The Forgotten Soldier

Rating:
Summary: "Gott Mit Uns"
Review: This is the most physically punishing book I have ever read, outdoing the merciless 30-page depth charge sequence in Bucheim's "Das Boot" or the hopeless final chapters of Stachow's superb "If This Be Glory" for its sheer, crushing misery. It took me three attempts to get all the way through it, and I can honestly say that Guy Sajer communicates the physical suffering of war better than any author I have ever read. There are passages in this book where the cold of the Russian winter seemed to seep through the pages and into my fingertips, and I had to actually look up and remind myself that I was not in physical pain or discomfort, not sitting in a muddy shell hole in fifty degree below zero weather, not starving, not terrified, not suffering from frostbite or chillblains or lice. To find a book that beat me to such a quivering, glassy-eyed emotional pulp, I would have to go back to high school, to my first reading of Orwell's "1984."

"The Forgotten Soldier" is the memior of Guy Sajer, one of the "volksdeutsche" -- people of majority German blood who lived outside Germany, but were awarded (or condemned, depending on your point of view) to German citizenship when Hitler conquered or annexed their country of residence. Sajer was French, with a German mother, spoke almost no German, and drafted into the Wehrmacht not long after it made him a refugee. His perspective is one of an outsider looking in, and it is part of what makes the book so interesting.

"Soldier" is a long, slow-moving book, somewhat boring at first. Sajer's prose starts out clumsy, overlong, and plodding. He lacks descriptive power and tends to go on and on about trivial matters. As the book advances however, he warms to his subject and becomes much more readable, even showing flashes of genius as he desribes his tiny corner of Hitler's war. After basic training he is shipped off to Poland and then Russia in the spring of 1942, and serves as a rear-echelon soldier with the Reichsbahn, the outfit responsible for getting supplies to the front. His main enemies are boredom, discomfort, crushing physical labor, and the horrible Russian weather, which oscillates between extremes of heat and cold, dryness and flood. Out of sheer ennui, he volunteers for an elite combat unit, the Grossdeutschland panzergrenadier division, in the spring of '43....and has no idea what he is getting into.

From his merciless combat training at "Camp F" (whose motto is "WE ARE BORN TO DIE") -- recruits are drilled until they faint, shot at with live ammunition, and literally trampled by their commanding officer -- to the baptism-of-fire in vicious street fighting at Orel, Sajer goes from complacency to a state of constant, bewildered terror. He and his tiny group of "Kameraden"
-- upright Weisreidau, fanatic Lensen, fun-loving Hals, cowardly Lindberg, and cynical survivor Wiener aka "the Veteran" -- are constantly in the thick of it, enduring endless artillery bombardments and human-wave assaults, crawling on elbows and knees through mud and barbed wire toward meaningless objectives, alternating from vicious cruelty (shooting Soviet soldiers as they try to surrender) to gallant chivalry (cheering Soviet prisoners who fought bravely) and back again. Never is there an escape from the war: shipped to the rear for "rest" they are attacked by partisans; shipped home for leave they witness the terror-bombings that turn every major German city into smoldering rubble. And as the situation at the front deteriorates, the misery multiplies. Just when you think things can't get any worse, they do: one of the most harrowing scenes in the book comes after the retreat following the Battle of Kursk, when Sajer and his comrades survive all nine circles of hell, only to face arrogant military police who pass life-or-death judgements on them one at a time.

The true villain of the book, however, is not the Soviets or the Nazi leadership, but the endless Russian winters. The scenes where soldiers shove their numb, frost-bitten feet into flames or urinate on each other to keep warm, while outside trees literally explode from the intense cold, are horrible and haunting.

Sajer wrote his book because the Eastern Front, the decisive theater of the war which saw the biggest battles in human history, is largely ignored by western historians, and its veterans largely forgotten. I guarantee, however, that nobody who can get through "The Forgotten Soldier" will ever forget it.

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Ever.
Review: I read this book about twenty tears ago and have been yearning to read it again. It is by far the finest war diary-factual book on war that I have ever read [voraciously reading military history and fiction for 30 years.] The author Guy Sajer was just an ordinary man from Alsace-Lorraine. He joins the Wehrmacht and is ultimately sent to the Eastern Front. Every aspect of this book rings true from the training through every kind of combat to the lice tormenting the troops. I felt for the German soldier in Russia who had literally nothing to eat, inadequate weapons and ammunition, and almost no winter gear. Sajer's depictions are flawless. His belief system, reflections and conclusions were a bit disturbing to me when I first read them. They are not now. Our John Wayne view of WW2 and the world is fast falling by the wayside. Guy Sajer gives it to us from the other side. Very highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: What more can I say. I am about to reread it for the n-th time. A truely great book on a truely increadible topic.

