that era.

Amidst the ruins of the German homeland we see how civilians cope or go under, and the paranoia of the regime is evoked (the nosey conformist 'house-frau' is suitably repellent). We even meet a Jew in hiding, who's temporarily sheltered by Professor Pohl, played by Erich Maria Remarque himself, whose conscientious behaviour has predictable results.

There's not much Ostfront war footage...

... but what little there is...

... is pretty good.

The ending is sad but predictable, and whilst it helps make one of the films central points, about the senseless waste of war (another thing it has in common with Decision Before Dawn), it still feels less convincing or weighty than perhaps it wants to.

When the credits rolled I must confess I felt somewhat disappointed by this film, especially as it's packaged and marketed by Eureka as part of their Masters of Cinema line, and would have given it just three balkenkreuz. However, in the course of writing this review I begin to think that, whilst Sirk's melodramatic style and the Yankee-doodle feel of some of the acting seem at odds with the subject, it is an interesting if uneven film, and worth watching.

Graeber is a principled grunt, going back to the front...

... whilst others play a morally looser game.

* As a result this film was sometimes referred to as All Quiet On The Eastern Front! 

PS - In addition to the author making a cameo, it's interesting that Klaus Kinski also has cameos in both Decision Before Dawn and this film.

Book Review: Stalingrad, Antony Beevor

Antony Beevor has a talent for writing military history that reads almost like an action novel. His account of the demise of the German 6th Army - the largest in the entire Wehrmacht at the time - during the fight for Stalingrad, is gripping.

The colossal scale of war on the Ostfront, and the barbarism of both sides, driven by pitiless ideologies, make this theatre particularly and ghoulishly fascinating. And, as is often said, Stalingrad is commonly viewed as the turning point both in this conflict, and the war at large.

A saluting skeleton greets German troops arriving in Stalingrad. [1]

The Germans pressed all available resource into their service.

Hitler and Stalin both became maniacally obsessed with imposing their will in this contest, neither permitting their beleaguered troops to give up or retreat. The profligacy of lives on both sides is truly appalling. Beevor, like the reader, is clearly enthralled by the carnage.

It strikes me that Hitler allowed himself to be deflected from his original goal of securing the breadbasket of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucuses, and was lured into a wasteful concentration on prestige targets, namely cities: Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad.

Germans dug in beneath a knocked-out T-34.

A famous pic. of German troops amidst the rubble of Stalingrad.

These battles favoured the Russians, as they denied the Germans the undoubted advantages of their mobile 'blitzkrieg' tactics, drawing them into static battles of attrition, in which the weight of Soviet numbers could be used to wear the Germans and their sometimes less than enthusiastic allies (Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, etc.) down.

The detail of the battle itself is well conveyed. Although I'd have liked a few more maps to have helped track how things developed. And Beevor manages to move pretty deftly around the theatre, from the action amidst the rubble to developments elsewhere on the flanks, without spoiling the narrative flow.

Soviet troops fighting in the ruined City..

You can easily see how arduous such street-fighting must've been.

He also moves smoothly through the various gears, from the top brass, with their concerns of ideological and personal prestige, down the chain of command to the God-forsaken 'grunts', fighting for their lives in a Dantean inferno, the hellishness of which is made all the worse by the inhumanity of the political ideologies that drove this conflict.

On that topic, one thing that really strikes me, the more I read about Russian history during Stalin's reign, is that - whilst Hitler singled out certain groups, in particular the Jews, for merciless persecution - 'Uncle' Joe seems, whilst preserving a glacially cool exterior (unlike the often apoplectic Führer), to have been a psychotic mass murderer of a far more wide-rangingly brutal and paranoid type.

Russian POWs who starved to death in Stalingrad captivity.

Stalingrad literally became a blitzkrieg graveyard.

Another striking thing is how many Russians sought to join the Germans. Some might well have done so just as a means to survive. But many, especially those persecuted under Communism (e.g. Kulaks, Cossacks, Poles, Ukrainians) initially saw the Germans as liberators from the Stalinist/Communist yoke.

According to Beevor the NKVD, part of Stalin's internal police/terror apparatus, were shocked and appalled when they discovered how many Russians were collaborating with the German invaders. These 'Hiwis' (from 'Hilfswillige') in places made up as much as 25% of German forces, and some estimates - unsurprisingly uncertain in the fog of war - run as high as 80,000 for the battle at Stalingrad itself.

The pitiful remains of VIth Army, passing into captivity.

Young aryans of the vaunted 'master race', reduced to troglodytes.

In typically Stalinist fashion, such people became 'former Russians'. Caught between two such appallingly inhumane ideologies the sufferings of all concerned were, frankly unimaginable. But Beevor does a damn good job of trying to convey how things were, and it makes for terrifically gripping reading.

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NOTES:

In researching images for this post I found a really cool post (click here) on abandoned German armour at Stalingrad. Some great images/info!

[1] Little did they know how prophetic this macabre roadside attraction would prove to be.