To begin with, this image was not the cover of the book you read. There was no swastika at all on your copy (which is an original printing). You weren't able to find an image of your copy (and uploading an actual photo you took of it would be SO tedious) but the swastika is pretty inappropriate. Yes, Hans Von Luck fought for the Wehrmacht under Hitler in almost every theater of war during WW II, but he was no Nazi. This is the story of a soldiers' soldier. A man who fought for Germany because it was his duty, not because he agreed with the insanity of Nazi propaganda. Even while fighting, he longed to marry a woman of Jewish descent, he loved Paris and London, he befriended men he damn well knew were part of The Resistance. I mean, the forward is written by Stephen freaking Ambrose! Colonel Von Luck was not a Nazi.
He was, however, one hell of a soldier. Hans Von Luck was in the vanguard of almost every offensive the German army (the Wehrmacht) launched from Poland in 1939 to France in 1940 to Russia in 1941. He held Erwin Rommel's exposed right flank in the battle of El Alamein and fought against the famed British paratroopers who held the crucial Orne River and canal crossings on the morning of June 6th 1944 in Normandy (D-Day) and he lead one of the last units to be captured in the defense of Berlin. He earned the highest decorations for bravery and valor his nation awards her soldiers and he was widely respected by his enemies. Among the warriors of the 20th Century, he deserves to held in the highest regard.
As humble as a memoir can be, it is clear in reading Von Luck's book that he was one of those people who was simply born for combat. He speaks of it with little passion and an almost disappointing lack of flare. But it is exactly that clinical analysis that hints at his excellence. Von Luck needs not embellish... his story is enthralling enough without any exaggeration. Von Luck is obviously a cultured man, one whose family history of devotion to national service stretches back to Frederick the Great. He is an open-minded, tolerant, almost apolitical man who loves art, music, and bustling cities filled with diverse peoples who can engage in interesting conversation over plates of excellent food and glasses of even better booze (during the war he held off on shelling a particular monastery because he enjoyed the liqueur they made there). His memoir is ultimately a twisted tragedy, a story of how such a cosmopolitan and extraordinary man could become the tip of the spear in the useless and cataclysmic war waged by Adolf Hitler's extremist totalitarianism.
As with other memoirs of former German commanders you have read ("Panzer Battles" by F.W. Von Mellenthin was the best) this book was written with the Cold War in mind. Von Luck starts talking about his relationship with the Russians on page 12! He learned the Russian language in college and went to dance at parties with live performances by Rachmaninoff himself. He studied Tolstoy Dostoevsky, and Pushkin. These were experiences that would serve him well during his five years of captivity in Russia after the war. I mean really, are their any other German commanders who can claim to have danced to live performances by Rachmaninoff? Maybe it is a proven marketing strategy for former German officers to emphasize the lesson the learned in fighting they Russians during the war rather than playing up how many Americans they killed, or maybe it reflects a genuine concern to pass on to the the next generation of soldiers who were likely to face the Red Army the lessons of how to win the looming Third World War. In either case it sets the book in that confusing and terrifying era between the Fall of Berlin and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Before the Second World War broke out, Von Luck traveled Europe. As Hitler was moving to create a secret armored military to dominate the continent, Von Luck was making friends across all nationalities. He fell in love with Prague and London, but he lost his heart to beautiful Paris and to the French people as well. His network of connections would serve him well as Germany was soon to expand to consume almost all of Europe. Von Luck even mentions hanging out in Berlin in and around the Tiergarten with Martha Dodd (from your first "Reviews For Sam" ever!). You know you love it when a book you're reading references a person or event form another book you loved.
Von Luck was one of the few men serving in the shrunken armed forces of Germany allowed by the Treaty of Versailles after the Great War. He witnessed the secretive expansion of German military might after Hitler had come to power and was one of the first soldiers in the Wehrmacht to get to develop armored, high speed warfare, in violation of international treaties. Von Luck observed the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler into power. The people of Germany liked the new Chancellor. He found jobs for millions of people, built a national highway network ( the autobahn), expanded German infrastructure, and peacefully recaptured the Rhineland (lost in the Great War). Most of the population saw nothing ominous in the rounding up of communist activists, they wanted the violent troublemakers off the streets too. But, in this memoir, Von Luck remembers all these things through the lens of what was to come. The highway system was crafted with strategic corridors leading to probable jumping-off points for the wars Hitler was planning. The fabulous jobs program would soon evolve to become the brainwashing 'Hitler Youth' movement, and those militant communists who had been rounded up would soon be joined by peaceful Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and any other people deemed politically undesirable. The words "concentration camp" and "ghetto" had not yet been heard by the German people, but it was only a matter of time.
