42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Incredibly bad, November 27, 2006
This review is from: Grandfather's Tale: The Tale of a German Sniper (Paperback)
You cannot believe how bad this book is. It purports to be the story of a 12-year-old who in 2000 listens to his 80-year-old great-grandfather's tales of having been a one-man sniping army for the Wehrmacht.
I must admit I bought "Grandfather's Tale" by mistake: I was under the impression it was an actual memoir. There was nothing about the book, it's jacket, "blurb" or description by Amazon to inform the buyer that it was fiction. Indeed, it was paired with a genuine memoir for sale at a special price. I assumed from all available evidence the book had been written by the grandson of a Wehrmacht sniper. I realized I had been taken - by the author.
I was first surprised by the almost juvenile style of writing in "Grandfather's Tale". Now, it's not unusual for World War II memoirs to be less than literary gems, because rarely is the author a professional writer. But we devotees of the war memoir make allowances in order to read about the true experiences of combat veterans of World War II. Veracity is what we prize most, and style is secondary.
But even by the relaxed "military memoir" standard, "Grandfather's Tale" is barely readable by an adult. The vocabulary, style and sentence structure employed is usually seen in books meant for readers who are 11-13 years of age. Indeed, the novel's voice is a 12-year-old boy. The events described however, kill after kill after kill of a sniper's victims, are far from appropriate for middle-schoolers. So I am left puzzled as to the age group for whom the book is intended.
More troubling is the fact the book is rife with glaring grammatical and typographical errors. Most maddening is author Timothy Erenberger's complete ignorance as to the proper form of the first person objective. (Hint: it's not "I") Several times I read with disgust lines such as, "He gave Koenig and I something to eat". That this kind of complete ignorance of basic rules of English grammar can be overlooked in a book advertised and sold by the world's largest book retailer amazes me.
Finally, it is the plot itself that gave away the fact I was reading a figment of someone's imagination rather than a truthful account. In Erenberger's world, German snipers were organized in units of 20 or so, as snipers, as early as the campaign in Poland. According to the author German snipers took up a single advantageous position and stayed there for kill after kill - perhaps 50 over the course of an afternoon. In Erenberger's world snipers routinely made one-shot between-the-eyes kills at 600 meters, and attempted shots out to 2000 meters. In "Grandfather's Tale", the sniper can somehow control recoil so well that, even at extreme distances, he can observe his shots as they hit right between the eyes of his targets. And finally, Erenberger apparently discovered a WWII telescopic sight that could somehow be attached to and detached from various rifles as easily as if they were made of Velcro. (I don't think Erenberger has ever heard of drilling and tapping a rifle for a telescopic sight.) Oh, and Erenberger's sniper somehow made it into every major combat on the Eastern and Western Fronts from Poland to Berlin.
This is an astoundingly poorly written and researched book by an amateur author who has unintentionally revealed how little he knows about sniping, the Wehrmacht, or even World War II. The reader interested in these subjects would do far, far better to purchase "Sniper On The Eastern Front" by Sepp Allerberger...a real memoir, intelligently written by a man who knew what he was writng about.
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35 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ugh - gave this one a second chance. It failed., July 24, 2004
This review is from: Grandfather's Tale: The Tale of a German Sniper (Paperback)
I bought this book a few years ago, thinking it would be an interesting historical fiction in the vein of "War of the Rats" or even the impressive "Black March."
This book is just bad. Factual errors, misspellings, poor punctuation, and non sequiturs are rife in this book. Couple this with what appears to be a remarkable lack of knowledge about WW2 and the German Army in general makes this book nearly unreadable for anyone who has even a veneer of knowledge about the Second World War.
The first error I noticed was that the main character, Georg Frick, claims that he was only 18 years old when he was drafted into the German Army in 1937. Fine - that would make his birthdate sometime in 1919. However, Frick mentions that his father was a German soldier killed in the First World War, which ended in 1918? Huh? I guess maybe he was conceived in a late-war furlough, but I digress.
Second, the Wehrmacht did not extensively use snipers until later in the war, and certainly did not have entire platoons of scope-equipped snipers during the invasion of Poland in 1939.
Third, Frick's mentor, a sniper named Ellis (strange name for a German, no? - kind of like a Briton being named Ratzenberger, but again, I digress) claims to have been a sniper in WW1, where he had "over a thousand confirmed kills." That is patently ridiculous. It would be like writing a story about fighter pilots and saying some guy had shot down 1,000 enemy planes - all confirmed.