Rating:
Summary: German Soldier's Experience On The Eastern Front
Review: I really enjoyed this book however I must admit I was a little disappointed with some aspects of it. As an enthusiast of the Eastern Front in WWII I had always been led to believe that the real horrors of this theatre of war for the Landser was the sheer verocity of the fighting and the constant combat that each and every soldier was involved in. Sajer totally blows this out of the water, for his involvement in combat was sporadic and indeed months seem to pass in his account without him firing a shot. For me the most horrifying experiences were the Russian Winters and the lack of supplies and these things alone express the difference of fighting on the Russian Front rather than the type of combat itself. His accounts of combat are written like a novel, as if written from a third party perspective with the writer detached from events around him and I never really got a sense of his own personal experiences during fighting. Indeed it seems to be more than halfway through the book before he does anything other than carry supplies and run away from the advancing Red army. No doubt his experiences were horrific although in terms of a combat story it could have been written about France, North Africa or Italy, the fact it was in Russia seems almost incidental and that is not the perception I got from the myriad of other books I have read on the Eastern Front. If I am mistaken on this then it is because Sajer failed to really make me see the type and style of combat that the German Landser was involved in on the Eastern Front. Sajer was not involved at Stalingrad or Kursk or Kiev and perhaps his experiences reflect this. As a book about the experiences of a German Landser in WWII it is excellent and I recommend it wholeheartedly. As a book about the combat experiences of a German Landser on the Eastern Front it failed to grab me. I got more from the Sven Hassel books which I would recommend over this one (if they are still in print).

Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the claims of this work being fictional
Review: This book gives the best account of what the horrors and hardships of combat during WWII were like. It will toy with your emotions and puts a very human face on the "enemy" soldiers: German soldiers. Collectively, the average German soldiers' experience during the war was the harshest and most severe, perhaps only rivaled by those of the Red Army.

The book has spurred controversy regarding its authenticity. Is it a clever fictional account, or factual autobiography as it claims to be? An excellent article that will answer all you wish to know about the author, and this pressing question, can be found at ...

It is written by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Douglas E. Nash, US Special Operations Command, MacDill AFB, Florida. I think all those with a strong interest in this book with find it most enlightening, and at least very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Why isn't it available in German ?
Review: This book is one of THE MOST DISTURBING books about war...Also the Spandau Machine Gun is from the first World War, the MG42 was the standard infantry MG during WW2.

However much of what Sajer wrote sounds very true and credible.
Also the locations of the battles match with the maps about Russian attacks in most WW2 encyclopedias.

The book itself does NOT try to bias anything or to twist facts about right and wrong during WW2. Sajer makes it absolutely clear in the beginning of the book that he was a young boy of 16 years, who "married" war when he was about the age to actually fall in love but got death and destruction instead.

Sajer isn't neither a nazi or glorifies the regime and it's crimes. When he mentions the Warsaw Ghetto he does it in a way that some people consider "ignorant" or blunt. Fact is that at that time those were his feelings. The whole book is an emotional recount of his experiences without any further comment.

And that is the big problem of "Forgotten Soldier". Despite it's
clear anti war message and exposing the inhumanity of the Wehrmacht towards it's own soldiers, readers might expect a reflection of Sajer about the right and wrong of the second World War. For a young boy those things didn't exist. Only the veteran soldiers in the division show a bit of cynicism about the madness of the Russian front throughout the book.

Sajer's final words at the end of the book actually deliver the message of the book...A final comment that is the most honest one I have ever read about soldiers in war...

Rating:
Summary: ¿¿because hope is horrible.¿
Review: This is not a WWII novel. It is the story of hope. It is the story of survival even without hope. This is the most self-aware memoir from a person thrust into the lowest denominator of human experience I have ever read. Man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. his own emancipated self. "The planes came over again, and I hid my eyes so that I couldn't see. The rhythm was too horrible, and I was only human, not God. I hadn't died on the Cross, and had no right to watch."

I don't read this genre. I'm not a WWII nut. Someone at my office handed it to me while we were talking about the build up leading to Gulf War II. I talked as if I knew something. "Russia means war - of which, as yet, I know nothing."

