First of all a note on the language – the book is in French only. It contains many very interesting photographs, but unless you are really into that, or if you don’t speak French, this is probably not for you. It also has to be said that many of the quite interesting photographs from veteran’s collections are unfortunately reproduced in poor quality, probably scanned on a low-quality scanner. A series of highly interesting propaganda pictures from the German Federal Archives – Military Archive are of very high quality though.

Second a disclaimer – books like this are not my cup of tea, since I am more into operational histories, with the occasional memoir thrown in, and this may affect my judgment, even though I tried to forget my bias. I volunteered to review the book after being asked by Marcus because I can speak French.

The positive first – the book is a decent overview of the background of the development of the first Luftwaffe ground forces, and as such it has a lot of merit. It contains some interesting information on the establishment of the Division Meindl and its fighting in the Staraja Russa and Demyansk sectors, some info on the battalion TO&E at the original establishment, and a lot of personal accounts of the fighting, collected personally by Didier from the veterans with which he has established very good relations. Which means that you won’t be able to read them anywhere else. In that sense, the book is fully in line with the motto of the site “Information not shared is lost”, and it is the strongest element of the book. The book also contains an interesting article on battle-field searches near Staraja Russa in recent years.

There are some serious criticisms however: on the whole, the book appears to be very badly organized, jumping from background to personal story with little break. It would also very much benefit from better, and more maps than the single one in the book. A lot of the sometimes very dense information, e.g. on the renaming or renumbering of regiments, would have been much better presented in tables. The print quality of the pictures from the private collections is sometimes very bad and generally not great, which is a shame, and unnecessary with modern scanner technology. There is little information on the divisional organization of Division Meindl. The description of the setting, i.e. the background to the war and the battles in the Volkhov sector is trite, of the standard ‘German soldiers were no Nazis and just ended up fighting in the east by accident’ stuff, which I had hoped we had moved beyond somewhat. I understand that close work with veteran’s association is not conducive to dispassionate analysis, and I am not sure I could do it were I to conduct this kind of research, but it is jarring nevertheless.

In conclusion, if you are a Frenchspeaking die-hard Luftwaffe ground troops fan, or really into first-person accounts of German soldiers in the east, this book maybe for you. Otherwise it maybe better to pass.

(Reviewed by Andreas Biermann)
Thanks to the author for the review copy.