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The High White Forest by Ralph Allen is a pretty good book if you have the chance to pick it up, Allen was a war correspondent for the Canadian Army during WW2, and some 20 years after it all went down he published a fiction novel about the Battle of the Bulge from 3 POVs The first is Franz Kroener, a German-American from New York who joins the American Bund and enlists in the German Army before hostilities broke out between the USA and Germany. He goes on to serve in the 12th SS Hitler Jugend during the Normandy Campaign. Thanks to his American background, he is hand-picked along with a few others to disguise themselves as Americans and disrupt as much as possible the enemy before and during the German attack as part of Operation Greif. The second is David Kyle, an American conscript from New York as well. His family is horrified that he won't file for conscientious objector status . Part of the 106th Division, he and his friends are sucked in the general American retreat during the opening phases of the battle, getting gang-pressed from one retreating unit to the next culminating in a desperate last stand at St-Vith of a mixed force of cooks, clerks, drivers, combat engineers and a few infantrymen like himself. The third, and definitely my favourite, Henry Whelan, a Canadian veteran of the Dieppe raid, whose actions earned him a few medals and a shower of shrapnel during the raid. His account is the most realistic and I think the most personal of the trio. Wounded and considered a bit of a hero, he gets transferred to the Forestry Corps for the duration of the war. Pulling some strings, he arranges to have his younger brother get transferred to the Forestry Corps with him rather than get drafted into the infantry like the rest of Canada's "Zombies". His company of foresters inadvertently find themselves at the front when word never reaches them of the German offensive barrelling straight at them. The book has some memorable moments like Whelan sitting on the cliffs of Dieppe after taking out a 20mm cannon, watching the raid unfold catastrophically, Kyle arguing from inside his foxhole with a irate Panther crew commander who just wants to get on with the show, but can't leave this GI behind him to shove a home-made bomb up his exhaust, or Kroener's account of escaping the Falaise Pocket barefoot, burnt, and starving with the remnants his child-soldier division. Barrakketh fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 19, 2016 03:27
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MA-Horus posted:There's a troll in the CanPol megathread who likes to poo poo on Dallaire for having PTSD.I fall for the bait more than I should because what he went through should be a test for military colleges. That's Dallaire's problem, and I say this as someone who has met and talked with him many times and respect him enormously, he believed he had a choice. In reality, his hands were tied, and there was nothing he could do. He would have been sacked as soon as he cabled back to Ottawa and New York any intent to use force in Rwanda. The man even knew where the weapon stockpiles were and was denied permission to seize them. Meanwhile, in Bosnia... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnnhi3RszM One measly mech battalion against 3 Croat brigades and we dug in and saved hundreds, thousands, of lives. If the Belgian Paras hadn't been pulled out, maybe we could have stopped the worst of it as well. So yeah, 1 all the way. I'm taking all you fuckers with me. Barrakketh fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Oct 2, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 00:29
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