German Metal (no, not Panzers)

I was vacationing back in Colorado this past week, catching up with old friends and reliving some of my old routines. I took in two Colorado State Volleyball matches, and was pleased to see the Rams stomp all over the University of Denver and then Wyoming (never mind that I'm a graduate of DU's Publishing Institute, my BA's from CSU!). I did a lot of reading, finishing John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War, and getting most of the way through Steven Erikson's House of Chains (I just have the final convergence left, it should make those final 150 pages fly by).

I stayed at SevSon1's place, and took the opportunity to listen to a few of his new CDs. I've been lax in acquiring new music, partly because the last efforts by some of my favorite bands were lackluster. I'm still not too fond of Kamelot's Ghost Opera, and so I wasn't too surprised that the new Poetry for the Poisoned did nothing for me. I will admit, however, that the lead song, The Great Pandemonium (video link), is pretty good.

I was more intrigued by Blind Guardian's new At the Edge of Time (video link for A Voice in the Dark). It's gotten mostly rave reviews so far, and SevSon1 was in agreement with those. The predecessor, A Twist in the Myth, was a bit too rock-ish for me, lacking the grandiosity that is Blind Guardian's reason for existence. I understand that they wanted to simplify everything (arrangements, concepts, number of overdubs, etc.) after the over-the-top-and-far-beyond nature of A Night at the Opera. They probably also believed they were going back, a bit, to their roots. But there's a reason the Guardians no longer make conventional Power Metal of the Helloween and Gamma Ray sort. Their particular skill is to make the intricate sound epic and overpowering.

I was pleased to listen to At the Edge of Time (video channel), because it could almost be A Night at the Opera, part 2. The first ANatO took me a good 5 years to fully appreciate, but now I adore it. "Spinal tap go to 11? Let's go to 12!!!" was the philosophy, and that spirit is back. Of course it is cheesy, that's half the fun. No other band can make such complex arrangements actually sound catchy and ass-kicking. If you have no interest in songs about The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice & Fire, then Blind Guardian might not be for you. Blind Guardian also write about Michael Moorcock's Multiverse again, with a piece about Tanelorn. I didn't notice anything based on Tolkien this time, but I still hope they'll eventually continue their coverage of The Silmarillion, begun in the awesome Nightfall in Middle Earth.

Even if I wasn't crazy about A Twist in the Myth, I still jumped at the chance to see Blind Guardian, when they played Denver on that album's tour in 2006. SevSon1 and I drove up to the venue early, and were fortunate to bump into three of the Guardians returning from dinner. They were gracious enough to chat with us for a few minutes, and sign some CD booklets. Perhaps I'll get to meet them again in a few weeks. They are playing New York City on November 20, and I have my ticket purchased. By then, I'll have my own copy of At the Edge of Time, and will be fully familiar with the songs. We all need some cheese in our diets, Happy Headbanging!

The War You Don't Know

World War 2 didn't occur as you probably think it did. Oh, the over all outline of the war is known, but popular accounts, until recently, rarely reflected the course of events that led to the known results.

This is particularly true of the events of the Eastern Front, so the so-called Russo-German War (which in fact involved numerous other nationalities on both sides). During the first 25 so years after the end of the war, it was normal to ascribe the Soviet victory to their masses of manpower and enormous number of tanks. This was followed by increased admiration for the Red Army, which was considered to have high quality armaments (especially armored vehicles), and a superior strategic vision. If it never mastered tactics, it still achieved victory through its own means, destroying the fighting capacity of the Wehrmacht. The Soviet Union thus deserved the bulk of the credit for the defeat of Nazi Germany.

I believed this latter view of the conflict, even if I had some nagging doubts. I own numerous rare unit histories and personal accounts from the war. I had trouble reconciling some details with the generally understood course of the war. The turning point, which finally allowed me to start making sense of things, came when Military History Journal, published an article by Eastern Front expert David Glantz. It was a preview of his 1999 book Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, about the fighting near Rhzev in late 1942.

I knew something awful had transpired near Rhzev at that time, because every history of the Grossdeutschland Division makes it clear that this fighting was the worst it faced during the war. Yet most campaign histories of the Eastern Front indicated that the fronts of German Army Groups Center and North were quiet at this time. Glantz had learned, from German unit histories and Soviet archived documents, that a massive Soviet offensive had been utterly defeated there at the same time the Red Army was finding success to the south at Stalingrad. However, the more northerly offensive was erased from Soviet official records because of its failure. Glantz soon realized that other Soviet failures had been similarly covered up, such as the late 1943 fighting around Vitebsk (the first attempt to destroy Army Group Center) and the May 1944 offensive in Bessarabia (subject of Glantz's Red Storm Over the Balkans). Even at the end of the war, the best the Red Army could do along the Oder was to frontally assault Berlin via the Seelow Heights, suffering appalling casualties in the process.