By September of 1939, Von Luck's days of leisurely touring Europe were over. He would soon return to many of his favorite locations throughout the continent but this time on the back of a tank. He was one of the first men to cross the border into Poland. Von Luck, and many other soldiers like him, introduced the world to the concept of blitzkrieg that summer. It would take many more lessons in many more countries before the world caught on and became better at making war than the Germans who raged across the Polish countryside in September of '39. But as it was, this war in Poland was over before October set in and Von Luck was back in his homeland waiting to teach another country what it means to fight a war of movement and envelopment.
The next year, Von Luck invaded France. Again, he was at the vanguard of the first units to cross the border. This time he was under the leadership of the famous Erwin Rommel. Right away, the men under Rommel's command could tell he would be a leader with something special to offer. He was a man who understood from personal experience the need to avoid the stalemates of the last war. It occurred to you as you were reading this part that the Germans' greatest fear during the invasion of France in 1940 was not that they would lose, but that their invasion would bog down. More than achieving victory, the Germans on the ground were fighting to prevent a repeat of the terrible trench warfare of the Great War. As they invaded Belgium in May of 1940 Rommel exhorted his men, especially the men of the recon battalions, "Keep going, don't look to the left or right, only forward. I'll cover your flanks if necessary. The enemy is confused; we must take advantage of it." Rommel knew what the world was soon going to learn, speed kills.
By the beginning of June 1940, barely a month from the start of the invasion of France and the lowlands, the British Army had been evacuated from continental Europe. In two days, supported by the fighters and dive bombers of the Luftwaffe, Von Luck and his division raced through Normandy, the coastal region of France that would, just four years later, take the combined efforts of all the Western Allied forces more than two months to move through. Von Luck lead his men along the Atlantic coast, bypassing areas of major resistance and gobbling up French land like the men of the Great War could never have dreamed. Half way through June, German tanks were in Paris, by the end of the month France had called it quits. When the shooting had finally stopped, Von Luck's recon battalion had pulled up on the outskirts of the famous city of Bordeaux, just 120 miles form the border with Spain! Von Luck himself arranged the escort for the removal of Marshall Petain's provisional government from Bordeaux to Vichy.
These staggering successes left the world shocked and terrified at the prospect of which country might be next. Von Luck describes how he and his men all knew in their hearts that the promised invasion of Great Britain would never really happen. They were right. The Luftwaffe could never gain control of the skies long enough to protect any invasion flotilla crossing the English channel.
For a year, Von Luck did not fire a shot in anger. He and his men were now preparing for the invasion of Russia. They were increasingly disillusioned with any prospects for victory. Their enemy's country was just too vast, the people too numerous for the Wehrmacht to defeat before winter set in. Even with the anti-communist rhetoric and anti-Jewish propaganda ramping up to new heights, no one could understand why Hitler wanted to open up a second front.
Nevertheless, despite the fears and doubts, in June of 1941 Von Luck found himself crossing the Russian border, leading another spearhead into yet another country. Again all enemy resistance crumbled before the shock and power of the German blitzkrieg. Again huge pockets of soldiers were surrounded and eliminated en masse. Again hundreds of thousands of soldiers were captured. Again speed was the key, but this time Hitler had miscalculated. He had delayed his invasion of Russia in order to deal with problems in Greece and the Balkans. The delay proved critical. Even as the Germans advanced at a pace that had been unthinkable in warfare for the history of mankind, time was ticking by and the area they were invading swallowed armies whole. By late October, Von Luck was securing the approaches to Moscow itself. He established a bridgehead across the final water obstacle before the Russian capital. The Germans had almost been fast enough, but not quite.
Overnight Von Luck describes the temperature dropping to levels no one anticipated. Hitler had believed the war would be over before winter set in and as such, in a betrayal of the German soldier as well as the German innate sense of efficiency and perfectionism, had not provided his armies with the appropriate equipment or clothing to fight in -40 degree weather. And even if he had, the German supply lines were stretched over 1,000 miles of Russian steppe with no modern road system and railways with tracks the were the wrong sized gauge for German locomotives, it would have taken too long for the needed winter gear to reach the men who could have taken Moscow. Instead those men, along with their vehicles and weapons, froze in place. Siberian soldiers appeared like ghosts from the snows, clad in white camouflage and gliding silently on skis to rip though the German defenses and wreak havoc on their ridiculously exposed supply lines. New Russian tanks showed up and were more than a match for the German armored units. Von Luck was forced to abandon his bridgehead and retreat. Russia was not Poland or France. It suddenly became clear to everyone that this war was now guaranteed to be a long one. To make the prospects bleaker, before 1941 was over, America had entered the war.
