George Kennan (not to be confused with George F. Kennan, remembered for his famous “Long Telegram”) was a journalist and explorer. He wrote a number of books, including Tent Life in Siberia where he wrote about living with a number of Siberian tribes such as the Koraks, Yakoots, Gakouts and others. It was this experience that opened the door for him to return to Czarist Russia to author a book about the exile system in Siberia.

He initially was positive about the exile system as he felt it was a positive way to bring settlers to Siberia who would be able to repay society for their various crimes. Because he authored several positive articles on that system, he was granted almost unlimited access to the camps and officials despite the skepticism of various Czarist officials. 

Daniel Beer’s book, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Czars reviewed here on 4/21/2023) wrote of an earlier version of the system and although he did not have firsthand experience, it outlines a terrible blot on the face of Czarism. Kennan’s book goes further as he spent months travelling across Siberia, visiting way stations, camps, and work sites as well as speaking to many Czarist officials himself.

Kennan very quickly changes his mind about the system as he immediately comes across suspicious officials who only put up with him due to his letters of introduction and directives signed by high officials from the capital. He describes the towns and villages of Siberia, mostly small, dirty, and rudimentary with only a thin veil of civilization and little culture. The European Russian inhabitants attempt to build some sort of livable community life, but they are the end of an exceptionally long and thin line, far from the capital and of no significant importance to the national concerns.

In visiting the actual camps themselves, he does find some dedicated officials (normally having served a shorter time in the system) as the system is simply overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of prisoners. There are more prisoners than camp buildings so the weaker prisoners sleep outside which is not that bad during the milder months as the interiors of the camp buildings are dark, poorly ventilated, and filthy due to the lack of proper sanitation. He writes that at times he is choaking from the stench of the buildings. Some officials show him stacks of letters they sent to their superiors asking for additional funds to construct new facilities, for more manpower to manage the prisoners, all to no avail. Most letters are never even acknowledged.

Bloodlands, his 2010 history of Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder presented a graphic picture of the continual wars, revolutions and famines which has plagued Ukraine and surrounding lands. We have seen for over two years with the Russian invasion of Ukraine more heartless killing and terror. In Prit Buttar’s Retribution we witness a merciless war of attrition between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as the Soviets drive to recapture an area which was overrun in 1941 and which suffered under the Nazi regime.

This is a detailed military book of that campaign which totally ignores the suffering of the local population. Caught between two gigantic military forces, we can only image the terrible cost that the locals faced when thousands of tanks, airplanes and hundreds of thousands of men on both sides fought in a no mercy military campaign driven and directed by military and political commanders who gave little if any thought to their own troops, let alone the civilians.

In a book of nearly five hundred pages, there are numerous eyewitness accounts by soldiers and field grade officers (most of them from the German side) which can very well lead the reader to exhaustion after only a few pages. The fighting was so brutal and unrelenting that it makes the battles of attrition of World War One almost seem to be less horrific than they were. Why? Because which World War One introduced the war between machines which replaced the wars between men, the leap in technology and lethality of the means of killing had exploded exponentially. Although the German army still had a slight professional edge, the Soviets had learned well from the Germans and had increased their ability to adapt and foresee the German defensive moves. Yes, the Soviets still used on many occasions the blunt force of superior numbers in both men and material, but the constant drain of experienced German officers, NCOs and material, though endless battles deprived the average German soldier of any hope of relief let alone victory.

The individual German tank crews were still, tank for tank and man for man, superior to the average Soviet tank crew, but as would be the case in Western Europe in the next year, the Soviets like the Americans were willing to lost three or four tanks in order to kill one German tank.  The Soviets outproduced German production by a ratio of two, three and even four to one, and while the Soviets could concentrate their efforts in one continuous theater, the Germans had to spread their production and manpower over several theaters.

Was the reconquest of Central Ukraine a forgone conclusion? Nothing is ever guaranteed in war, but nothing short of a miracle could stop the Soviets. The mistakes of the Germans earlier in the war such as not knocking out England, or their defeat in North Africa, even the German declaration of war on the United States all came home to be paid in this campaign. The Germans decided to fight the world knowing that time was not on their side. When they committed serious errors which upset their timetable, they faced the reality they created.

