T-34 an audio review

https://youtu.be/k2izg34nHJ4

Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad By William Craig

 Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

By William Craig

William Craig was born in 1929, in Concord, Massachusetts. His story is perhaps a uniquely American one. He was working as an advertising salesman in 1958 when he appeared on a television quiz show, “Tic Tac Dough”, which worked by having you answer questions to place an X or an O on a tic tac toe board (Hollywood Squares before Hollywood Squares? {Folks welcome our guest editor, former movie critic and current friend Havoc} ). Mr. Craig did incredibly well, earning 42,000$ (this would be around $385,000 today) a record victory at the time. Mr. Craig followed up this victory by displaying some uncommon good sense, using his winnings to pay for additional education. He enrolled at Columbia University and earned an undergraduate and Master's degree in History (My man!). He then turned to writing, his first book being a non-fiction work, The Fall of Japan, released in 1967. A narrative history of the last weeks of Imperial Japan, it was received breathlessly, and announced to be virtually flawless by the New York Times’ book review. Mr. Craig then turned to fiction writing, penning The Tashkent Crisis, a Cold War Thriller where a President who had slashed the military budget to pay for domestic programs is forced to use extreme measures to face off a resurgent Soviet threat. It was published in 1971. Mr. Craig then spent the next 2 years gathering information and writing the subject of today's review: Enemy at the Gates, which was released in 1973. He released his final work, The Strasbourg Legacy, in 1975, a thriller about a CIA agent hunting a secret cadre of Nazi officers committed to bringing about the 4th Reich by having the US and USSR destroy each other. His wife Eleanor Craig, a teacher and therapist, wrote 4 books herself, and together they had 4 children and 8 grandchildren. Mr. Craig would pass away on September 22, 1997, from complications of kidney disease in Norwalk Hospital. Mrs. Craig would pass away on August 7th, 2012, at the age of 83. 

Enemy at the Gates was first published by Readers Digest Press and received a 2nd printing from Penguin Publishing.  Now before I go too deep into the book, I have to address the elephant in the room that is the 2001 film, which did take the title of the book and some various historical elements, but honestly, the film borrows just as much from the fictional novel War of the Rats by David Robbins in 1999. So I would encourage people to consider the film and book here as two very separate entities. 

Now let me get back to the book. Mr. Craig would face a lot of difficulties in gathering source materials. First, he had to track people down, as the survivors of the battle had scattered to 3 different continents (and frankly, there weren’t all that many German survivors of the battle), but track down hundreds of them he did. He also poured through journals, diaries, and letters, many of which are reproduced in full in the book. He was able to access lots of information from Russian soldiers and citizens, including several Soviet generals, such as the personal papers of Marshal of the Soviet Union Andre Yeryomenko and some of the correspondence from Marshal Zhukov, but the realities of the Cold War kept him from accessing any official Soviet archives in any great depth (The Soviets rather assumed that, for most of the Cold War, anyone accessing their wartime archives was either trying to learn how to beat them in a future war, or going to use them to embarrass the government.  One of the few things I’ll give the current Russian regime is their partial reversal of this policy). This is balanced out, I think, by the use of first-hand accounts from Russian soldiers and civilians, but should be kept in mind. Because the surviving Wehrmacht generals and officers were more than happy to give Mr. Craig full and open access to German sources, this has led to some arguments over the events presented in Enemy at the Gates, as a number of historians have argued that these officers used this opportunity to try and deflect blame from themselves to rivals within the German Army, or onto Hitler and other political leaders in the Nazi leadership (Not a hard thing to do.  The argument over whose “fault” Germany’s defeat in WWII belongs to is a complex and active one.  This Historian’s personal opinion is that there is plenty of blame to go around, frankly). While I'm pretty sure that some blame games are being played, and that the generals and other officers are overplaying just how much they tried to resist the strategy that Hitler dictated... frankly, it fits what we know of Nazi political leadership and Hitler's leadership style. We know that Hitler was a micromanager who overestimated his own abilities and rejected facts that didn't fit his preferred worldview. We know he had a tendency to override his generals and officer corps and that he was increasingly erratic, whether it be from illness, drug use, or personal instability. I mean who would be stable on a cocktail of cocaine, amphetamines, testosterone, gun cleaner, and strychnine? (All very true, but what the Generals often forget to mention is that, by and large, they were uniformly in agreement, or at worst, of divided opinion, concerning almost all of his high-level decisions.  They believed, as Hitler did, that the Soviet Union would implode as soon as they hit it.  They believed that the seizure of Stalingrad justified the deployment of the 6th Army, and that they could re-supply or relieve the pocket when it was surrounded.  These were bad decisions, and Hitler does ultimately bear responsibility for them, but I find it hard to accept the protests of officers who believed the exact same thing, now looking back and claiming it was all his idea.{What’s that saying, only Germany would produce a professional general staff willing to fight the entire planet twice and only Germany would produce a professional general staff that doesn’t ask if fighting the entire planet is a good idea twice?})