But for Von Luck, the war in Russia was over. Rommel, in command of a headline grabbing army in North Africa had requested the presence of his favorite recon battalion commander. Von Luck describes his drive from the gates of Moscow back to Germany as one would a man fleeing hell itself. He and his trusted aide, Beck, push their beloved Mercedes to the limit, popping stimulants so they could take turns driving westward 24/7, always on the lookout for ski patrol raids or aerial attacks. Escape from the frigid certain doom of the Russian war could not come fast enough.
Von Luck writes about his time in Africa as if it were his favorite part of the entire conflict, more adventure than combat. And it wasn't just that the sands of the Sahara were preferable to the snows of Ukraine. The war there became what would later be referred to as a "gentleman's war." Eventually, despite the intense fighting, the British and the Germans reached what they called an agreement. Combat every day ended at 5:00 PM. Both sides made tea and ceased aggressive patrols for the day. The two sides even established radio contact with one another and would ask their opponents if they had captured friends who had been lost on patrols during the day. A German doctor was traded back to his countrymen for medicine to treat the British soldiers suffering from some native disease. A British soldier, son of a cigarette magnate, refused to be traded back to his side for anything less than 1 million cigarettes; he was sent back to a POW camp in Germany instead. For this brief time, Von Luck, one of the men to introduce the concepts of modern warfare to the world, was given a glimpse of what war had looked like for millennia before. When it was time to fight, both sides would be ferocious, but a certain civility was maintained and fair play ruled all but the most intense situations.
With the absolute trust that made him such a great leader, Rommel placed Von Luck in charge of the entire German flank as they attempted to drive eastward to expel the British from Egypt. If the British were to outmaneuver Rommel it could only be around the right flank, to the south through the endless trackless desert. Von Luck and his men made sure that never happened. Despite valiant efforts and brilliant leadership however, Rommel was forced to call off his advances. He simply did not have the supplies he needed to effectively wage the war Hitler was demanding. Unbeknownst to Von Luck at the time, the British had broken the German radio codes. Every convoy full of supplies and equipment was soon at the bottom of the Mediterranean. They could not hope to match the British in fuel availability, artillery shells, medical supplies, or aircraft. In contrast to the heady days in France when Von Luck helped kick the British out of Dunkirk, the RAF now ruled the skies of North Africa. No matter how extraordinary Rommel and his Afrika Corps were, they could not fight a war with no supplies.
Early in the summer of '42, the Americans landed on the west coast of Africa, outflanking Rommel from the sea rather than the desert. Immediately Rommel became interested in bloodying the Americans who were late comers to this most modern of wars. The Germans raced westward (the opposite direction of their initial advances) and smashed into the Americans in the battle soon to become known as "Kasserine Pass." Von Luck lead the charge through the pass and is therefore responsible for the deaths of more Americans than even the most extreme Nazi could ever dream. This was war. This was his duty. Even to this day, American soldiers hold Erwin Rommel in the highest regard. Despite the casualties at Kasserine Pass, Rommel's name is almost sacred to members of US armored divisions and especially the cavalry regiments, but it was Von Luck who personally lead the attacks that resulted in the most American losses. Reading this section reminded you, once again that this man was a soldiers' soldier.
Eventually the German army withdrew from Africa (three weeks after Von Luck had been sent to plead with Hitler to begin extracting Rommel's forces; the idea being that the Fuhrer might honor the opinion of a true combat commander fresh from the front over his generals who he believed infected with defeatism) and Von Luck was placed in charge of a recon training school outside Paris. By June 1944, he was back in command of a battalion defending the Normandy countryside just behind what were about to become the landing beaches for the Allied D-Day invasion. On the morning of June 6th the invasion came and Von Luck was in perfect position to roll his tanks from the east across all of the British and Canadian beaches, kicking his enemy back into the sea. Instead, he was forced to stay in position. Hitler and the German high command were convinced this was a diversionary attack and refused to commit their armored units to the fight in any decisive way.
But even after they realized this was, in fact, the real thing and Von Luck was allowed to attack, it was in no way an easy task. Not only did he face the same veteran British and Scottish troops he had fought in North Africa, but this time his enemy had both air superiority and naval offshore bombardments to support them. Every advance Von Luck tried to make in the open during the daylight hours was crushed from the air, and every advance that promised to make headway despite this disadvantage was met with a naval barrage that could have stopped the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Allies were in France to stay.
