Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/March 2016/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7

Hermann Balck is not one of the better-known German generals of World War II. This is probably because most of his career as a general officer was on the Eastern front, although he had a brief period of acting command of the XIV Panzer Corps in the Battle of Salerno in 1943, and halted Patton's advance in the Battle of Metz in 1944. He was one of only 27 men to be awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. He was wounded four times in World War I, and twice more in World War II.

Writing immediately after the war, Hugh M. Cole wrote: "Balck came from an old military family; his father had written a well-known textbook on tactics which had been translated and used for instruction in the United States. Balck had fought as a young officer through the four years of World War I and subsequently took part in the early mechanization of the Reichswehr. After winning recognition in the Somme campaign of 1940, he spent some months as a staff officer at OKH. Later, in the Russian campaigns, he commanded the famous 11th Panzer Division, led the XLVIII Panzer Corps in the fierce battles around Lemberg, and briefly held the position of commanding general of the Fourth Panzer Army. Both Balck and Mellenthin came to the West with no experience against the Western Allies—a fact which Rundstedt always held against the new appointees. Politically, Balck long had held the reputation of being an ardent Nazi. His personal bravery was well established (he had been wounded six times), he was known to be an optimist, and he had a long record of successful offensive operations. On the other hand Balck already had been ticketed as an officer prone to take too favorable a view of things when the situation failed to warrant optimism. From his earliest days as a junior commander he had built up a reputation for arrogant and ruthless dealings with his subordinates; his first days in command of Army Group G would bring forth a series of orders strengthening the existing regulations on the enactment of the death penalty. He was, in short, the type of commander certain to win Hitler's confidence."

This book is a translation of Balck's 1981 autobiography, by two retired US Army officers, Major General David T. Zabecki and Lieutenant Colonel Dieter J. Biedekarken. This means that military terms are correctly translated. The text remains awkward, but not through fault of the translators. There is also some running commentary though the endnotes, so the reader flips to the back of the book a lot. Footnotes would have been much better. Balck talks about his military ancestors, and about his father, William Balck, a generalleutnant in World War I. His wife doesn't rate a mention. About half the book is devoted to Balck's service in World War I, with the Alpenkorps on the Western, Eastern, South Eastern and Italian fronts. What Balck has to say about the German Army in the inter-war period is most interesting, as this topic is not well known or well covered.

His campaigns in World War II are recounted in detail, but restricted to his own corps or army, so the reader may be left wanting to know more. He expounds his personal mantra that the offensive is stronger than the defensive. And also, but probably less to the liking of the US Army, that it pays to change your tactics before the enemy cottons on to them. The translators have some trouble with the fact that Balck still regarded Hitler as a good bloke. There are some important points here though. It was too easy to blame Hitler for everything that went wrong, especially after the war, when he was dead.

The book ends with the conclusion of World War II. After the war he was tried and convicted by a German court over a summary execution of an officer in France in 1944. In the period after the Vietnam War when the US Army re-focused on fighting the Soviet Union, Balck became something of a celebrity in military circles, and in 1980 they brought Balck and his chief of staff, Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, to the United States to participate in a colloquium alongside William E. DePuy and Glenn K. Otis. Like them, Balck was a devotee of the work of Carl von Clausewitz.

In Weapons and Hope (1984), Freeman Dyson rather unconvincingly contrasted Balck with Alfred Jodl. Of Balck, Dyson wrote, "he went on winning battles, just as Picasso went on painting pictures."

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 * By Hawkeye7

The daughter of an Australian Army officer, Neryl Joyce enlisted in the Army herself under the old Ready Reserve scheme, under which kids spent a "gap year" in the Regular Army, after which they became part time. So if you didn't have the money for an overseas experience, the Army could send you somewhere exotic, assuming that Kapooka is your idea of exotic. Conservative politicians absolutely hated this scheme, and have killed it twice, but it keeps coming back because the Army was stunned at the high quality of the recruits it got this way. People like Neryl Joyce, who stumbles from one bad relationship to another, eventually becoming a single mother working at Woolworths. But in the Army, she completes officer training at Duntroon, joins the Close Personal Protection Unit, and is deployed overseas to Cambodia.

Then she discovers that there is money to be made working in security in Iraq. She joins Edinburgh Risk and Security Management (ERSM), and later Blackwater. An account of this consumes most of the book. There are a lot of details here about what this is like. It turns out you can take the woman out of the Army, but not the Army out of the woman. "I was an ex-officer in the Australian Army, and a person who believed in doing the right thing." (p. 201) The book concludes with a harrowing ambush. This being the 21st century, there is video, and while the book refers to her fellow operatives by their codenames, you can find their real names online easily enough.

A good read if you are interested in the subject.

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