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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In celebration of those "in baggy pants covered with mud", August 20, 2003
Although hardly a scholar in the field of military history, I certainly have a keen interest in it. One of my favorite sources of information is John Keegan's The Face of Battle in which he explains combat experience from the perspective of those who were directly involved at Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). According to the first-hand accounts on which Keegan relies, films such as Paths of Glory, Pork Chop Hill, and most recently Saving Private Ryan probably offer about as realistic a visual account as is possible. However, as Ken Burns demonstrated when calling upon various sources for the narrative of his television series on the Civil War, first-hand accounts have unsurpassed authenticity and credibility. For that reason, I hold George Blackburn's work in such high regard. In each of his three volumes based on his own experiences with the Canadian 4th Field Regiment during World War Two, he enables his reader to know precisely what he was thinking and feeling as well as what he was encountering during the Normandy Invasion, during the Battle for the Rhineland, and then during the final months of the war. In this volume as in The Guns of Normandy, Blackburn brilliantly uses two strategies to present his narrative: the present tense (to invest the material with immediacy) and the second person voice (to engage his reader in each situation, albeit vicariously). This volume offers so much technical information but always within a human context. For example, consider this brief passage in which Blackburn explains the symbolic importance of guns (as opposed to rifles) which bears striking resemblance to the importance pilots assign to the carriers on which they and their squadrons are based. In this instance, Blackburn describes what is (in effect) a warrior's reunion with artillery: "You get the feeling that you are visiting a very strange place -- one of the most welcoming places you will ever visit in your whole life --even though you are conscious that tomorrow, or before today is out, this field will be abandoned, never to be seen again by you or any of these fellows. How strange that something that has no permanence by way of form or location should become fixed in your mind as something of substance, something reliable to be counted on in this shaky, impermanent world, an island of stability and order in a churning ocean of disorder, an ultimate refuge to which you can withdraw if everything else disintegrates: home." Surely this is passage could also describe a weary survivor of the air war in the Pacific as he prepares to return to his carrier, "an island of stability and order in a churning ocean of disorder, an ultimate refuge to which [he] can withdraw if everything else disintegrates: home." By the time we reach the conclusion of this volume, we fully understand the meaning and significance of the quotation from Kipling with which Blackburn concludes Part Four. Specifically, the last line "The guns, thank God, the guns." Perhaps Blackburn will not object if I presume to thank God also for those "in baggy pants covered with mud, their boots and socks always wet."
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Final Volume Of A Superb WW II Trilogy!, December 23, 2003
This review is from: The Guns of Victory: A Soldier's Eve View, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, 1944-45 (Hardcover)
In this, the concluding chapter of Canadian war veteran George G. Blackburn's superb three-volume eyewitness history of our northern neighbor's involvement in the war in Europe, we find a truly stunning successor to the previous two volumes. As with "The Guns Of Normandy" volume, we discover a masterful narrative punctuating the combination of dramatic life and death struggles contrasted with moments of drumming ennui or utter despair. For the Canadian soldier on the ground, the several months following the heroic and costly landing on D-Day were seemingly a coda, a time that seemed unreal because while they had the enemy on the run, the remaining elements of the Wehrmacht fought savagely and well in the ensuing period of time. So, although many of the allies felt it was all over but the shouting, especially after the re-taking of Paris and much of France, as Blackburn shows us from the ground grunt's view, it was anything but over and done with. This volume picks up the narrative thread where the previous volume left it, with the much-vaunted Canadian 4th Field Regiment ordered in to relentlessly pursue the Germans as they retreated through the treacherous topography of the flooded French area known as the `Low Country'. As the pursuit ensued, the soldiers began to reach the limits of their physical and emotional endurance. And the battle as it unfolded before them promised no respite from the hellish demands posed by an enemy with no real thought of surrendering or fleeing. Yet, as they knock the Wehrmacht from its hastily devised defense perimeters within the Scheldt estuary again and again, they gradually succeeded in creating the conditions for re-opening of Antwerp, and thus helped to unleash the productive power and formidable logistics trail previously left hanging for want of such a large and capable deep-water port. In the midst of all this, the Canadians, along with the rest of the Allied forces, had to suffer through the worst winter in decades in the European theater in the open and on the ground, and many died from such harsh exposure to the elements. Yet the Germans, fighting under these horrific conditions, still were able to mount savage resistance as they fought even more ferociously even as they began to understand how desperate their situation was. And as they beat the foe back yard by yard, mile by mile, back across the Rhine, the Canadians are enlisted in the increased fight once more in the Battle of the Rhineland, the final push toward the German heartland. And, as victory finally comes, Blackburn assures us it was indeed a bittersweet experience, felt equally with measures of pride and relief, knowing the unbelievable ordeal of the last several years was finally over. As with his other books, here Blackburn relates his personal experience with a wonderfully literate and engagingly approachable writing style, and he surely uses his journalist's experience and his obvious facility with words to great advantage here, adding immeasurably to our understanding of what the experience on the ground was in as the first fatal hours and days turned into weeks and months of savage fighting, as the Allies bludgeoned their ways through the brutal resistance of a frenzied Nazi war machine. This is a story we should hear again and again, as we rediscover once more how truly amazing the feat of both the Canadians in particular, but all the Allies in general, stood tall in the very face of tyranny and smashed it into smithereens, saving the world from what has to be considered the face of absolute evil. Mr. Blackburn writes with surprising intensity and emotion, and his sense of recall of particular events and existential circumstances for himself and his fellows is both impressive and quite moving at points in his narrative. This is first person history at its best, one that employs both a more objective coda to the book, which also serves to lend a more authoritative aura to the proceedings than would otherwise have been possible. I recommend not only this book, but the other two volumes as well. Enjoy!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FOO lives to tell the tale, May 5, 2005
And a stirring tale it is!
In a magnificent trilogy by a former junior officer in the Canadian Royal Artillery, George Blackburn records his experiences as a Forward Observation Officer (FOO), and those of the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division in general, in World War II's western European campaign. The first book, WHERE THE HELL ARE THE GUNS?, covers the training in Canada and England of Blackburn's unit, the 4th Field Artillery Regiment, from its formation in 1939 to June 1944. The second book, THE GUNS OF NORMANDY, describes the 4th Field's actions in support of the 2nd Division in northern France from early July 1944 to its arrival at the Seine River in late August. This final installment, THE GUNS OF VICTORY, chronicles the advance from the Seine into the Third Reich via the Benelux countries to VE-Day, May 8, 1945.
Should you read this series, you will, like me, come away with a heightened and supreme regard for the valor of the Canadian Army from D-Day to the end of the war and the value of massed artillery to the combat efficiency and survival of infantry units. Blackburn's personal account is perhaps the best description of men in modern war that I've ever read. The author's narrative is not a detached one. He brings you along into the mud, cold, rain, fatigue, terror, devastation, and apocalyptic arty barrages of the conflict's leading edge.
There are too many excellent passages to enumerate, but I shall give two examples.
At one point, Blackburn's observation post is in a Dutch windmill on the very border of Germany. As the Army brass plans the advance into the Reich, the author's vantage point becomes widely heralded as having the best view of the ground to be fought over, and to it, as if on pilgrimage, come the high and low, including Lt.-Gen. Guy Simonds, Commander of 2nd Canadian Corps, and Lt.-Gen. Brian Horrocks, Commander of British XXX Corps. But the interesting perception by Blackburn is the way the various officer ranks used battlefield maps.
"Corps commanders ... planning the best use of 450,000 men, swept open hands across map boards ... Division commanders and brigade commanders, reviewing the role of their brigades and battalions, stroke their maps with two fingers held together. Then come battalion commanders using a single finger for similar purposes in meetings with company commanders. But when company commanders returned with platoon commanders, maps were marked with razor-sharp pencils."
Much later, at a company command post, the author comes upon a Major Stothers and the Company Sgt.-Major opening parcels from home mailed to men already killed, the contents distributed to the survivors, and enclosed letters put into a pile.
"(Stothers) hands one across the table to you without comment. It is a hand-written note of only a few lines: 'Dear Son, the papers tell us that it is very wet where the Canadians are fighting now. So please, Dear, always be sure to wear your rubbers and keep your feet dry.' When you look up at Stothers, he tells you that her boy is the one lying dead outside the back door, face-up in the rain."
As the war's end approached, Blackburn had the reputation of being the longest surviving FOO in the Canadian Army, and 4th Field gunners, not without affection, had a pool going, the money to be won by the man who correctly predicted when the Baker Troop FOO (Blackburn) "got it". Lucky for us, George survived to pen his memoirs. By the end of the third book, I can even forgive him for writing in the second person, a quirk that, in WHERE THE HELL ARE THE GUNS?, almost put me off. But, in no one of the volumes, in the photo section of each, did the author include a wartime picture of himself. That's the only deficiency in an otherwise superb literary accomplishment.
To George, who recently celebrated his 88th birthday on February 3rd, and his comrades-in-arms, living and dead, highest honor is due.
Note: George Blackburn, through his son Mark, personally sent me all three of his books. Thank you, Sir.
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