I'm surprised by the enormous amount of 5-star reviews this book received, because anyone who has read anything about the Wehrmacht and WW2 history in general would just laugh at this book and its 8th-grade level research and writing.
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33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Epic Tale of War and Survival, June 11, 2005
This review is from: Grandfather's Tale: The Tale of a German Sniper (Paperback)
This book really surprised me in many ways. It begins in the modern USA with a boy going to visit his grandfather, who at first seems to be nothing more than an old man. When the boy and his grandfather go target shooting, the boy quickly recognizes that his grandpa is no ordinary marxman, as he nails one bullseye after another.
One thing leads to another, and the boy finds an old box of German war medals. Rather than being upset with the boy for snooping around in the attic, the old man decides that he should finally pass on the story of what happened to him during the war, so that the memory would live on.
At this point, the story goes back in time, to (I believe) 1938. The grandfather, Georg, is a young man in Germany. He is working at his mother's Bakery when he recieves a draft notification. The world suddenly changes for the baker as he joins the German Army and is trained to be a soldier.
Next comes the annexation of the Sudetenland, where young Georg rolls into Czechoslovakia along with thousands of troops. Not much happens here in the way of combat, but it is an omen of things to come.
A few months later, the army rolls into Poland in the first real blizkrieg of the war. Jeorg experiences combat for the first time as he picks off enemy Polish soldiers with extremely long-range shots with his scoped Kar 98K rifle.
The Polish campaign surprised me, as I have always been told that the Polish were incompitent soldiers, charging the German machinegun emplacements with cavalry. In Grandfather's Tale, the Polish cavalry behaves much differently. They dismount for combat and are very well armed and trained. The Poles also have an airforce (although a very outdated one), tanks and artillery. It is more the tactics of the Germans than their technological advantage that they prevail over the Poles.\
During the Polish campaign, Jeorg is befriended by a master sniper, named Ellis. This man teaches him tricks he learned during the First World War. The two of them make an amazing sniper team as they pick off enemies from hundreds of yards away, concentrating upon soldiers using heavy weaponry.
After the Polish campaign, Jeorg and Ellis join the Fallshirmjager, which is the equivilent to the US Airborne. As paratroopers, they participate in the taking of Eben Emael, the greatest single fortress in the world, which is located in Belgium. Here, a mere force of 85 paratroopers overcomes a garrison of 1500 men. This enables the remainder of the German Army to take Belgium and France.
Next the story moves on to the invasion of Crete, a small island south of Greece. Here, the English Army is waiting for Georg and his fellow paratroopers with a deadly trap, for they have already cracked the German Enigma codes. Though the enemy is waiting for them and thousands of their fellow paratroopers are killed, the Germans manage to take a small pocket on the island, enabling reinforcements to land on a newly captured, crater-filled airstrip.
Just when you think Georg and his buddies could not possibly go through anything worse than that, they are informed that they'll be participating in the invasion of the Soviet Union!
This begins with an enormous, 3-million man army thrusting into Soviet Poland (Since the Soviets took the eastern portion of Poland). Jeorg and the other snipers participate in battle after battle, moving ever closer to the capital, Moscow.
The army is bogged down in the mud, which dellays them for about a month. Only days after the mud begins to dry, the army is frozen in an arctic blast of cold, which freezes the mud, and everything else (including the oil in their tanks!). The Soviet counterattack is ferocious.
The harrowing Soviet campaign goes on for several chapters, as the soldiers fight in one horrific battle after the next. About two years after the innitial invasion, the paratrooper's division is recalled to Italy, to help in the defense against the American invasion!
When the Americans and British land in Italy, the now amazingly compitent soldier Georg begins to lead a squad of men in the defense of Italy. They lay mines, set boobytraps, and of course, shoot several enemy soldiers in a tactical retreat up the Italian mountains.
From here, they are moved into the army which attacks the Americans in the Ardennes, in what the Germans refer to as "Whact am Rhine," or the "Battle of the Bulge." Though the innitial attack fails, the paratroopers fight on the western front for several months.
Finally, Jeorg and his remaining friends (many were killed throughout the many battles in which they fought) are sent to the final defense of Berlin. In this battle, about 75,000 German soldiers, police and Hitler Youth attempt to hold off a Soviet army of some 1-million men! This very climactic final battle will not disappoint you, as it is as thrilling and suspensfull as anything ever written.
Check out Grandfather's Tale. I guarantee you'll love it.
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