This book is intense. It is tough to read. Not because of the language, which is excellently written/translated, but because of scene after scene of heart stopping tragedy. The Forgotten Soldier can both cause depression and shame in humanity, and in the next sentence cause a contemplative happiness in the reader. At least for the time being I very much appreciate NOT being a soldier, for not freezing in the wilderness, for not begging for food with a gun, not watching my friends die horrible slow deaths as I placidly watch, not asking them to shoot me. And almost worst of all: surviving all that and then try to believe in "everyday" life. I thank God for all the wonderful things that I take for granted. For instance, writing silly reviews on Amazon.com.

Read this book. One cannot glorify war in ANY way after this. Other war novels by other authors will dim and seem petty. All of my previous assumptions about war and what it means to be human have been blown away.

"I still watched, through my dazed eyes, as these thousands wandered through the heights of tragedy, in a silence which, to my ears, drowned out all the noises of the earth. They had been striped of their human condition, and I watched them in hideous loneliness, weeping internal tears as heavy as mercury."

Rating:
Summary: The new All Quiet
Review: In brief, I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the human side of modern war, and would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed or was moved by All Quiet on the Western Front. This autobiographical reflection of one man's experience in World War II presents an unusual perspective, that of a French-German man from Alsace who joined the German army and eventually entered the ranks of one of the elite divisions of the Wehrmacht, the Gross Deutschland. It takes place almost entirely on the eastern front in Russia, and later Poland and Germany as the war approached its conclusion. The novel portrays with absolute clarity and authenticity the horror, sacrifice and waste of humanity of war at its very worst, particularly this war.

For those unaware of the scale of the war on the eastern front in World War II, the geographic scale, number of soldiers, casualties (both military and civilian) and number of days of combat dwarfed the same figures of the western front where the Americans and British were fighting. The intensity of the combat was generally greater as well; since neither side observed the Geneva Convention when taking and keeping prisoners of war, and since surrendering enemy soldiers were almost never taken alive, the individual soldiers on each side fought with a desperation and fanaticism than was almost unheard of on the western front, where both the Germans and the Allies tended to respect international law regarding the treatment of prisoners of war. More affecting than the horror of combat and the scale of the conflict, however, was the near total hopelessness conveyed by the author as the novel progresses and the fate of his comrades, and of his country, becomes more and more inevitable. The novel conveys the immensity of the landscape, the complete inhumanity of the fighting, and the increasing desperation of the situation as the Russian armies inexorably advance further and further, consuming everything before it. The depictions of the battles that occurred toward the end of the war are truly epic in their scale.

This novel will never become the classic that All Quiet on the Western Front is, because the author describes the enthusiasm and patriotism he felt for Germany at the time, feelings which he attempts to explain but for which he does not apologize or repent. The political and moral sensitivity of his early support for the Nazi regime will ensure that this novel never achieves general acceptance. WITHOUT ENDORSING HIS VIEWS, I feel that this is unfortunate, because the novel is so far beyond Nazi ideology or any of the politics of the conflict that it is insignificant within the context of the story. His experience is universal. The sacrifice and loss of so much humanity, while necessary, was no less tragic, and the truths about war remain undiminished by the lack of moral justification of the cause for which he fought. I recommend this book to all those who feel that they can put aside the fact that the author was a patriotic German in World War II and instead can read it purely as the story of a man who may have lived through the war but did not quite survive it.

Rating:
Summary: Truly one of the best stories i have ever read
Review: This book truly expressed the subhuman horrors of combat from a personal perspective. I would recommend everyone and anyone to read this book. The author was very detailed oriented in his many experiences with death. This book truly expresses the clash of two very different ideologies which inevitalby erupts into a total war. This book it meant to convey the horrors of war and it also projects a message of the primitive nature of man. I cannot stress enough, the importance of the read anyone who wants to truly understand the ultimate test of life should read this book. It's not just about a man's life during the second world war. This book convey's so much pain, suffering, numbness and death to the reader. The ethos of these men during this period was one, that cannot be fathomed in our period. This book is for anyone who wants to know the hard and real truth. Not every german soldier was a nazi, many were soldiers who fought for their cause, or realistically they simply fought to avoid the embrace of death.

Rating:
Summary: An Outstanding Book
Review: This is the first book I had ever read the looked at the German side of WWII. We americans tend to only think of our side of the story. We think that ALL Germans were blood thirsty Nazis. Not true. Many of the German soldiers were just young draftees and had no animosity toward the Allied forces. This auto-biography is a perfect example of that. It shows how hard the Germans really had it. I recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII.