Customer Reviews

Slaughter at Halbe: Hitler's Ninth Army in the Spreewald Pocket, April 1945

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

 

 

This book, like Tony Le Tissier's "With our Backs to Berlin", is another excellent overview of the final, chaotic days of Hitler's Third Reich. Mr. Le Tissier does a superb job of using first-person accounts to tell the story of the brutal and horrible fighting that took place on the approaches to Berlin in the last weeks of the War. It's amazing how he found so many survivors, both military and civilian, to tell this little known history of the fighting in the Halbe Pocket. There are very few detailed accounts of the last days of the war on the Eastern Front, and as he has in the past, Le Tissier does not disappoint with this book. If you want to read a chilling, but true account of what it must have been like to fight for your life against an embittered enemy, this book will prove hard to put down. I strongly recommend it for any serious student of the war on the Eastern Front.

The last Battles of WWII and that of the depleted German Army are getting more and more attention these days which is a good thing. It is always good to know information about the other side of the coin and we get that with Tony Le Tissier "Slaughter at the Halbe" book. This is an excellent, well written book from the same author which brough us "With our Backs to Berlin" Mr. Tissier is an excellent writer and brings in lots of facts and eye witness accounts in this book.

This is the battle fought by the 9th Armee in order to get to the Allied lines and not get captured by the Russian. Of course Hitler wanted this Armee to come and rescue Berlin in the final week of the war but its Commander, Gen. Busse thought of a better way to use his remaining strenght, to save as many lives as possible by deliviring them to the Allied side across the river Elbe which separated the Allied armies from the Russians. But before they could get to "freedom" they had to go through one of the most grueling and death filled journeys in the whole war. One of the main battles was over the city of Halbe in which so many German soldiers and civialians died. This whole book tells of that battle. How tanks got blown up and caught in cross fires, how some soldiers refused to fight and others did the imposible to get to this "freedom". To those who reached it, it was a bitter pill to swallow but at least it wasn't the Russians.

To understand the whole overview of the importance of the 9th armee one should read "The fall of Berlin" by A. Beevor as it also speaks to some of the events in this book but gives you the overall situation of the final days of the war according to the Fuher Bunker. But concerning the series of events that 9th armee and its personel went through this is an excellent book and one of which one can jump off to other subject about WWII. If one needs to know about what happened to the losing side read "A terrible Revenge" by A. de Zayas as this will give you the rest and least thought of subject of WWII, the German people and there fate

Le Tissier continues to amaze and horrify his readers with the descriptions of Germany's death spasms in the East. This particular volume details the efforts of Germany's 9th Army to escape from it's encirclement and find saftey beyond the Elbe River in what would become the American Sector of control.

The reckless ferocity of the German bid to escape is only matched by the dogged and may I say "murderous" determination of the Soviets to destroy the Germans.

While no one can deny that the Germans certainly reaped what they sowed, one is also confused at the effort the Soviets put forward to destroy German military and civilian elements that were basically attempting to leave Soviet control. One asks this question, because the Soviets suffered tremendous losses themselves in attempting to completely annihilate the German 9th Army. With Berlin already falling to Soviet domination, one must wonder what the Soviets hoped to gain by destroying the German 9th Army.

Le Tissier's only flaw in my opinion is that the really never tells us why the Soviets, and Koniev in particular found it necessary to destroy an army that at that stage of the war posed no threat to Soviet stratgic aims.

Thus the reader is left to conclude that Soviet lives were lost simply to add more prestige to Koniev's military accomplishments with the destruction of yet another German Army.

For the Germans, the story of Halbe is one of unending tragegy. Le Tissier for all his effort can only convey the briefest glimpse of the hell these people endured.

This is not cheerful reading, but for any student of the Second World War, your studies remain incomplete until you have read Halbe.

I purchased Slaughter at Halbe, having already read several of Le Tissier's other works. The author's Zhukov at the Oder was masterfully researched and well written, while his With Our Backs to Berlin was also excellent. Assuming (wrongly as it turned out)that Slaughter at Halbe would be of this same standard of quality, I was terribly disappointed. The book is - it seems - well researched, but the authors failure is in presenting that research in a readable fashion. The book jumps around, does not give a consistent or particularly flowing narrative, and the reader will find himself regularly looking for places mentioned in the text on the handful of woefully inadequate maps.
Here's (perhaps) my biggest complaint about Slaughter at Halbe: The maps are either poor or irrelevant. Dozens of towns and villages are mentioned in the text that are no where to be found on the author's odd collection of maps. Serious military history volumes need good (and relevant) maps!!!!! If I have to continually refer to my Brandenburg road map to find the author's referenced places, well, that does not say much, does it?
The review given by "Truthteller" for the paperback edition of this book largely encapsualtes my other complaints and I would refer the prospective purchaser to that review. In summary, this volume is much poorer than I anticipated, and it is clear that Le Tissier can do much, much better. To reiterate, I would strongly recommend Zhukov at the Oder, With Our Backs to Berlin, and Berlin: Then & Now. But Slaughter at Halbe is poorly written and poorly organized and while there is a lot of great research that went into it, the value of that research is severely curtailed by the manner in which it is presented. A lot of interesting details, but the failure to weave them into a larger picture is - there's that word again - disappointing.