The shame of it all is that we see another war of attrition in the same area today. Once again, the average person will pay the price for a tyrant’s illusions.

The review of this book from the back cover states that, “Buzzati is one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his fantastical imagination and for a touch that is as lyrical as it is light. The Stronghold, previously translated as The Tartar Steppe, is his most celebrated work, a book that has been seen as a veiled attack on Mussolini’s militarism, a prophetic allegory of the Cold War and an existentialist fable.” Considering it was originally published in 1940, claiming it is an “allegory of the Cold War” is quite a claim, but I digress.

I personally was not impressed with this novel; I found it slow moving, dull and pointless. It tells the story of a young Lieutenant who is transferred to the remote fortress of Bastiani, there to stand guard along with an aging garrison against an anticipated invasion by some terrible enemy. Aside from the normal duties of manning a garrison in a remote area, there is little to do and despite the best attempts to fulfill his duties, the Lieutenant like all the other officers and enlisted men gradually fall into a lethargic existence. Then the enemy appears, and life suddenly has meaning! On the various mountain tops two or three of the enemy are spotted so action must take place! Then a message appears, and that brief flame of action is destroyed as the “higher ups” state that the newly seen opponents are in fact on a peaceful mission and garrison life returns to normal.

That is about it. Fini! Oh, there is more as we watch our Lieutenant live out the rest of his life and those who he holds dear die or disappear. Nothing more.

Now I admit, I may expect more from a novel, I may be a bit too shallow (one reviewer wrote that the Lieutenant confronting, “the desperate need to affirm oneself as an autonomous entity against the forces of solitude and persecution”) to understand such depth. On the other hand, some reviewers may have gotten into a bit of group-think and must enjoy a bit of mental, shall I politely say, exercise. Unfortunately, this novel reminds me of Hunger by Knut Hamsum (see my review, 3/14/2020), a western European attempt at authoring a short Russian novel; one which allows a willing reader to find much more than there actually is.

During the first world war, Corporal Barthas kept a diary, totaling some nineteen notebooks; in those books, he recorded his thoughts and actions while serving in the French Army.  A simple but educated man, he hailed from what is known as the Midi, which is Southern France, bordered by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  He was a barrel maker, a respected craftsman, a socialist and anti-militarist, none the less, he was called up in his late 30’s to serve in what was a reserve unit.  As the war went on, that reserve unit was called on to enter the front lines on a continual basis and he served in the battles for Artois, Flanders, Verdun, the Somme and the Argonne.  Fortunately for him, his unit was not involved in the bloody offensives but managed to serve in the “quieter” sectors of those famous and terrible battles. He thus managed to escape the murderous infantry attacks against barbed wire and machine guns but was still subjected to the daily filth of the trenches with its rats, bodies in shallow graves and being covered from head to toe in mud for weeks on end. After the war, Barthas set out to complete the notebooks by corresponding with surviving companions via letters and postcards, and re-writing them in new notebooks as the older ones were covered in mud, chewed by rates and subject to all of the indignities of any ordinary soldier. Having achieved that, the manuscript lay untouched until it was finally published in 1978, sixty years after the end of the war and twenty-six years after his death.

His diary is highly unusual for the great classics we have from the first world war were by and large written by officers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Ernst Junger, Robert Graves and others.  This is one reason why this book is so important; it tells the story of the war from the sharpest end of the bayonet, from the perspective of the average infantryman.  Barthas did manage to attain the rank of corporal (although it was temporarily lost) and it is clear that there was even a noticeable distinction between a corporal and a sergeant let alone the gap with the officers. It is also important as having read literally hundreds of military books covering many nations, I personally have never read a book in which the attitude towards the lowly infantryman was so great as existed in the French army at that time.  If the locations were different, I would have assumed I was reading about the army of the Czar at the time so brutal and calloused was the mindset of the officer corps. 

