This book recountsthe horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery. As a member of the elite Gross … Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. His German footsoldier’s perspective makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said “may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited.” Now it has been handsomely republished as a hardcover containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.
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A classic true story from World War II. From Alsace to the Russian front, this is how it was in some of the most brutal fighting the world has ever seen.
He goes off to war thinking it will be an adventure as many youngsters do, only to find the harsh reality.
Survival is as much a matter of luck as skill. We need more like this: the true story of war and not the rah-rah of some of the tales.
Guy Sajer, a Frenchman from Alsace, was seventeen when he enlisted in the German Army on the eve of World War II. He took part in the blitzkrieg invasion of Poland at the start of the war, advanced across Western Russia to the Volga River, then fought bitter rear guard actions all the way back to the German homeland. When he knocked on the door of his parents’ house on his return from the war, they did not recognize him. This is a detailed, first-hand account of an ordinary foot soldier under the appalling conditions of modern total war. That Sajer survived to tell his story is nothing short of miraculous. His descriptions of surviving countless shellings and ground attacks alone make the book worth reading, for they show how training, discipline and courage can even the most outsized odds against survival in combat. Sajer’s book has been acclaimed in Europe as one of the finest war memoirs to come out of the Second World War.
Guy Sajer was a unique individual to start with, born and raised in an area contested by France and Germany for many years. He had family ties to both sides and his worldview strikes the modern reader as an idiosyncratic, naive, homogenized nationalism. He was filled with pride, for instance, when the Vichy French joined the Axis–his 2 nations, fighting as 1 (as he saw it).
But putting his convoluted motivations aside, Sajer wrote one of the best war memoirs ever–and about one of the biggest, bloodiest campaigns ever: WWII on the Eastern Front. His experiences as an infantryman should be required reading for every young man who imagines war to be heroic or glorious. His honesty about what he saw, did and thought is striking.
The closest anyone in Sajer’s auto bio comes to heroism is a man Sajer often refers to as “the Veteran” (Wiener was his name, so Sajer undoubtedly did him a favor by dubbing him with that title). Sajer and the other soldiers came to depend on the Veteran, who was a pragmatic survivor, almost never lost his cool, and had a keen grasp of the strategic big picture well beyond his tactical grunt’s-eye-view. The men in his squad thought him invincible. “Combat fatigue,” “shell shock,” “post traumatic stress” or whatever you choose to call it affects every soldier differently, and I found it profoundly sad what happened to the Veteran’s mind by the end.
The reason for the war on the Eastern Front was that one power-mad dictator wanted territory (Leibensraum) from another. But Sajer’s story resonates with the experience of veterans of any war who endured heavy fighting and monumental hardships. For another good war memoir, read Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back.
“The Forgotten Soldier” is definitely a must-read for all WW2 history buffs. I fell in love with this memoir after the first couple of pages and after finishing it I can say with all certainty that it has become one of my favorite war memoirs, if not the most favorite one. What is so special about it is that the war is shown through the eyes of an ordinary infantryman from the Wehrmacht, and a very young one on top of it. Barely seventeen years old, he’s thrown right into the hell of the Eastern Front and has to see the horrors which most of us would never imagine even in our worst nightmares. He tells about every event with incredible honesty and with so much feeling that you feel like you’re living his life, even though sometimes you wish the descriptions weren’t so vivid due to all the gore, blood and dirt. But that’s what makes this memoir so incredibly personal and sincere – Guy Sajer definitely doesn’t shy away from any subject, let it be war atrocities, animalistic fear one experiences during the offensive, the death of his comrades, despair, anger, love, hatred, doubt, devotion – all of the emotions that make us all human. The vividness of it all, the details, the mood of the ordinary infantrymen like him, and even such acts of comradeship and kindness towards the enemy that are difficult to imagine in certain situations come alive with every page turned. If you love war memoirs and would love to read a firsthand account of events on the Eastern Front, read this book – I promise, you will never view Wehrmacht men in the same light. Highly, highly recommended!