How can this be reconciled with the very real success that the Soviets had in driving the Axis forces back into German and Austria? John Mosier has explained it better than anyone before in his recent book Deathride. He has a repuation for turning history on its head, but this was my first exposure to his work. I came away enthralled by the most mentally-stimulating book I've read in several years.

Mosier demonstrates that fiction was the order of the day in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule. Stalin was told what he wanted to hear, whether about agricultural harvest yields, or the output of tank factories. Soviet official histories consistently overestimated the casualties inflicted on the Germans, while minimizing Red Army losses and inventing tank production numbers. The Red Army in fact ran out of armored vehicles on many occasions, which explains why they made such extensive use of allegedly-inferior British and American models. They often ran out of men, too, and could not have continued the war without conscripting women, men considered too young/old/unfit for service by other armies, and men from lands that were liberated or occupied during the advance to Germany. Only the most elite units were kept up to strength with fit Russian men of prime military age, the rest had to take whatever they could get or find.

What doomed the Germans, Mosier argues, is that they had to divert substantial resources to the Mediterranean theater, to Western Europe, and to the airspace over Germany. This removed manpower and armored divisions from the Eastern Front, but more importantly, it robbed the armies in the east of most of their air support. Meanwhile, American lend-lease supplied the Red Army with hundreds of thousands of trucks and similar vehicles. Previously, up to mid-1943, the Germans could make orderly retreats, exacting heavy losses from the Red Army. Thereafter, the Soviets could advance faster than the Germans could retreat, so that German defensive efforts became less and less effective, even as they continued to inflict far higher casualties than they suffered. German resources were stretched too thin, which saved the Red Army from the defeat it would have suffered if the Germans could have devoted their full effort to the Eastern Front.

It all makes sense to me. Mosier backs up his ideas with detailed end notes (including a minor reference to one of my own books). I'm familiar with many of his sources, and believe he interpreted them correctly. At the same time, I can understand how this unorthodox view of history will bother some historians. It makes some books on the same topic seem irrelevant. At the same time, the topic is too vast for comprehensive coverage in one book of 300 pages. So Deathride is essentially a guide for how to approach studying the Eastern Front, from now on.

I have since acquired Mosiers earlier The Myth of the Great War and The Blitzkrieg Myth. I've read the latter, and found it to have good ideas, but with execution less successful than in Deathride, which I think benefits from having stronger source material. I assume Mosier acquired much of this material in his research for Deathride's predecessor, Cross of Iron (a study of the Wehrmacht, which I haven't read, but intend to purchase).

This is a golden age in the study of World War 2. Numerous detailed, extremely informative books are easily and cheaply available to anyone who wants to learn about the era. Deathride is a fine addition to this body of literature.

Listen Up, Glen Cook Fans!

As the publication dates for Gilded Latten Bones and Surrender to the Will of the Night get closer and closer, I noticed something more on Amazon. Audible.com, owned by Amazon, has the entire Black Company series available as audio books for download! The series is split into its original ten volumes, and each sells for $24.95 on Audible, or $18.71 on Amazon. The individual books each take roughly ten to twenty hours to narrate, so that should keep listeners entertained through plenty of commutes and road trips. I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I'm sure I will before long.

The image this time is from another Glen Cook reprint, Nightshade's upcoming omnibus of the Darkwar series. It has all three volumes, Doomstalker, Warlock, and Ceremony. Doomstalker was actually the first Glen Cook book that I can recall seeing in a store, when it was new roughly 25 years ago. I own all three, but have yet to read them. I think a shiny new package can sometimes make a book more enjoyable than reading the same tale via a beat-up old massmarket paperback. Of course, the opposite can also be true, but I still plan to get the Darkwar omnibus to sit on my shelf next to my other Cook collections. It is scheduled for release in December.

Finally, Tor have made available an excerpt from Surrender to the Will of the Night. It's from the first chapter, and no, it doesn't make any sense to me either. Since Lord of the Silent Kingdom resolved most ongoing issues in the series, it makes sense to have new ones introduced. I presume this mysterious excerpt is connected to some new plot development. We'll know more in a matter of weeks, meanwhile, anyone who has listened to the Black Company audiobooks, please feel free to comment.