The lack of care and general attitude that is shown in the pages of the diary are exhibited in so many ways; a lack of leave, poor food, cowardly and inadequate medical care, failure to plan and provide shelter and basic sanitation for troops as they rotate out of the front line, the list goes on and on.  Coupled with the sheer willingness to sacrifice troops in a war of attrition (as General Joffe would say, “nibble at the enemy until there are no more”), there is no wonder that the French army had a mutiny which, had the Germans realized it’s existence, they could have all but walked through entire sections of the French line.  Barthas does not cover the mutiny in any detail, also in his section some soldiers’ councils were set up and he was offered to be elected as the President of his.  Fortunately for him, he refused the “honor” and thus avoided the punishment when the council was dissolved (for more information, read Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt).  It is a miracle that the troops did not turn their guns on their officers.

Barthas makes it clear that the soldiers fought not for glory, honor or the fatherland, but rather for their comrades, the man next to you in the firing line, your mate who would carry your pack as your feet are blistered and you cannot go on, the man who would share the precious parcels that he received from home.  Perhaps after the war, after the pain begins to go away, some of the men will remember what passed as good times, the small victories be they in a fight or in the scramble for a good place to sleep, but Barthas makes a strong argument that at least for the French, the first world war held little to look back on with anything except distain and disgust.

An outstanding book which will make every individual who has not been in the military and especially in a war, look with new respect on those who have given that precious piece of their life for others.  Barthas is in the end no flag waving patriot and he had a different vision of the future; he was against war and we shall never know if he ever came to realize that the human cycle contains that terrible seed that must bloom in order to keep safe the life all man want.

Prior to World War II, the established bureaucracy within the U.S. navy felt that battleships would decide victory or defeat in any ocean-based war. During the war, it was realized that it was not battleships which were the deciding factor, but the aircraft carriers and hence, a new bureaucracy displaced the old.  There was another weapon which created its own set of followers and that was the submarine.  It was the submarine in the Pacific that accomplished what the U-boats could not achieve in the Atlantic; the destruction of the Japanese to transport the basic materials they needed to conduct a war.  The U.S. submarine fleet destroyed the Japanese merchant fleet which carried the oil, wood, coal, foodstuffs and all the other ingredients upon which Japan depended.

The submarine officers were a different breed apart from the officers on carriers and other surface vessels.  They were so different in fact, that officers who served in submarines knew they did not have a chance to access the highest ranks in the navy.  They were considered mavericks, risk takers and prone to striking out on their own.  They readily admitted these characteristics but then their service was entirely different from the rest of the navy.  A surface vessel can have engine problems and get towed, but if a submarine has major engine problems, it sinks.

Against this backdrop of two entrenched bureaucracies, each attempting to snare more dollars in the military budget, comes Hyman Rickover, a man of Jewish background, born in Russian occupied Poland in 1900 who has chosen to make engineering as his course in the Navy.  Talk about handicapping! As with sub officers, an engineering officer realized that getting a shot at Admiral status was small.  Not only those black marks, but he also becomes the driving force behind creating a force of nuclear submarines while disdaining the sub captains who came out of WWII with honors and medals.  Yet somehow, despite all odds, he manages to defeat much of the naval bureaucracy, convince powerful Congressional leaders and several President’s to create a nuclear submarine force that although smaller than the Soviet fleet, was technologically far ahead of the Soviets.

A massive biography which covers the first half of Wellington’s life. Not being the first son, he was relegated to joining the military (under British custom, the first son inherited the title, the second went to the military and the third son entered the Church of England).

As was common at the time, Wellington had an unhappy childhood and like many men of that time, he made his mark and fortune in India. His military victories and diplomatic skill in India allowed him to assume command in the Peninsula during the Napoleonic wars where he reorganized the army of Portugal and created the famous defensive lines which the French under a number of Napoleon’s generals refused to attack. In a series of brilliant maneuvers, he out generaled every force sent against him as he slowly pushed the French out of the entire peninsula. That does not mean that he had an easy time as Napoleon poured men and material into the fight, but his real struggle was with various politicians and powers in London who were jealous of his successes and who kept Wellington’s forces on a strict leash.

Unlike other Wellington biographies, Muir provides excellent insight into Wellington’s excellent political skills not only in India, but also in Europe where he moved with ease. He was recognized as skillful, even tempered, and able to bring various factions together after the defeat of Napoleon.

