Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Vintage) [Paperback]

John Gimlette (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage | Publication Date: April 7, 2009

Beautifully blending contemporary travel writing and military history, John Gimlette travels across Europe in the footsteps of one of the greatest armies ever assembled: the United States forces of 1944-45. In 2004, John Gimlette set off across Europe with his guide Putnam Flint, an eighty-six-year-old Bostonian who had landed in Marseille in the midst of World War II with his tank destroyer battalion, nicknamed The Panthers. With Flint's help, Gimlette traveled from Marseille north to Dijon and Alsace, Paris and Lorraine, across the Rhine into Germany, and eventually south through the Alps into Austria. Gimlette provides a vivid portrait of the route as it is today, from spectacular landscapes to cities that have risen from cinders and as it was during one of the most tumultuous moments in world history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Overlong and slyly self-important, travel writer Gimlette's third book takes the recollections of WWII veteran Putnam Flint and combines them with Gimlette's own European tour for a then-and-now travelogue that doesn't ever quite connect. Flint, an 86-year-old Bostonian who traveled from Provence to Austria with his tank destroyer battalion during the closing days of the war, is winning, inquisitive and has a writer's gift for precise language, telling Gimlette, "In combat, you hear guns, and it's like a musical score. The story unrolls from there." Unfortunately, Gimlette can't help but stretch the metaphor to the breaking point: "In Flint's case, it was a complex score, and no two recitals were ever quite the same." The two-thirds spent with Gimlette's own travels are often tedious; he has a fondness for looking for old brothels and new strip clubs, and a heavy hand with generalizations: "For the French, culture is duty, for the Americans it's pleasure." The combination of Gimlette's fatuous modern opinions and a tense historical memoir never quite gels; Flint's worthwhile stories deserve better. Illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Gimlette has written a travelogue of a vanished place, the "great wheeled city" of more than two million American soldiers that rolled up from Marseilles in 1944 to meet the German Army. He sets out with an American veteran of the campaign to see what remains of that movable metropolis. Their progress is marked by chapters like "La Sauce Parisienne" and "Sauerkraut und Blitzen," and soup, as the title implies, is key: the "soup of wrecks" in a bombed harbor; the "vat of municipal soup" boiled up by starving Austrians from scavenged G.I. swill; the fetid fraud that is bouillabaisse. And then there’s dessert: soldiers feed on "Hershey bars and powdered lemonade," and make forays into Paris, where "sex was cheaper than chocolate." This is a book about the appetites of war and peace—for food, sex, and human comfort—unbridled, sordid, and, somehow, in their ability to lead a civilization back to itself, redeeming.
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307277917
• ISBN-13: 978-0307277916
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,899 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracks in the mud through the mists of time, April 10, 2008

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Hardcover)

Fans of John Gimlette will be delighted with his most recent book, Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace. Gimlette is a graceful writer who writes realistic travel books based on the details of his own experiences. In At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay, he found himself in Paraguay during the Falklands War; as a Brit in Argentina he decided to cross the border and the result was a study of a country few readers know much about. He inherited a large number of materials from his grandfather who had been a medical missionary in Canada; the result of tracing his grandfather's steps was Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Panther Soup -- the title is taken from the name of the muddy roads created by trucks and tanks during World War II -- Gimlette follows the path of US veteran Putnam Flint who was part of the American invasion of Europe in 1944 and 1945. Gimlette met Flint during a dinner and after considerable effort was able to convince Flint to return to Europe for the first time since his return to Boston from the war 60 years earlier.

The two journey with Putnam's grandson Jeff from Marseilles to Austria following the path of Flint's 824th Panther Tank Busters unit. The book reconstructs Flint's experiences and and records Flint's modern reactions:

"Sergeant Parham was the only one who'd ever known enemy fire (Panama '38), but it was not an experience he could humanely explain. `I shot one right though his left ear,' he'd say, `and it came out of his right.' The only other professional was Major Clint Smith, the battalion commander. He was a tall fleshless man from somewhere south-west, all chickenshit and razor-sharp dress trousers. Everyone else felt much like Flint, overawed and out of place. The 824th were always an odd mix. Amongst almost 800 uprooted souls there were Cubans, Baptists, truckers, dockers, hucksters, accountants, cops, cheats, hunters, conscientious objectors (serving as medics), asthmatics, several athletes, countless adulterers, a couple known as `The Rover Boys' and a Chinaman called Jung Chin. It was like a village in the ether, a community only in concept."

As in his earlier books, Gilmette records his own reactions to the sights they encounter:

"Then I'm at the top, alone on an empty battlefield. It's like a landscape inside out, a great belly of eviscerated earth and rock. All around is the wreckage of an Armageddon, a vast fungal fortress system of shattered domes and concrete mushrooms, pillboxes, foxholes, giant gun emplacements, crumbling redans, rangefinders, embrasures and trenches ten feet deep. I find tiny, cement cells in the earth, like weird earth-borne fruits that have ripened and burst and turned to stone. Nothing has been spared the cataclysm. It's now a world of components and pieces; lumps of roadblock, bedsprings, a glittering carpet of glass, and fuel cans scattered like chaff. Obstinate chimneys nose their way up through the rubble and, in the cement, I see a date scratched with a stick: 1944."

One of the most poignant moments occurs in Alsace. Flint remembers that he was ordered to shell a church tower in a town three miles away which the Germans were using as an observation post. Flint and Gilmette find the tank's location, then visit the town which was shelled and where the damage has now been repaired. They spend some emotional moments discussing the shelling with residents who remember the day their church was destroyed.

This book is a remarkable achievement, beautifully written, deeply human, and a fascinating journey through the past and the present.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique Book and Story, August 27, 2009

By 

Jeffrey Swystun (Ottawa & New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Vintage) (Paperback)

A journey that combines travelogue, history, and cultural study. It follows the return of war-veteran Putnam Flint whose WW2 experience involves a less known campaign in Europe. It takes the reader on the path he followed after landing in Marseilles in October, 1944 through to Austria and the close of the war. The author accompanied Flint and his grandson, Jeff documenting the journey and adding rich history, geography, and cultural analysis on this return to the battlefields of Europe.

It is like five books in one and all of them interesting alone and in the aggregate. It has the potential to spawn an entirely new genre - imagine a Vietnam veteran's personal odyssey through Hue and Saigon. What made the book so special is the time that has passed for context and perspective, the honesty and subtle reflections of Flint, the innocence and wonder of the grandson, and the incredible insights and writing of Gimlette.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lively adventure off the beaten path, August 16, 2009

By 

K. Arteaga "texana" (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Vintage) (Paperback)

"Panther Soup" is not a history book. It is author John Gimlette's description of his adventure with Putnam Flint, a taciturn American veteran, as they retrace Flint's World War II armoured advance through Europe--not from west to east but from south to north. Gimlette, like an errant and inquisitive child, finds innumerable distractions along the way, and his descriptions of the people, places, food, events, weather, fortifications, ruins, mountains and history are full of lively and often excruciatingly accurate details. The reader can imagine "rich farmland, a brilliant brocade of cabbage and mustard"; "a staircase made of books and a ladder to the loft"; "an area that looked like the Serengeti for pigs, the horizon heavy with pork"; and a town that "was in a perpetual state of Christmas . . . .Everything was made of pine or chocolate, or inhabited by furry animals and puppets".

Gimlette listens while Flint remembers Paris as it was in 1944: "The city, he said, had been black with grime, the fountains didn't work, and there was no coal or heating during one of the coldest winters ever. The Parisians themselves had looked raw from washing in icy water, and clacked around in wooden shoes because there was no longer any leather. Girls wore their skirts short, not because it was fashinable but because it was all they could afford." Such heartbreaking images are difficult to imagine and impossible to forget.

History and its horrors resurface at every turn, and Flint's second journey is not the same as his first. Flint passes through now-unrecognizable villages and mountains, in a vehicle very different from the Hellcats of the war. The reader feels what he must have felt as a young man and now again as a traveler: Where are we? Is this France? Austria? Germany? A principality? How can I tell? In an instant a memory clicks into place and he recalls a bell in a little church spire, a steep ridge dropping off into nothing, the smells of barns and cooking smoke. He remembers, though his family tells the author he tried all his life to forget.

As Flint's grandson Jeff drives them through the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, "the shadows seemed even deeper than before, with the clouds lapping into the forest. As our car climbed through ever darker shrouds of sycamore and ash, a collective gloom seemed to seep amongst us. Flint shuddered, as much from the cold as recollection." They were approaching the site of "the only concentration camp ever built in mainland France". In 2005, Gimlette returns to Flint's route and sees the riverbank where Flint's unit entered Germany: "I found myself on a little beach of gritty sand and nettles. It may not have looked like a D-Day bridgehead, but this was where the first American armour had landed on the eastern banks of the Neckar." To Gimlette and the reader, this unremarkable crossing is indeed worth recording.

The sacrifice, confusion, fear and deceptive triumph of victory in Europe are magnified in one of the author's sentences: "Apart from the arrival of an army bound for Japan, only two things have ever happened in Oberhofen". As soon as Flint's Panthers reached Germany, they received orders to begin training for the War in the Pacific. It dawns upon the reader that no one knew where they would go. The way Gimlette intertwines tragedy and comedy, along with a dollop of the absurd, is an unforgettable adventure. His description of the other two memorable events in Oberhofen's history is hilarious. What were they? You'll have to read the book.