Enemy at the Gates is divided into 2 parts, each with 15 chapters. The first part is concerned with the German attack on Stalingrad and the background of the assault, beginning in the summer of 1942, as well as the planning for a second offensive into the Soviet Union. The winter offensive by Army Group Center had failed to take Moscow, but German confidence was still high, and many still believed that the German Army was all but invincible (and not just Germans were of this opinion). The Blitzkrieg into Southern Russia did not do much to counter that belief as the Sixth and Fourth Panzer Army ran rampant across the steppes. At first, the campaign had more limited objectives of simply wrecking Stalingrad's ability to operate as an industrial center and block the traffic of the Volga river. However, by July 1942 Hitler dreamed bigger (as was his wont), and decided to pick up his gambling dice once again (as was also his wont). He would attempt to take both Stalingrad and Baku, cutting off the supplies of oil and fuel to the USSR, and the southern route of land lease supplies (bear in mind, Stalingrad and Baku are more than 650 miles from one another.  This is like ordering an army you have sent to besiege New York City go ahead and capture Atlanta while they’re at it). Of course, changing your goals in the middle of the campaign is not a simple thing and Hitler compounded this by splitting up his units and redirecting them mid-lunge. This caused a massive traffic jam on the steppes as divisions had to cross one another's path, often meaning stopping, reorienting themselves, and then moving sometimes through another division trying to do the same thing (It is not a trivial thing to re-route a division, let alone an army.  Not for nothing is Patton’s greatest achievement often regarded as him turning the entire Third Army northwards in 36 hours to slam into the southern flank of the Bulge during the second Ardennes offensive). Mr. Craig shows this through the eyes of German troops on the ground caught up in a giant snarl for reasons they didn't understand. Meanwhile, Hitler signed the death warrant of Stalingrad by sending forth the Luftwaffe to reduce it. Here we get a view through the eyes of Russian civilians as their homes are engulfed in firestorms caused by German bombs. Their children are blown apart and their families drowned as German fighter bombers strafed riverboats intent on evacuating unarmed civilians from the battle zone. It was bluntly, mass murder committed from the air (Neither the first nor last case of this in the war, though one of the worst). Nor would the mass murder stop, as brave men and women volunteered for wretchedly under-armed civilian militia groups to fight the Nazi War Machine. That said, in the bombed-out rubble of a once-great city, something the world thought impossible happened, the Red Army and the civilians supporting it brought the Germans to a stop short of their goal. The Red Army adopted a strategy of turning buildings into strong points manned by small units that the Germans would have to dig out one by one. This ground the Blitzkrieg to a halt amidst the bombed ruins it had created short of the Volga river (The irony that this strategy was only really possible because of the Luftwaffe reducing the entire city to ruins was not lost on the Russians). Here the book turns to the sheer lethality of street fighting, as both sides would send in formations of thousands of men only to have hundreds survive their first day (The Germans called this style of warfare “Rattenkrieg”, or ‘rat-warfare’.  It was an apt description). Meanwhile, the Russian civilians who couldn't escape would either have to live as German captives, Red Army Auxiliaries, or huddle hidden like rats in their holes in an increasingly mad world. Part I ends with the misery of a Russian winter closing in on defender and invader alike (supposedly the temperature dropped as low as -42 Fahrenheit during the day), and in Moscow, plans are drawn up for a new operation that will turn the tables on the Germans, Operation Uranus. 

Part II opens with Operation Uranus, the great attack on the flanks of the German Army, which was held by a group of Axis allies, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians mainly. They were under-equipped, under-trained, and badly led for the most part, and the Red Army scented weakness (correctly.  Romanian troops’ letters home read like prayers to a merciful God to get them out of there before they are killed/captured by the superhuman Russians). Under the assault of the Red Army, the Axis troops broke and ran, and again using interviews, Mr. Craig gives us first-hand accounts from the ground, mainly from Italians and Romanians. There are several Russian accounts here too. This assault cut off the Germans in Stalingrad, but the book makes it painfully clear that there was more than enough time to withdraw them and prevent their encirclement by the Red Army, however, basically everyone is unanimous in blaming Hitler. I'm suspicious of how every German officer seems to claim they personally protested this and knew it was a disaster but let it pass (I’m far more than suspicious.  While the officers inside the pocket definitely were of the position that they should break out, almost the entire Wehrmacht General Staff was not.  General Model went on at length about how the retreating troops might be caught in the snowfields and run down like cattle.  Admittedly, pulling out of Stalingrad was not going to be a pleasant or cheap operation, but it was absolutely doable if they had committed themselves to it.  Neither Hitler, nor the Generals did.). Hitler however decided he wasn't going to let Stalingrad go, and in doing so condemned hundreds of thousands of young men, who had been carefully brought to believe that he would never fail them, to their deaths (sounds not unlike another group of people who put their trust in a right-wing demagogue more recently, fortunately with less-lethal consequences). As the trap slams shut and the Germans find themselves surrounded, the book takes us through how the Russians turned the tables on their tormentors. Again using first-hand accounts, Mr. Craig gives us tales of heroism, some of them with darkly tragic endings, like Sasha Filippov, a young lad of barely 17 who went to work as a cobbler for the Germans so that he could spy on them for the Red Army. He walked into German officer clubs and headquarters to repair shoes and boots, his ears strained for every drop of intelligence and even stole documents right off the desks of unit commanders to smuggle out inside German boots. After months of wildly successful activity, Sasha was found out and hanged on December 23rd, 1942 in front of his own mother.

