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larryerick's review
4.0
I don't recall ever reading a book so intensely and still regarding it so poorly at the same time. Perhaps I should step back a bit and point out I have a big pet peeve about being manipulated by others for their gain, and I have a keen sense of when that is happening, and that applies to this author and this book. I read this book because (1) it was getting a good response -- how good? copies being, ahem, "lost" from the library good -- and (2) my father was a tank commander for the 2nd Armored Division "Hell on Wheels" in Europe during World War II. During the 25 years my father and I both were alive, my father told me all of one story about his time in the Army. One, just one, and that took all of about two minutes. So, this book was an opportunity for me to learn a bit more about what it might have been like to be like the real people depicted in this book for the 3rd Armored Division "Spearhead". The nucleus of this book is the author's interviews with an American tank gunner and people associated with him during the war. (Snippets of those interviews are available to view online.) The book takes off with gangbusters. In my mind, I'm thinking Treasure Island type big adventure, only for adults. The book definitely keeps the reader involved. Unfortunately, being the critical reader that I am, it didn't take long for me to ask myself, how could the author possibly know what various characters -- yes, actual people -- could be thinking to themselves at various points in the activity. Some of these people were never interviewed. And, as a video of an interview of a key character proves, the interviews did not always reveal the exact information that is relayed in the book. The fact is this book has more in common with an excellent historical fiction based on lots of actual historical facts, like Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, than it does on a limited scope history book by a trained historian. I struggled a bit to figure out what the author was doing to fill in the blanks, and then it dawned on me. He must have taken an actor's technique with a drama play or movie screenplay and asked himself, "What was the character's motivation right here?" or "What would the character being feeling at this point?" And so, the reader gets told thoughts and reasons for actions that the author could not possibly have know for sure, but would still come across to the reader as very believable, especially given the intensity of many situations being related. That dominates the book, but it was also disappointing to me that the subtitle of the book promoted a connection between an American soldier and a German soldier that is actually a much smaller part of the narrative. Finally, one last criticism is the fact that a German filmmaker produced a documentary about a key scene in this book a few years before this book was written, and that film adds to but in small ways contradicts what the author reports in this book. Why would he leave this information out and why would he not address the contradictions as a true historian would? It was very easy for me to find it. Why not the author, too? Read this for the adventure and the details of war situations. Don't read it for the history.
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