Customer Reviews

Crack of Doom

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't know how to describe how I felt after reading this book. It was much the same as after reading Cross of Iron. Many of the characters in this book are unsympathetic and unlikable, and you'll wish for more 'justice' in the proceedings...but you won't get it. After all, this is late 1944 on the Eastern Front. The destruction of yet another un-named German division on the Eastern Front is both compelling...and harsh. The brutal, wintry mountainous backdrop to these events is so fitting...One passage will never leave my mind: At the height of a losing battle against the Russians General Stiller sends his most experienced battalion into a suicidal counter-attack; even though a raw, untrained 'green' battalion is available. He orders the veteran battalion into the doomed assault because 'the attack has to look believable'....such a sad waste of lives.

I have read this in both English and German, as in the case of his "Cross of Iron". This English version seems better to me.
Having been an infantry EM and officer, having had experience in
modern Eastern European history, and having been in the USSR and
Slovakia, the terrain (south of the Dukla Pass) seems realistic.
The decline of the German Army, with sergeants in company command
and lack of officer combat experience (Schmitt and Giesinger), also seems appropriate for late 1944. General Stiller is striking in his hardness, and in his role as a "fireman" at a
desperate juncture, as is the hardness of the Russian Nikolash,
who will use Margita and the Slovak anti-German partisans without
mercy but with ambition. This book shows the Slovaks and Volksdeutsche well, as does Heinrich's "Jahre Wie Tau" (never
printed in English), particularly Kolodzi in his desperate attempts to save Maria; Kolodzi eventually puts life over the
war, after 5 years; an effective ending from an author who never
deserted in his Eastern Front career. This novel is not as good
as the other two cited, but is certainly worth reading

I've just finished Crack of Doom by Willi Heinrich. My inititial impression was that it's an unpleasant book about a gruesome time and ultimately just that, unappealing, but within twelve hours of that first reaction I've settled into another response, more just, I think, because the characters have sat down, as it were, within me, and I think this might happen to you too. The strength of each of the major characters is their one dimension, some for survival, a couple for honor; some for their professional skills, others for their inexperience.

The blurb on the cover says the author came by his experience the hard way, and it shows. I came to the book in spots of reading stretched out over some months, so I had to go back and recall which character was which and consequently found it a slow start, but it has a hell of a second half!

The three classes of characters also bear watching, with their inside codes of behavior and their codes between each class: civilian, enlisted, and officer.

If, as they say, life is a story we intend to write one way that ends up writing us another way, there must obviously be no worse setting for it than wartime. These terrifying backdrops give the novel a chance to squeeze every inch of definition out of each character so that by novel's end there's a handful of painful character sketches that all deserve to be remembered: (in order of the vivid traces they've left within me, from the strongest first) Schmitt, Giesinger, Stiller, Margita, Kolodzi, Herbig. There's at least half a score of minor characters who, because they are so much in type, do more than most such in the few pages they appear: Matuska, Teltschik, Baumgartner, Nikolash, and the fat Gestapoman.

This book must certainly have done all its author could reasonably expect it to do. I give it one less star for the type it intends to put itself in: gritty with a kind of hunkered down marching forward through the inferno with little hope of a succeeding purgatorio, much less paradisio, but then, that's pretty much what I guess the real thing must have been like (though there is Schmitt's open sky and his admiration for wolves), and for that, on second thought, I should say, this book is as good as it can get.

The defeat of Germany created much angst among the surviving post war Germans, especially those like Heinrich who actually served in the Wehrmacht on the eastern front. For casual reading, this book is mediocre or somewhat above average. However, for readers who really immerse themselves in the non-fictional history of the German-Russian conflict, this book has it all. It includes a believable and accurate account of the typical military situation on the eastern front at this stage of the war, combined with fictionalized accounts, quite believable and amplified by skilled character development on the part of the author. This novel clearly conveys what it must actually have been like to be a member of a defeated army in retreat, whose pawns questioned the futility of continuation of a hopeless cause, yet who would not bring themselves to give up. It all seems real. It is hard to put down. It is in the vein of the classic, "The Forgotten Soldier."

Not a big fan of these pulp-fiction war books, but thought I'd give this one a try, and all and all wasn't that disappointed. The story revolves around a rag-tag unit of the German army retreating through Czechoslovakia. As it happens, while stationed in the vicinity of the main protagonist's--Kolodzi--home village--the unit is detailed to search for a general that was captured by Czech partisans. Kolodzi therefore is torn between his duty and the temptation to desert and return home and shack up with his girl who he hasn't seen for ages, and who incidently has connections with the partisans, etc. Anyway, it is a gripping, face-paced book, and not all that bad, even if the title is a little, well, odd.

I read The Cross of Iron by this author. It was one of the best books I read in my life. I'm going to get all of his books.