It's here I should note that while Mr. Craig avoids being explicit, he is rather blunt and open about the barbarity of war and the brutality that the Nazis and the Russians inflicted on each other (As well he should be.  It is not possible to adequately do justice to the Battle of Stalingrad in a PG-13 manner). This can be hard to read, as given his use of first-hand accounts he's humanized the victims of the brutality even if they are Nazi soldiers. I can see some people protesting this and I can certainly understand why. Consider that the Nazis invaded the USSR, a state that was in many ways aiding Nazi Germany (supply trains of grain and oil passed from the USSR into Nazi Germany up to the very day of the invasion), without provocation, and conducted themselves with such savagery and madness that they have rightfully become the standard that evil behavior can be judged against. It's hard to want to see them as anything but monsters, but those crimes were done by human beings who at their core were not that much different than you or I, and if we forget that we open the door to repeating their crimes (Amen.  Thinking that we’re too civilized or intelligent to possibly do such evil things is one of the surest ways to guarantee that we will). As for the Red Army, I find it hard to judge men who are fighting invaders who have murdered their families, burnt their homes, and enslaved their neighbors. Did the Red Army commit crimes against POWs and in Eastern Europe? Yes, absolutely, but these men too were human, and they had been pushed hard (to say the least). Mr. Craig shows us that by taking us to the viewpoint of young Russian soldiers, who are fighting without any knowledge of if their parents, siblings, wives, or children have survived the German invasion (and many who know that they did not.  At the height of their conquests, the Germans occupied territory that had been home to a full third of the Soviet Union’s pre-war population.  To say that they behaved badly in those areas is like saying that Jupiter is “a bit” larger than a penny.  Most soldiers from those areas assumed that their entire families had been starved, shot, or gassed to death.  And a great many were correct in this assumption). So I would warn you in advance that some parts of this book make for difficult reading, especially since it's all true, and it's often told to us by men who survived it. 

Mr. Craig's work, as difficult as some parts are to read, preserved the first-hand impressions, memories, and accounts of men and women who lived through some of the most grueling and brutal parts of the greatest war in history. Stalingrad as a battle could easily be considered one of the greatest battles of that war in and of itself (Unquestionably so, if not the greatest battle of all time.  Two million men died in the course of that battle, amidst scenes of violence, barbarity, and courage as would render most men mad.{Given some of the accounts I have to wonder if some did go mad}). The battle where the back of the Nazi War Machine was broken and the Germans would make no great advances ever again. (After the war, the Soviets liked to point out that before Stalingrad, the Germans had never lost a major battle, and after Stalingrad, they never won one). By using first-hand accounts along with documents such as letters, cables, and more, Mr. Craig puts a human face on the war, both the brualizers and the brutalized, and maybe forces us to ask just how we would measure up in such a situation (a question I’ve asked myself more than once, and that I hope dearly I am never in a position to find out {I also hope you and our readers never find yourselves in a ruin of a city full of people who want you dead}). That said, I do think we should be careful in accepting some accounts at face value which Mr. Craig often seems to do. A lot of the remarks from upper-level German officers stink of ass-covering and deflection. There's also the fact that a number of Soviet officers had axes to grind, Marshal Yeryomenko, for example as he was passed over for final command, after putting in grueling months, fighting off the relentless German offensive (Supposedly, when Stalin was told that Yeryomenko was going to be upset at the new command arrangement, he responded that “We are not High School Girls” {My experience is officers as a group are as touchy about their dignity as any schoolgirl.  I mean, I watched a Lt chase a Pvt down for over a block to collect a salute once}). This is the danger of just passing on primary sources without any additional consideration because those sources have their own agendas, narratives, and goals to push. Anyone reading this book should remember that and keep that in mind. The book could have also used a list of each person and their nationality and position, as there were points where you could get some survivors confused, and having something to reference would have helped immensely. That said, this book does provide an excellent on-the-ground view of the battle while providing enough of an overview of the campaign to provide context as to what happened. I'm giving Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig a B+ and a recommendation for anyone who is really curious as to the battle and the worm's eye view, as it were. (And as a Historian who has made the Battle of Stalingrad a matter of personal study, may I also recommend Anthony Beevor’s excellent Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, for a slightly more academic view of the battle as a whole).

I hope you enjoyed this week’s review, which was voted on by our ever wise patrons.  If you would like a vote on upcoming reviews and themes or even just support for the review series, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for just a dollar a month.  Join us next week as we wrap up our look at World War II history and start a month of Americana in July.  Stay safe and Keep Reading! 

Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front By Anthony Tucker-Jones

 Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front

By Anthony Tucker-Jones

Anthony Tucker-Jones was born in 1964 in the United Kingdom. Before even attending college, he started writing freelance as a defense journalist for publications like Jane's Defense Weekly, Jane's Intelligence Review, and the Middle East Strategic Studies Quarterly (all of the sudden I’m taken back to being a kid, leafing through Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft at the library looking for anything new about the F-22 {I was always more into tanks myself}); he sold his first article in 1981 and continued until 1988. He also attended the University of Portsmouth from 1982 to 1985, graduating with a BA in historical studies. He then attended Lancaster University from 1987 to 1988 and graduated with an MA in International Relations and Strategic Studies. At this point, he was recruited by British Defense Intelligence. He served as Soviet Bloc Politico-Military Affairs Desk Officer in the last years of the Cold War, then Liaison Officer for NATO from 1991 to 1994, Liaison Officer for the UN Special Commission for Iraq for a year after that, and worked as a Regional Assessment Coordinator which is a Staff Officer for the Director of that department. He was then Deputy Head of the Global Weapons Trade department serving from 1996 to 2001, ending his career as Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator in 2002. He returned to writing, focusing on military history and defense and has published over 50 books on those topics, which is impressive to say the least. He has also served as a public speaker and commentator for print, online, and broadcast media, appearing on BBC Radio, Channel 4, ITN, Russia Today, Sky News, and Voice of Russia. He also served as an expert witness for the Military Court Service. Today's review is one of his more recent works: Slaughter on the Eastern Front, which was published in May 2017 by The History Press. The History Press is a British publishing company specializing in local and specialist history and is one of the largest independent publishers in the field. It was created in 2007 when Alan Sutton (the founder) bought NPI Media Group and reformed the core elements of the business under The History Press. With that, let's turn to the book itself.

Slaughter on the Eastern Front focuses on the epic and brutal event that was the war in Eastern Europe between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union. During the period between 1941 and 1945 when the war in Europe finally ended, an unimaginably vast conflict unfolded from the borders of occupied Poland to the very suburbs of Moscow. The front lines would stretch from near the Arctic circle down to the Caucasus Mountains which mark the border between Europe and the Middle East. Here millions of men, thousands of tanks and planes and guns, and unknowable tons of supplies would be devoured in a savage war where the existence of entire peoples and races were at stake (oddly enough the 70s singer-songwriter Al Stewart has a pretty good song about the eastern front called ‘Roads to Moscow’, I recommend it - It’s very haunting {So I sat down and had a listen and damn it is haunting.  I’m adding a link to the song at the bottom of the review folks}). Make no mistake, if the Nazis had won here it would have meant the destruction of entire nations. Hitler intended nothing less but to create a vast colonial-settler state in Eastern Europe, believing that was the only way to ensure the survival and dominance of the German people over not just Europe but the entire world. To do that he would have to destroy hundreds of millions of human beings and he was utterly prepared along with the cult of madmen he had cultivated in the SS to do so. In fact, to be honest, he might not have been prepared for the sheer madness brewing in the SS under Himmler but that's a topic for a different review (I’ve been assured that Top Men are still looking into this issue at this very moment). However to achieve this goal he wasn't fighting against a continent of divided tribes, many of whom were centuries behind the technology of the European settlers and still reeling from the onslaught of apocalyptic diseases; he was fighting against the Soviet Union - An industrial, united nation full of over a hundred million healthy men and women who did not want to be wiped out for German ambition and were prepared to battle to the last for their very right to exist.

Mr. Tucker-Jones advances the idea in his book that the war and its conduct was the result of both sides ignoring, at least in the beginning, their intelligence services (I am uncomfortable with the idea of messy empirical reality muddying up my internally-consistent and neat ideology {isn’t that always the way?}). This failure led to Stalin completely ignoring evidence of Hitler's intent to attack in the summer of 1941, leaving his nation open to the devastating assault that occurred and the millions of casualties that followed. It also more fatally meant that Hitler completely underestimated the Red Army and its ability to rebuild from defeats and losses that would have been fatal for just about any other nation or military, barring the Nationalist Chinese Army which did fight on against the Japanese Imperial Army despite suffering comparable loses in men and equipment or theoretically the United States military which has the resources and manpower but has never suffered a comparable disaster. It is in fact the incredibly impressive feat of the Red Army to not just rebuild after losing over a million men and thousands of tons of equipment but to do so when large stretches of industrial and heavily populated parts of the country were under enemy occupation as is highlighted in the book. The Red Army not only rebuilt itself after highly damaging losses, but did so while under fire and fighting in its metaphorical living room. This would be like having to rebuild the US Army while an enemy occupies the West Coast and the American Southwest including Texas and is advancing to give you an idea of the sheer difficulty of the task (We will not abandon our Whataburgers to the fascists! Not one step backwards!{Didn’t know chicken strips with toast had such a special place in your heart} (additionally, this makes me picture a partisan Bobby Hill kicking Nazis between the legs all over occupied Texas)). On top of that, the Red Army managed to integrate lessons learned from its defeats and improve its performance and leadership as well as improve its equipment. While on the equipment side of things it had a lot of help from the Western Powers, specifically the United States, it is still an achievement that earns the Red Army a place of respect among historical military organizations (just don’t ask them to publicly acknowledge lend-lease nowadays).

That's all in the future in 1941, however; the Red Army of that time was considerably less than it had been and would be. Stalin's purges had left the officer corps critically undermanned and under-trained with most of the veterans of the Russian civil war either dead or in prison camps (look, knowing which end of a rifle to point away from you means you could point it at Stalin, so clearly measures must be taken). Those officers who survived were either skilled but utterly apolitical or completely loyal but ranging in skill, some having no business holding command (Voroshilov being the prime example of how playing office politics will get you way further in life than simply being good or even brilliant at your job). Now, the Red Army was very dependent on its officer corps as its enlisted pool was filled out with conscripts at the time mostly serving 2-year terms and having no strong NCO corps (non-commission officers being  senior enlisted men such as sergeants and above.). This meant that junior officers were the main instructors and small unit leaders of the army but with their senior leadership in ruins and many of their own grabbed they weren't uniformly able to provide such training and leadership. To make it clear: 80% of the Colonels in the Red Army were gone and so were 90% of the general officers, and 40,000 medium-ranked officers were dead or imprisoned (surely, nothing bad can come of this). 90% of the remaining officers had received no higher-level military training and 40% hadn't even received intermediate-level training. Of the officers in service in 1941 75% had held their post for under a year (again, nothing bad can come of this). This didn't mean that the Red Army was an incapable force, but without leadership it couldn't be used properly (Also being saddled with the commissar corps and dual-leadership arrangements if memory serves - officers who squander their whole commands are one thing but revisionism simply can’t be tolerated {The commissar corps is whole another bag of issues but yes I imagine it didn’t help}). Mr. Tucker-Jones demonstrates this by taking us to the Finnish War, and the Battles of Khalkin Gol. The battles of Khalkin Gol where the Red Army under Zhukov smashed the Imperial Japanese Army in Mongolia showed what the Red Army with proper leadership could do. It was also completely ignored by Nazi Intelligence in favor of the Red Army's performance in Finland which fed Hitler's belief that the Red Army and the USSR was a rotten half-destroyed structure that he could bring down with a divisive enough blow (confirmation bias is a hell of a thing, although if someone used Finland as their sole reference point you’d be forgiven for concluding the Red Army could be rolled up by the rat king’s army from The Nutcracker).

While Nazi intelligence did try to warn Hitler of the vast reserves available to the USSR, Hitler dismissed such warnings as defeatism. Meanwhile in the east warnings were sounded of Nazi invasion only to be dismissed by Stalin as English trickery (dastardly limeys and their provocations). Soviet Generals would attempt to prepare for the invasion but were severely hampered by their own government although they would be successful in setting up reserve lines behind the front for reinforcement and for an in-depth defense. Mr. Tucker-Jones leads us carefully through the conflict showing us the drive for Moscow and how it was hampered by Hitler constantly ignoring his own intelligence officers and his somewhat confused strategic directives. That said, even if Hitler had gone all-in on taking Moscow, I'm not sure he could have done so. Army Group Central, the Nazi command that would prove to be the USSR's single greatest foe in the war, was simply at the end of its logistical tether when they reached the Moscow suburbs (maybe the only time in history where suburban sprawl was a net positive). Especially when you factor in the fanatical resistance put up by the city's population with large groups of civilians voluntarily fighting Panzer Corps with nothing but light arms and not nearly enough light arms at that. Hitler would constantly switch goals during the war according to Mr. Tucker-Jones and simply refuse to accept intelligence that didn't fit his own preconceptions and prejudices. While this might not have saved the Red Army, it certainly provided extra breathing room to work with. From there Mr. Tucker-Jones provides us a complete overview of the eastern war, touching on the siege of Leningrad, to the battles for Ukraine and the battle of Stalingrad and Kursk. Showing us how at each point Hitler and at times Stalin would ignore or dismiss intelligence reports that led to unnecessary defeats and losses. In this, I have to admit that Hitler is ahead of Stalin, who seemed to have learned his lesson after 1941 in large part. However, Kursk is a direct result of Hitler not learning his lesson and attacking right into prepared defenses that he was warned were there and ready for him! As the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of their homeland and across Eastern Europe, we see that Hitler still refused to follow his own intelligence. Demanding counterattacks that bled out the Nazi war machine's strength and wasting the entire Army Corps in futile last stands in “fortresses” that existed only in his own mind (later leading to intense depictions of these manic directives in films which would eventually become grist for internet memes). It swiftly became a mad train wreck you can't look away from. The Red Army, however, grew more adept at taking advantage of their intelligence and using it. Which they did, all the way to Berlin (If I recall correctly, there was a diverging trend where Stalin was increasingly comfortable with delegating military decisions to his general staff, whereas Hitler took on more and more personal control of his military down to the level of tank turret procurement {Stalin did delegate more as the war went on and Hitler did remain very much hands on.  Of course Hitler also was using cocaine eyedrops (yikes but also very on-brand, I’m surprised these didn’t come back in the 80s) and had been exposed to at least a half dozen attempts assassination attempts by German Army Officers, which likely led to a lack of trust.  Stalin on the flip side was assured of the Red Army’s loyalty}).

