Russ Schneider (1) (–2000)

I had not heard of Schneider, an Anerican who apparently wrote two collections of short stories centred on the Russo-German war, a non-fiction piece on Germany's last stand in the east in 1945, and this work of fiction based on two minor sieges around the towns of Cholm and Velikiye Luki in the winter of 1941-1942; minor in comparison with the epic scale of Stalingrad, but for the men who lived through it, every bit as searing.

Schneider does a very good job of describing the horrors of that completely unforgiving war, the reduction of men to levels devoid of any virtues except survival, the conditioning of training, and in some cases, a camaraderie variously defined and of various depths depending on the individual. The book reminded me very much of Peterson's great movie of Stalingrad with its exploration of the unimaginable through the lives and experience of ordinary people. A story of ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary circumstances of life and death, far, far from the grand geo-political schemes that put them there, and the flesh and blood and guts and horrible deaths that do not show in flags and lines drawn on strategic maps at headquarters far removed from that reality. Schneider also describes well the basic Russian approach of using soldiers simply as fodder to be expended in the absence of any real tactical planning. How many millions of individual live were snuffed out this way.... unfortunately, for the Germans, the Russians improved their tactical abilities while still being able to rely on vast reserves of manpower for overwhelming assaults; see Beevor's description of the fall of Berlin.… (meer)