He was a man of his age but also a man of a different age. Unlike most commanders of that time, he took great care for his men, ensuring that they had adequate food and logistical support. He may have been arrogant and superior in his manner to his men, but unlike Napoleon, he was careful with their lives and tried to avoid the typical frontal attacks which so wasted his opponent’s armies.

This is a long read, incredibly detailed, but for a serious scholar, an excellent biography on a complex individual.

According to Marxist “scientific thought”, man is shaped by his environment; change the environment and you can create a “New Man”.  The same belief applies to plants and animals.  Thus, it was that while the Soviet Union spent more on scientific research than any other nation, they also managed to produce some of the worse examples of what we would call “junk science”. 

Part of the problem was that it was believed that the masses which were held down by the forces of reaction, exploitation, etc., contained within them the seeds of greatness.  Thus, it was possible for a poorly educated individual like Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and others of his ilk to make fantastic claims of break throughs in agriculture and dominate the Soviet scientific community.  With the right backing (Stalin), Lysenko, who denied the existence of genes, kept many of the older, traditionally educated scientists in a scientific limbo.  They were forced to work secretly in small poorly equipped labs while millions of rubles and huge tracks of land were given over to dubious experiments and the results doctored to fit “Marxist scientific” thought.  Attempts were made to grow lemon trees above the artic circle, millions of trees were planted in arid waste lands in an attempt to change the environment (the trees all died from lack of water, brutal winters or scorching summers), etc.  Foreign species were introduced into areas where the wolves had been killed off with the result that those populations greatly expanded by they passed along their diseases to the local domestic cattle which caused a great death toll and thus shortage of beef in the country.  There was even a theory that apes could be used to inseminate women to create a new race.

During World War II, in the face of national disaster, the strict guidelines of adhering to Marxist theory was relaxed with the result that a newly educated generation of scientists were allowed more freedom.  The results were staggering as break throughs not only in weapon development, but also in agriculture and genetic research helped to save the State.  After the war however, many scientists were forced to adhere more closely to the pre-war scientific theories.  This included theory related to such fields as psychoanalysis, social psychology or individual psychology (Pavlov had not ventured into these areas, so research was not considered necessary).  The only psychologic theory that seemed to hold any sway was that anyone who did not adhere to Soviet thought must be schizophrenic.

While there was hope for greater freedom after Stalin’s death, the agricultural experiments and failures under Khrushchev were examples of the continuation of the continued life of the theories of Lysenko.  To this day, Russian agriculture continues to suffer for the errors of previous times.  The amazing thing is that even under the warped science theories of the time, there were positive break throughs which have been beneficial to the scientific and non-scientific worlds. 

This book is one great story of political correctness in the scientific world at that time and should serve as a warning to all of us, both scientist and non-scientist of the dangers of the concept of “settled science”, a frightening term if ever one existed.

Who were the financiers who provided the manufacturing and technical expertise which allowing Hitler and the Nazis to overrun so much of Europe and commit the Holocaust?  And, after the war, what actions if any were taken against them not only for their material support of Hitler, but also for the use of slave labor on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire?

Mr. De Jong spent four years researching this book focusing on four major German families; the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks and the Porsche-Piechs.  How is it that the Krupps are so well known and yet these families contributed in so many ways to the Nazi war machine, producing tanks, guns of every caliber, ammunition, drugs, medicines and almost every other item that a nation needs for war.

Some of the named above were successful industrialists before Hitler’s rise to power, such as the Quandts while other took advantage of the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses.  “Aryanization” was the concept that with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were forbidden to own factories and businesses.  In order to comply with the law, Jewish businesses were “bought out” by Germans for pennies on the dollar and then those few pennies were determined to be the cost of an exit visa from Germany as many of the Jews fled to other countries. Such theft was in itself a crime that these and other families committed but add to the list the inhuman treatment of the slave laborers and the wheels of justice should have centered on these families.  Why weren’t these families the targets of justice?

In January 1901. Queen Victoria died at the age of 81 after being Queen for 64 years.  Her reign experienced the revolutions of 1848, the formation of the Second French Empire, Crimea War, and the unification of Germany.  A small woman, she hid herself from the public and to a certain extent, politics for decades after the death of her husband, Prince Albert.  The unintended result was a diminution of power of the Crown as strong Prime Ministers stepped into the role she abdicated. 