Mr. Tucker-Jones does adapt the air that the entire thing could have been avoided if Hitler had listened to his intelligence officers. I'm not entirely convinced of that. Sooner or later Hitler is marching east, it has simply been too large a part of his overall goal for Nazi Germany to not do so (The drive to the east in WW1 being a similar instance of fears of a rising Russian menace prompting immediate action, then mixing in the annihiliationist racial ideology and Germany getting high on its own blitzkrieg propaganda). For that matter, while Stalin wasn't planning on attacking soon, I do think if the Nazis had shown weakness he would have dived in for a share of the spoils; to not do so would have meant waiting for the Armies of the West to show up on his doorstep and I don't think he was capable of that (“socialism” in “one” “country”* {Silently points to all the pre-WWII annexations (adding inverted commas for extra spiciness)}). That said Mr. Tucker-Jones is very convincing that much of the bloodshed was unnecessary and was brought about due to the leadership of both nations ignoring their own intelligence services in favor of bias and preconception, although he proves that the Nazis were the more deeply guilty party in this and that they never really learned to stop doing so. The book provides a good general overview of the Eastern front, even going into the politics of Axis allies like Romania and Hungary and Bulgaria's constant refusal to provide troops to fight the Soviet Union. That said, because of the sheer size of the subject, Mr. Tucker-Jones can't really go into any great detail on any specific subject (Editor recommendation - Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor, just to name a personal favorite. Also, Ivan’s War for a good  exploration of the Red Army at the level of individual soldiers). Still, I think the book serves well for people who are just starting to look into the Eastern Front or are just in need of a good, solid overview. I'm giving Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin's war on the Eastern Front by Anthony Tucker-Jones an A- for that.

This was a long review wasn’t it?  I hope you enjoyed it!  If you did, please consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a dollar a month you get a vote on what books get reviewed. Hope to see you there!  Next week we take a look at Stalingrad with a special guest editor who actually visited the city recently!  I hope you’ll join me for Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig until then stay safe and keep reading!  

Purple text is our guest editor Mike

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjKajpMoUxM&ab_channel=GSSJ70GSSJ70Verified

Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy By Ben Macintyre

 Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy

By Ben Macintyre

Benedict Macintyre was born on Christmas Day(hey same as Newton...sort of) in 1963 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, the United Kingdom. His father was Angus Donald Macintyre, a Fellow, and Tutor in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford. His mother Joanna, was the daughter of a baronet. So as you can imagine Mr. Macintyre grew up in a fairly academic and somewhat privileged environment, attending Abingdoh school, (which is the 20th oldest school in the U.K, celebrating its 765th anniversary in 2021) as a boy. He attended and graduated from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1985 with a degree in history. After that, he went to work as a columnist and Associate Editor for The Times, working in New York, Paris, and Washington D.C at various times. He published his first book in 1992 and has published over a dozen books since. Most of his books are biographical looking at the lives of spies, crooks, and wild adventurers who lived on the fringes of the “civilized” world. I suppose that might explain his interest in Eddie Chapman, who was in a sense all three. Agent ZigZag was published in 2007 by Harmony books, which is an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, which is owned by Random House (why no I haven't dropped this)(this is almost as complicated as tracking secret agents…). The book is the biography of Eddie Chapman, a man who rose from safecracker to arguably the most successful double agent in World War II, although I'll admit the competition for that title is fierce.

I suppose before I get too far into the book I should define my terms, on the chance that some of my readers don't know what a Double Agent is. A double agent is a spy that started off working for one country only to be turned by a second country and spies on their original employer (seems straightforward if somewhat risky as a job). Well, most of the time Double Agents are used to supply disinformation, false information meant to deceive their original employer. This is different from a defector, who is someone who switches sides and may or may not bring covert intelligence with them, as the double agent usually stays in place. This is also different from an asset, which is a person who provides information to a spy voluntarily but is usually not a trained spy(less straightforward and way riskier especially because most people are horrible liars). Of course, agents can end up being assets and assets can turn into agents because this is a complicated game where things change quickly. This is made more complicated by the fact that there are re-double agents, agents who get caught as double agents by their original employer and are forced to mislead the 2nd employer (wait hold on let me draw a diagram). There are also Triple Agents, who are spies who pretend to be double agents but never stopped working for their original employer. The difference between a triple agent and a re-doubled agent is that a re-doubled agent is forced and a triple agent isn't. As you can tell from this paragraph, espionage is a complicated game where lies can stack up quickly and loyalties are often in doubt  (“Nobody can get the truth out of me because even I don't know what it is. I keep myself in a constant state of utter confusion”). Let's dive into the book itself, shall we?