The title of the book gives only a partial description of what happened in that part of the Eastern Front as the war drew to its horrible end. As I read the book the most striking aspect was not the killing of the soldiers but the unworldly, nightmarish, horror of what the civilians who were caught up in the mass withdrawal found themselves in. War continues to be glorified and excused by some who are far to quick to justify its occurrence and this book describes situations that made me question the legitimacy of military action in most cases. Of course nothing will change and men and women will continue to justify, rationalize, explain away why human should kill other humans. Although the book describes the various movements that the Soviets and German Armies made as they manuevered either to escape or annihilate, the most striking parts of the story for me were the individual stories.

Although I have read several books that covered various aspects of the war in the Eastern Front, this story was a very new and different one for me. I think it would make a good movie, at least from my perspective.

To say that the winners write the History books would be a simplification of generally accepted facts about any war. This book puts a voice to the losers side. To many, the story and carnage surrounding the greatest forced human migration in history is unknown and since it dealt with the Germans fleeing the Russian, very little care shown either. But the plight of the common citizen caught up in the storm of total war is both shocking and sad.

This book does a very good job of detailing the desperate conditions which the military arm and the civilians had to face. Having read the German division logs from the units involved had prepared me for what this book contained. Knowing some of the surviving civilians caught up in the exodus only brings the story that much closer to home.

It is very difficult for readers today to understand what happened late in WW2. It was difficult for the Soviet forces to seperate military from civilian targets so they bombed and attacked them all. The civilians clung to the hope of safety with the few surviving tanks and stayed in their shadow. Tragedy often followed. Countless died and to this day are still be discovered where they fell.

This book uses many German sources to depict the facts and is well worth reading and learing the story.

This is an outstanding book, that is not only very interesting and exciting to read but very well researched, with end notes for each chapter and a detailed bibliography. The first hand accounts make this book better than many other "End of the Reich" books out there. A must own book.

Since I read Cornelius Ryan's "The Last Battle," I have always been fascinated with the end of the 3rd Reich. In such a hopeless situation, what was going on in the minds of the German soldiers and officers and what made them continue the fight and what did they hope to gain? I expected "Slaughter at Halbe" to focus on the battles and soldiers around Berlin starting with the final Soviet offensive in April 1945. It does contain a lot of detailed descriptions and personal accounts that may make it worthwhile as a source for a limited audience. However, as far as being interesting reading is concerned, it falls far short due to a lack of continuity, context, and uninspired writing. There are many maps, but most of them are very difficult to read and also unfocused. I would have never bought this book, but I came across it while browsing on Amazon. Usually, my Amazon inspired purchases bring great reading into my life, but I suppose that cannot always be the case. Except for possibly the extremely hardcore military history buff and book collector, I cannot recommend Slaughter at Halbe to anybody.

I had expected that this would have been a dead certainty for my top ten all time military history books, but I was very disappointed by the end.

Initially, the authors style lacks any form of imagination or colour, which in essence, makes the reading of the book a rather bland experience.

The veteran narratives used in the book all seem to be from German veterans who have had a vacaction courtesy of the Soviet Union, and the same applies to civilian eye witness accounts.

Basically, a lot of military historians out there are well aware of the Order of Battle of both sides, the Zhukov / Koniev ego war etc... and this can be read elsewhere, and not used for padding here. The main failure, in my opinion is that the narratives used, and there are not near enough of them, should be more impartial to the Soviet side and have more of a 'Western' outlook. Lastly, the quality of the maps also leave a lot to be desired.

It was disappointing to see such an unresearched and historically fascinating part of the history of the final days of the Third Reich, not being given a better platform to relate its tragic tale.

This should have been impossible to put down. Instead, it was hard to motivate myself to read it. The author goes through dull recitals of fact instead of making any evident attempt to tie the facts together into a narrative. I pride myself on finishing books I start, but I make an exception here. I'll add that the maps are poor enough to be entirely unhelpful.