What Are You Reading?

Threw it out today. Too many errors of detail, author clearly didn't do his homework. 275 pages' reading wasted.

 

If you want an accurate, fiction set in the Battle of Manilla and post ww-2 tokyo about the events of the missing Honjo Masamune:
Robot or human?

I think it's pretty good. Give it a try. You might be surprised.

 

Currently reading ‘A Better Comrade You Will Never Find’ - Helmut Schiebel .

A Better Comrade You Will Never Find presents Eastern Front experiences of Helmut Schiebel from 1941 to the end of WW II. The author took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 as a member of the 43 Motorcycle Infantry Battalion of the 13 Panzer Division. In September he left for an Officer Candidate course in Germany, returning as a Leutnant and platoon leader to the division s reconnaissance battalion at the end of April 1942. He was wounded at the end of June and retuned to Russia in September 1943.

On the way to the 18 Panzer Division, he found out that the division was being dissolved and opted to transfer to the antitank branch. He arrived at Panzerjager Abteilung 88 in October 1943 where he was given a manual for antitank troops and soon after became a platoon commander on a Marder tank destroyer. After heavy losses, in November 1943 the unit was transferred to Mielau Poland, where it trained on and was equipped with the heavy Hornisse tank destroyer. When the battalion was sent to the Eastern Front in mid-February 1944, the author stayed behind to receive missing equipment and additional personnel. Panzerjager Abteilung 88 was trapped in the Kamenez-Podolsk wandering pocket, and its actions there are recounted through the eyes of some other soldiers.

Just recently completed reading

 

Finished Whitlock's The Rock of Anzio and now on Dance of Death.

 

The Day Of Battle by Rick Atkinson, copyright 2007, 588 pages softcover. The war in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. Volume two of The Liberation Trilogy. I am only on page 50 but find it to be very good. I had started it back in 2019 and couldn’t read anymore for quite a while and then put it back on the bookshelf until yesterday.

 

I couldn't read Prisoner of Stalin. It's the writer's style. Onto No Better Comrade (or sometihng like that about panzer jager (Hornisse/Nashorn).

 

Currently enthralled by this. Love the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

 

I just finished reading it, under it's original title The Simple Sounds of Freedom. Talk about your epic journeys.

 

I’ve always thought that this book would make a great basis for a 10 part HBO miniseries.

 

Finished John McManus' Island Infernos and now onto the last book of his trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific, To The End of The Earth.

 

Several things I learned from it. First is why the Soviets called the Germans Hitlerites. Socialist brothers are not supposed to fight each other because it flies in the face of "workers of the world unite!" Hence the Soviets reference to Germans not as Nazis but Hiterites. Second, that awards/medals are property of the state and if you fall from favor, you could be stirpped of them. I heard of people losing their awards when they became persona-no-grata, but the actual confiscation of the physical award was revelational.

 

Germany's National Socialism and the Soviet Union's Socialism is not the same thing.

Back in 1917 the United States did something similar to stripping soldiers with Medal of Honors handed out during the Civil War although many of them were not deserved to began with. An entire regiment was awarded the MOH for re-enlisting, one soldier received the medal for putting out a campfire, but the all time least deserving of the MOH was Asa Bird Gardiner who received the medal because he simply asked for one.