The book gives us a quick overview of Eddie Chapman's life before the war. A boy born in poverty to a father who spent most of his time in a bottle, Eddie was smart but lazy. Before turning to crime Eddie tried a number of other things, he attempted a career in engineering but grew bored with it. He then enrolled in the British Army joining the Coldstream Guards. He did well in training but found standing guard boring (on the surface it doesn’t seem super exciting but you would know better than I would {It can get pretty boring but at least you usually aren’t being shot at}). On his first leave, he went into the bad neighborhood of Soho and upon meeting a pretty girl, deserted. This turned out to be a mistake as she turned him in once his pay dried up. He served time for desertion and was turned out with a dishonorable discharge and headed right back to Soho. There he started working as a barman, movie extra, masseur, boxer, wrestler, whatever work he could find to pay for his expensive taste for late champagne breakfasts and even later fast nights surrounded by crooks, artists, and various other types of people your Mother would be disappointed to find you hanging around with (I dunno she seems to think Marines and Communist are a good influence on me so who’s to say? {low blow, man, besides we were hanging with him long before he went commie}). This started a predictable slide into petty crime, check forging, theft, and the rather disgusting practice of seducing and blackmailing women (I was cool with the first one, not the other two). Frankly, Eddie seemed doomed to become petty scum, except for the introduction of gelignite into his life. Gelignite is an explosive gel created from nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose invented in 1875, it's incredibly stable, moldable, and can be handled with no safety gear as long as you keep it away from anything that can detonate it. To the British underworld, it was perfect for safe cracking, and when Eddie met James Hunt, a professional safecracker... Well, things got interesting. Eddie became more than a petty thug, the money from safe cracking gave him access to goods and people of a higher class and he worked to fit himself into them. Meeting people like Terrance Young, director of the first James Bond film, Eddie learned about wines, manners and began to read widely, making up for the lack of education in his early life (like a Dickens novel directed by Michael Bay). However the police were closing in and AFTER picking a girl named Betty, Eddie made for the island of Jersey, where after breaking into a nightclub he was caught and sentenced to 2 years of hard labor on the island after which he would be handed over to the English court system for further punishment (sounds like extradition but Jersey is a dependency of the UK, so I’m guessing separate charges? {Yes, Jersey has a separate court system from the rest of the UK}). It was 1939 and the greatest war in history was about to open its European front.

World War Two frankly changed the course of history in a lot of ways. It was the death of the European-dominated world economy and the rise of the world dominated by the US and the USSR. It changed the fate of millions of people, the vast majority of them for the worse. For many, this would include a terrible and early death. For some people, among them Eddie Chapman, however, it was an opportunity (as well as vast numbers of industrialists who built up massive corporations off government contracts, I’m looking at you Coke and Hersheys). By 1940 the island of Jersey was under German occupation and when Chapman was released from prison, he opened a barbershop with a friend named Faramus which was also a front for the black market. At this point he offered to join the Nazi spy program, a move he would later claim was driven by a desire to get to England so he could provide for his first daughter Diane but was instead arrested by the Gestapo for resisting the German occupation, ironically a crime he never committed. His friend Faramus was arrested with him and was later shipped off to a concentration camp, barely surviving the war. Eddie was first dropped in the prison of Romanville in France which was used to hold hostages that were shot in retaliation for actions by the French resistance. It was here that the Nazis took his offer seriously enough to offer him a job attracted by the fact that there was a man who spoke French, German and English, and had a list of criminal skills that they would use pre-learned. (I mean he practically already sounds a bit like a spy from just that stuff) The book spends a lot more time on this period of recruitment by the Nazis and his first period of training in occupied France. We get a full look at the people who trained him intending to parachute him into the English countryside to commit explosive mayhem and how Eddie dickered and argued to make sure he would be paid for his trouble. We get a look at Eddie's German boss an out at the heels German aristocrat named Von Groning, who may have been working to spike Nazi efforts. For example, we know Von Groning often refused to send prisoners to concentration camps and at times released them, believing it a lesser crime to release the guilty than to ship off the innocent. While I agree with Von Groning here, it also makes him really bad at being a Nazi, which isn't a criticism(no, no that is not a criticism). We also get a look at Eddie's somewhat delicate mental state, where he could slide from excited and committed one minute to depressed and nihilistic the next. Which leaves me wondering how much of Eddie's behavior before, during, and after the war came from unrecognized and untreated real psychological problems? (Always hard to tell well after the fact, could be a justifiable response to stress, could be a latent manifestation of some kind of fetal alcohol issues leading to poor impulse control, or maybe some type of bipolar/BPD issue.  All of these things are common reasons for people to bounce between careers or engage in risk-taking behaviors {Well his father was a barely-there drunk and there’s nothing about his mother in the book and he grew up in poverty so who can say?}) 

