Customer Reviews

A Storm in Flanders (Cassell Military Trade Books)

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

 

 

I can't believe I am the first reviewer for this book. I just closed the final page -- having plowed through it in 48 hours -- and it was great. Not only was the horror and mud of WWI conveyed in vivid detail, but I found the "bounce" between direct reports (from diaries/letters) and conventional political history exactly right. More important, the first 20 pages of the book illuminated the origins of WWI so plainly -- for the first time I understood how this could happen. At the back end of the book, the same service is performed, so the reader can see WWII coming a mile away. Will start buying Groom's other/future historical non-fic work immediately.

Americans possess little native sense of the tragic sweep of The Great War, in which an entire generation of young men was severely depleted in several European nations. Initially, at least, we study it in grade school as a roman numeral - "I" as opposed to "II", which was far more significant in our curriculum because of Pearl Harbor and all that followed. My first visit to the Ypres Salient in Flanders helped me to understand how deficient my American schooling had been. Scores of graveyards and thousands of crosses appear throughout what is still farmland. A modest roadside plaque, no more impressive than the ubiquitous historical markers appearing throughout the Washington DC region, marks the location from which chlorine gas was first released as a weapon of warfare. The landscape still yields the occasional German machine gun bunker, or the remains of a 1918 trench line, and the cold steady drizzle that day reminded visitors of what kind of conditions were faced by troops on both sides over four long years. Most Belgian cities and towns have erected memorials to their casualties in Great War, but not in the war that followed. Many thousands of British tourists have visited Ypres over the years to pay tribute to the sacrifices of that generation, while few Americans can even pronounce the name.

American Winston Groom approaches the trench warfare of the Ypres Salient with that distinction in mind, and depicts both the strategic aspects of the war and the terror of the new mechanized mass killing, with an accessible writing style and a combination of official history and anecdotal journal entries. He explains with a fiction writer's skills and pacing how the great powers were able to start a nineteenth century war with twentieth century implements of mass killing, and quickly accept "attrition" as the only strategy (The very fact that there were four "named" Battles of Ypres over four years is depressing enough.) He describes the leaders - Haig, Foch, Ludendorf, Rupprecht, Lloyd George, and Churchill, often in their own words, dwelling just long enough on their personality traits but not so long as to speculate that these complex events were driven by a single character. He also inserts poetic interpretations by the participants, a reminder of the class nature of military leadership in that era, and a division which could not endure with the appalling casualty rate for Britain's battle leaders. Likewise, I found it interesting to read Corporal Hitler's sporadic commentary on the trench war and his visits to the homefront from Mein Kampf, a grim foretelling of the next roman numeral war. But most of all, Groom describes in bloody detail the physical and psychological effects of endless shelling, the subterranean terror of mining, the helplessness of phosgene and mustard gas exposure, and the morale of the trenches.

Other reviewers have pointed out some factual errors, which are minor and the fault of the editor, not the author. Although the book is clearly intended for trade sales rather than research, I would have preferred more footnote documentation. Groom does well enough citing sources in the text itself, especially when there are differences between the German and Allied interpretation of events. But I'd like to know which sources he relied upon for various portions of the narrative. With those minor reservations, I enjoyed this book tremendously.

This book is rare in not trying to spare the reader the true horrors of trench warfare during World War I, including some of the costliest slaughters of that time. The author's writing is vivid, graphic, even horrific, yet always remains readable and compelling.

Were it not for a few historical, and unnecessary, errors made by Mr. Groom, I would have given this book the full five-star rating. His work seems excellent as long as he does not stray from the immediate topic, though he contradicts himself seriously ("The Chateaux Generals") and makes outright mistakes concerning the naval war (Lord Kitchener was not being transported to Russia aboard a battle cruiser when the ship hit a mine and sank; Rheinhard Scheer never planned to confront the entire Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916).

For the reader willing to forgive and overlook such matters, the rest of the book is a gruesomely fascinating account of a particularly violent and nasty period of warfare.

Books are like a boc of choc-lits: you never know what you're gonna get til you open them. Normally,I refrain from writing reviews of the military history that I read, but this book, written by the author of Forrest Gump and supposedly written for an American audience, deserves comment.

Frankly, it's garbage. Aside from Groom's appalling ignorance of Canadian geography (Winnipeg and Calgary are not provinces, as he states,but cities); or the appalling misquoting of Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est (it's high zest, Mr. Groom, not high jest), it seems to be superficially researched and quickly written.

While his premise is interesting, which is to look at the Ypres salient throughout the war, it is a highly derivative work and his subject matter has been covered by better authors, most of whom he quotes. It seems most of his research was done using secondary sources at best, and he really has nothing new to add to the body of work that already covers this subject