When she died, most citizens knew no other monarch and although her health had been slipping, many of her closest advisors were unaware of the seriousness of her illness.  This meant that her death came as a shock to the nation and the private secretaries, etc. scrambled to find the proper procedure for her internment. Fortunately, Captain (later Sir) Frederick Ponsonby took charge, often stepping on bureaucratic toes to make the arrangements.  Fate seemed to work against a smooth ceremony as the funeral cortege was too long for the route march, the casket almost fell off the caisson, the casket (there were several, each within the others), was so heavy that the troops carrying it had to be relieved after taking it off the caisson, and finally the traces broke and the caisson with the casket had to be pulled by the troops (in fact it was considered a great honor and a rival troop demanded the honor of pulling everything during the next stage).

The United States suffered shocks to its system by the death of FDR and the assassination of JFK but imagine if either of them had governed for over 60 years.  And, given the level of communications at the time, her death must have come like a bolt from the blue.  It seemed to be taken for granted that her reign would never end.  Her children ruled or were married to rulers of most of the European states which was thought to assure stability for the future but in the end, her death signaled the beginning days of the end for the old world which would be smashed in World War I.

If you are not familiar with this area, this book gives a glimpse into a simpler time, one filled with hope and dreams for a future.  A time when Europe still believed in itself and looked positively to scientific and economic advances which would benefit humanity.     

Through the mists of time, the campaign against Poland in September 1939 has seemed to have almost disappeared.  Memoirs and campaign histories of other actions of World War II have stuffed libraries around the world to overflowing and even today new volumes are produced which seldom contribute something new to our understanding of these events.  Aside from an occasional article in a history magazine, about the most complete history of the campaign that I found was by Major Robert M. Kennedy as published by the Department of the U.S. Army (1956).  Roger Moorhouse’s new book promised to bring some new facts to bare, especially around personal narrative from the Polish defenders.  To some extent, this has been achieved.

I say to some extent as there are some actions where the thoughts and activities of the defenders are noted, but not as many as I personally would have enjoyed.  The strength of this book is in putting the lead up to the war in good context, especially in the alliance between the U.K., France, and Poland.  To be brutally truthful, Poland was betrayed by its allies, who promised aid and an offensive against the Germans but had no intention or desire; instead the “allies” of Poland were depending on bluff to stop the Germans. Just two days before the invasion, when the German army was deployed on three sides of Poland, the French Minister of War assured his Polish counter parts that France was fully committed to invading Germany with the full might of its military if war were to begin.  Of course, the French “offensive” thrust a few kilometers into Germany and then quickly pulled back, while the British did not begin a bombing offensive as “private property” might be damaged.

The Polish defense of Westerplatte is covered well, but other actions such as those on the Hel peninsula and at the fortress of Modlin are barely touched.  The famous cavalry actions of Poland’s Uhlans are put into proper perspective and the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland are also covered adequately.  Other weaknesses include not discussing the escaped of over 100,000 Polish troops through Romania and their contribution to the allied victory (as well as their betrayal in England where they were not allowed to participate in the victory parade for fear of offending Stalin and the domestic Labor Party), and a summation of German losses during the campaign.  It is known that the war costs the Germans over fifty-thousand casualties and approximately twenty percent of their tanks.

From the very start of the war, the Germans embarked on a reign of terror, executing both Polish “intellectuals” including policemen, lawyers, doctors, priests, and teachers.  In the beginning theses individuals were primarily Polish but Jews were also targeted.  The key was to break the will of the Poles to resist, the view being that the Jews had no where to go and could be handled on a larger scale in time.

In the end, the nation which was the first to stand up to Nazi Germany and who stood by the Allies in spite of bad faith, was a loser in the Second World War. There were no victory parades, no awarding of honors but there was forty-four years more years of terror under the rule of Communism. Perhaps that is why Poland realizes the danger of Russia so much more clearly than the Western Europeans.  

This work is a good introduction to the campaign and basic reference book for anyone who wishes to understand the importance of the politics on both sides and a bird’s eye view of the battles. Moorhouse follows in the footsteps of his mentor, Norman Davies so we should see additional fine histories in the future.