[TQ8]∎ Descargar Gratis Night over Day over Night Paul Watkins 9780380707379 Books

Night over Day over Night Paul Watkins 9780380707379 Books

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Night over Day over Night Paul Watkins 9780380707379 Books

Pretty good novel from the "other side" of WW2. Definitely a novel, takes some liberties with historical facts.


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Night over Day over Night Paul Watkins 9780380707379 Books Reviews

A novel so intense and authentic that the reader feels as if the stock of a Garrand has butted them in the jaw. One can smell the cordite and experience the flash of incoming shells as they huddle in a shallow fox hole that might well be a premature grave. Know what it is like to drive home a dagger when it is the heat of hand to hand combat and you only have your own skill and guts to rely upon. Few novels approach the height of realism and magnificence as this volume. If you have the desire that lives in the heart of all real men to know war but have have been tied down at home with family responsibilities, or if you wish you had been born in Germany prior to WWII so you could have participated in the Big One, then this is indeed a book you must read and Paul Watkins an author you will want to remember.
In appropriately sparse prose, Watkins tells the story of Sebastian, a Hitler Youth member who signs up for the SS in 1944, when Germany is reeling and the war's outcome appears obvious. His offhand reason for doing so is that when you reached a certain age, you either signed up for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or SS. The Air Force and Navy are nonexistent at this point, and when he heads to the recruiting office, it happens to be the SS recruiter's turn to be there. One gets the feeling that he joins the SS for lack of anything better to do, and perhaps a general case of teenage angst. His father was killed in the war, his mother's gotten a bit weird, he's got an older lover, a proper girlfriend, his best friend is crippled, and we get the sense that like Holden Caufield, he just can't stand anything any more.
At SS training camp, Sebastian makes a few friends, a big doofus of a farmer boy, and a cool upper-class kid. They all sort of drift through a training regimen overseen by two grizzled veterans who survived Normandy and have nothing but derision for the new recruits. Even non-military readers will realize that their training is virtually useless, and they are being prepared as cannon fodder for the final offensive in the Ardennes (aka The Battle of the Bulge). When Sebastian visits home on leave, his emotional distance from everything and everybody is even starker, and it's clear he is even more adrift than when he left. There's a minor subplot of sorts, as Sebastian is tracked down by his older lover, and he tries to run from her obsession with him. The final third of the book takes place during this offensive and is a maelstrom of chaos, killing, looting, and murder. By the end Sebastian has been reduced to a survivor, and little else. Some readers may be troubled with Watkins' entirely human portrayal of an SS soldier, however it's clear many were not believers and joined for any number of reasons. Indeed, the question of why he enlists is a recurring one. At one point in the book, Sebastian pokes fun at another boy from his town who enlists, saying he saw the "Meet Your Comrades in the SS" poster and thought it would be a surefire way to finally make friends. While this may be true, it's no worse than Sebastian's own lack of concrete reason.
If you're interested in this book, I recall reading another book as a kid called "The Black March" written in the late `50s. It purported to be the memoir of an SS recruit's training and service on the Eastern front, and as a kid it was gripping. I don't know if I'd still find it so, and I've since heard it was all a fake by a French pulp writer, but you might want to check it out.
I must give the author credit for a great read. With his style he keeps my attention all the way to the end with its Hemingwayish simplicity and curt dialogue, but the story does not ring true to the German experience during World War II. First of all, he makes the Germans too sympathetic and veers away from inserting their racial policies, although he does insert their reference to Teutonic supremacy over Europe.

Now I would like to list many of the historical inaccuracies I found while reading through the book. The character in the wheelchair, sorry if I don't know his name since it's been a while since I've read the book, is a believable character in some aspects, but many of these people, unless ethnic Aryan or loyal veterans were sent into death camps for their disabilities. The beer drinking at age seventeen and the flings with women at such an age were authentic, although many soldiers did not drink to excess at this age, but rather overindulged in cigarette smoking. The training, although described as brutish in the book with its veteran soldiers square-bashing recruits into battle ready barbarians, is true to the Wehrmacht experience, not the Waffen SS, and again the story inaccurately calls the battle group the soldier has enlisted into as the SS instead of Waffen SS, the SS, or Shutzstaffel Algamien was exclusively a police force whose primary duties were to act as Hitler's personal bodyguard, assist the Gestapo, and run the infamous concentration camps. The Waffen SS, recruited most of its soldiers out of the Hitler Youth, where boys had already been hardened into fighting machines throughout their boyhood years, and under the tutelage of Kurt Meyer, commander of Waffen SS training, they went through a more friendly training atmosphere where drill sergeants would explain, rather than punish soldiers, at the onset of a discrepancy. In the story the author gives reference to the sergeant carrying a Luger, which during World War II was replaced mostly by better side arms, even amongst misfortunate ranks who were given less material. In an earlier chapter there is introduced a soldier with red hair going through the same training. The Waffen SS would never recruit a boy with red hair, for Nazis labeled this as a Jewish heredity trait, and many of these youth were thrown into concentration camps, deported, or were thrown into prisoner battalions. All in all a good read, but not a historical epic
Great response time. Looking forward to the next purchase.
Pretty good novel from the "other side" of WW2. Definitely a novel, takes some liberties with historical facts.