Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: The best memoir of WWI
Review: Ernst Junger was there for the duration. He was wounded sixteen times, he lost his brother. He experienced the trench war in all its hellish glory. That's the difference between Storm of Steel and other WWI memoires like Farewll to All That, Memoires of an Infantry Officer, No News from the Western Front, etc: Junger is not anti-war; he loved it! Do not expect some dreaming idealist though. Junger was a harsh realist. Nothing is to horrifying for him to tell (and believe me - there are a lot of horrifying detail!). He took part in the major combats on the western front, so we get a rare first hand glimpse of the war, The style is vivd, yet sober. He comes across as a Prussian gentleman, not cruel, but he does what he has to do to survive.
Junger later became one of the finest authors of the twentieth century. He is sadly unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, in much due to his refusal to distance himself from Hitler (he did not embrace nazism though either). He lived an interesting life; he stopped doing LSD when he turned seventy, and he wrote a major treaty on the role of bugs in heraldry. More of his work deserves to be recognized.

Rating:
Summary: A war classic
Review: Generally armies are slow to combat military innovation and those who develop a new form of warfare have a significant advantage. The British struggled against the Boers who used the new technology of repeater rifles and smokeless powder. The French and British struggled against the German development of combined arms.

The First World War saw the development of a huge number of military innovations. These included the development of the first widespread use in Europe of the machine gun, the use of barbed wire, the invention of recoil springs in artillery which allowed for accurate and rapid fire at an unprecedented rate, the development of the howitzer which increased the effective range and efficiency of artillery.

During the course of the war both sides developed their knowledge of how to use the new technological innovations. However for most of the war the Western Front was a bloody stalemate in which each attack gained little at a huge cost in human life. Between the wars the literature that was produced was critical of the various commanders and suggested for example in the case of the British army that they were lions led by donkeys.

A large number of the books written at the time reflected the experience of the soldiers on the Western front who were caught up in the endless pointless battles. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sasson and others detailed the pointlessness and stupidity of it all.

This book however is by a German who revelled in the fighting and no doubt the experience was the high point of his life. The German experience of the First World War was perhaps somewhat different from that of the Western Powers. With the exception of Verdun and the Ludendorff offensive most of the German battles were defensive. They knew that they were in for the long hall and tried to develop defence systems which would minmize disease and provide some comfort for their soldiers. After the heavy losses on the Somme they moved to using machine guns to hold the front of the line to preserve their manpower and to use it for counter attacks.

The book starts early in the war and the writer is a witness to some of the most significant battles. We get a strange ant like view what were affairs that involved hundreds of thousands of men. Compared to the British experience the thing which strikes one is how much the German war effort was run on a knife edge. The book conveys the feeling of the Germans always being outnumbered out gunned and hanging on because of their spirit and elan. It is in fact not hard to understand the development of facism as a response to the disappointment over the defeat. This edition is a new edition that removes the last four pages of the original edition. The last four pages were a rambling inarticulate cry of anguish. The writer was apparently not a Nazi more of a conservative nationalist.

An interesting book which explains the mindset of the Germans who did not accept the result of the first round and supported the end of democracy in the country.


Rating:
Summary: Classic Account of Trench Warfare from the German Side
Review: Storm of Steel is abeautifully written - even lyrical - memoir of the Great War. Ernst Junger was a young German soldier who, like many men his age, was anxious to test himself through the crucible of combat. While many soldiers enlisted out of patriotism, soldiers often had internal motivations, those that Shakespeare expresses so well in Henry V. Junger's account depicts the savage intensity of trench warfare: artillery bombardments, raids through the opne hell of "no man's land," murderous machine-gun fire and the mud and stench of life in the trenches. Incredibly, unlike millions of others, Junger survived the war, became a writer, then was estranged from Hitler's Germany, his works only becoming popular again in the postwar era. He died in 1998, at the age of 103. This book is a new translation of a classic memoir of infantry combat.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Work
Review: This is one of the best books ever written about war. Savage, honest and horrifying.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Amazing---but an uneven translation
Review: This was one of the first books written to depict combat in the First World War, and the author was much hailed at the time. He lived on throught WW2 and later, and only died in 1998 at the age of 102. This is apparently his most famous book (though he was quite prolific) and it apparently had a lasting effect on German society and political thinking.

The strange thing about all of this, of course, is that the book is only about fighting, and has *no* overt or over-arching politics in it at all. There's absolutely no context for the book whatsoever: the author doesn't even bother to mention the entrance of the United States into the war, for instance, and only briefly refers to the Eastern Front. There's nothing about his life prior to the war, and the story abruptly ends with the author receiving the Pour le Merite two months before Germany's surrender.

What the book is, then, is a harrowing account of combat in the First World War from the point of view of a common soldier who was promoted from the ranks to the rank of an officer, but never rose past company command. He fights continuously throughout the book, except for the passages where he's either wounded and in the hospital, or on furlough or in reserve. He was wounded an astounding 14 times, leaving out what the author calls "trifles" such as grazes and spent bullets, and wound up with 20 scars. It's an extraordinary tale, to say the least.

I do have a few problems with the translation, however, and that's the sole reason that this book didn't get five stars. Translator Hoffman is apparently British, though one wonders if that's his native tongue, to be frank. At one point he refers to "specialism" when he clearly (from context) means "specialty," in another passage he calls some soldiers "cookers." He uses words not commonly seen in books ("tilth") and occasionally his grammar is clumsy. Also, while the book as written provides no context, the author refers to things that he clearly expects the reader to understand. In a couple of instances that I caught, one involving Junger and his soldiers urinating into the jacket of a water-cooled machinegun, the other a reference to the Langemarck volunteers, the average reader of today wouldn't understand what the author was referring to. I understood the references, but the next reader might not.

Given that this is not the most scintillating translation in the world, it's still an amazing story, and well worth the time of almost anyone. I highly recommend it.