It is obvious that Von Luck learned a lot from serving under Rommel. During the fighting in Normandy he mimicked Rommel's style of leadership, always moving from hot spot to hot spot, personally leading attacks that were critical to the overall situation. He held back the Allied push inland from the beaches for weeks. During a massive offensive by the British, Von Luck almost single-handedly stalled the entire Allied advance by finding an idle anti aircraft unit, moving them to the perfect position, and insisting they lower the barrels of their weapons to fire into the exposed flanks of the advancing armored units. Without his actions on that day, it is conceivable that the British might have broken out of eastern Normandy a full week before the Americans did farther west.
Instead, it was general Patton and his Third Army, west of Avranches, who broke through the German lines and into the open flat country perfectly made for tank warfare. And suddenly, it seemed as if every German, from Hitler all the way down to the most fresh-faced cadet, absolutely shit his pants. Patton had learned the lessons Von Luck had taught the world about how to fight a blitzkrieg war. He was racing through France as fast as he could go. Even Allied cargo planes had difficulty finding Patton's forward units in order to drop supplies; they had to follow the columns of smoke. Patton's unpredictability made him effectively unstoppable. If this man was in charge of an army that was on the loose, free from hedgerow country, then no German in France felt truly safe. Regardless of the situation in their own sectors, everyone went running for the safety of the fatherland.
But when the Allies came to the border with Germany, the rout ended and Von Luck fought near the border with Switzerland, in the Vosges mountains. Although he avoided the carnage of the Battle of the Bulge farther north, he describes the fighting in his sector as intensely savage. Von Luck talks about hideous hand-to-hand, house-by-house, street-by-street fighting, the kind of warfare where epic battles are waged to gain one floor of a building that will only prove to be demolished the next day by either side's artillery.
On page 209 he says of one such battle, "After eight days we still didn't know whether we were continuing to fight there for reasons of prestige, or whether there was a tactical significance to our holding the position." You thought this quote was a pretty apt metaphor for the entire last half of the entire war. Tragically, every day that Von Luck and his men so skillfully delayed the fall of the Third Reich, more and more civilians died in bombing raids or in that kind of savage street fighting being witnessed on both the western and eastern fronts, more soldiers died in a war that was clearly unwinnable, and thousands, maybe even millions of men women and children were dying in Nazi concentration camps. As monstrous as the actions of the guards and officers at places like Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz are alone, seeing them in the light of the ultimate sacrifice men like Von Luck were making at the fronts made these sins even more unforgivable to you. Genocide was not what the average German soldier was fighting to defend. Most of them had no idea it was happening.
Von Luck and his men were pulled off the front line to recuperate and receive replacements, but were immediately rushed to the Eastern Front instead, a front which was not so far east any longer. By spring of 1945, the Russians were ominously close to Berlin and Hitler was ordering every available unit into the defense of the capital, however futile that defense clearly was. Von Luck describes witnessing waves of Russians that seem unstoppable, cowering under firepower that seems withering, and facing a tide of vengeance that seems straight out of Dante's "Inferno." It was here, defending his countrymen against impossible odds at the gates of Berlin itself that Hans Von Luck, surrounded, out of ammunition, and at the end of a very long war, finally surrendered to his enemies.
Von Luck's captivity in Russian gulags lasted almost as long as his service in the whole war. Five years spent scrounging for the merest scrap of both food and dignity, being tortured both physically and mentally. His knowledge of Russian culture served him well, as did his deep seated compassion for the least among us. Recognizing that the population near his prison was being just as crushed under Stalin's boot heel as he was provided him the patience he would need to survive the ordeal.
When he was finally released and returned home, Von Luck realized that those five years he had lost in a Russian POW camp had been momentous years for the rest of the world. He and the love of his life no longer had anything keeping them together. They had planned to marry after the war, but she had become a television personality in Germany and he was still stuck in a 1945 wartime mentality. The two were worlds apart and it became clear to both that a relationship would not be possible. Von Luck found odd jobs here and there until settling into a sales position at an export firm, establishing a new branch in Africa. He loved his new career enough that when the West German military offered him a commission, he declined.
In the decades to come, Von Luck lectured and spoke in college classes and at various events commemorating the war he had such a hand in shaping. It was in this capacity that he was brought back into contact with many of the men he had faced across the killing fields of Africa and France. Bound by their mutual service and with no animosity, Von Luck and several Allied commanders struck up deep and lasting friendships. These men, like Colonel Hans Von Luck, had answered the call of their nations and served in the greatest war the world has ever known. As this book was published the clouds of another world war were gathering and Von Luck ends his memoirs with the wish that the young people of the world never be used again for such destruction.
On to the next book!
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