Eddie was sent to England where, instead of carrying out his mission, he promptly surrendered to the British intelligence agency MI5 (see risk-taking behavior {wouldn’t carrying out the mission for the Nazis be riskier though? (Potentially, he is a known criminal and who’s to say the British would buy his story and not just lock him up to prevent any risk of him letting information slip)}). This is where he became part of one of the most successful intelligence operations ever run, the British Double Cross system run by MI5. This was greatly made possible by ULTRA, the operation that cracked the German Enigma code system. This meant for most of the war, the British had complete access to even the most secure communications of the German government and the Germans never realized it. Because of this, the British were able to find and arrest just about every German spy sent to the UK. Due to this, some 480 spies were arrested throughout the war, only 77 of them were native Germans, with the vast majority coming from all over western Europe. The ones they didn't arrest like Chapman gave themselves up. The book goes into fairly great detail on how the system worked in general, explaining how German agents were paired with guards and handlers and either taught their handlers to send messages over shortwave radios or sent messages while their handles watched and listened. Chapman managed to charm his handler and his guards to the point that they brought him his daughter and let the Mother of the child a dancer named Fredia live in the safe house with them! Even more importantly Chapman convinced MI5 to fake the success of his mission, sabotaging the factory that built the Mosquito bomber and send him back to Germany, where he became the only British citizen awarded the Iron Cross.

The last part of the book covers his time in Norway and his efforts to get the Germans to send him back to England and his fall from grace from a position as a spy once he returned to England. His fall from an active agent in a lot of ways is due to the failure of the British Intelligence Community and bluntly the flaws of the British Class System. Eddie was handed over to a new handler, an upper-class drunk who never saw action but had the job because of an influential Father In Law and the fact that he was “one of the right kind of people.” This new handler decided to drive Eddie out of the service because he was a liar, a thief, and someone who was militantly unfaithful to every woman he was ever with. Now all of this is true and at no point am I gonna say Eddie Chapman was a good person but those very qualities are what made him a good spy (generally speaking I’d say that being a good spy often means being a bad person) and bluntly he had rendered good service to England at the risk of his very life and that deserved better consideration. Another part is I frankly loathe people like the handler in question who are moralizing busybodies, whose own moral character is severely lacking and frankly degenerate but have the nerve to render judgment on others and act as some sort of moral enforcer. (The British did call a chunk of their counterintelligence service “the office of ungentlemanly warfare, so this is totally on track for them.)  Eddie was at least honest about being in his own words, a villain. On top of that, I just hate seeing some desk-warming rear lines puke sneer at someone who puts themselves at the sharp end. I mean we are literally talking about spies here, not altar boys! People whose profession entails lying and stealing! (see good spy=generally not a good person) That said, Eddie's war experience propelled him to greater successes after the war and he died in his own castle, married to Betty the young lady he left in Jersey, while the man who busted him out of the service died broke and alone rambling in cheap bars(HA!). Now that was a castle that Eddie bought with ill-gotten gains because he had learned to become a better class of crook from everyone involved but if you ask me MI5 has only themselves to blame for this. I mean they never even arranged an official pardon for him. Which is the least they could have done.

Despite that, this is a really interesting book to read about a man who frankly was uplifted by the war, not dragged down by it. Did Eddie Chapman deserve to be uplifted? Probably not. Was Eddie a good person? No, absolutely not. But he did play a role in defeating the Nazi war machine and did so at personal risk and I don't think you can ask much more from him(I think that's one of the cheat codes for that generation, “I messed up Nazis so I get more leeway on xyz”). Especially since we can't really claim that British society showed him a lot of gratitude. This is something to think about since if Eddie had been shown some gratitude and understanding, there may have been a bare chance at making a semi-honest productive citizen out of him. If nothing else, having him teach his skills to the next generation of British spies could have been useful, instead of throwing him away. Especially with the Cold War dawning. Now this book does not get us into Eddie's head or even pretend to really try, instead of depending on the testimony of others and recovered documents throughout the book, which means while we can sympathize with Eddie we never forget that this guy is a liar, a crook and someone who will cheat on you with no twinge of conscious. For Mr. Macintyre to walk that fine line without lionizing Eddie or dragging him through the muck is a great feat of writing and he does so entertainingly and educationally. Letting the readers come to their own conclusions about Eddie's motives and moral character. I'm opening War World II month by giving Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy by Ben Macintyre an A and I encourage you to read it.

This book was selected by our ever-wise patrons, if you’d like a vote on what books get reviewed, what theme months are pursued, how they are pursued, and so on… Consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month. Next week, also selected by our ever-wise patrons, we turn east as we examine how intelligence failures led to the greatest bloodbath in human history.  Join us for Slaughter on the Eastern Front by Anthony Tucker-Jones. Until then, stay safe and keep reading!

Blue Text is your editor Mr. Davis

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders