Trilogy of Books

 My proudest possessions are the book series that I have read, and reread, over the years.  It all started with Shelby Foote’s trilogy on the Civil War, which was so good that I have read it three times, and then I moved onto Caro’s books on President Johnson, Atkinson’s trilogy on the battles that America fought in Europe in WWII, Toll’s trilogy on the battles that America fought in Asia in WWII, Chernow’s books on Washington, Hamilton, and Grant, Morris’ trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt, and now the John Erikson books on the Eastern Front in WWII.  These authors take an honored place on my shelves, their tomes neatly shelved, patiently waiting for me to pick them up again.  The books are sacred texts to me, allowing me to learn the secrets of the past.  They contain knowledge that no one else is interested in, or cared enough about, to take the time to learn.

I enjoy the struggle of reading a challenging book.  It is like a bulldog biting into a bone and refusing to let go.  There is joy in grappling with a new subject and it is immensely satisfying to turn the page, having the story unfold in my mind, and watching the bookmark move from the beginning to the end of the book, from the far left to the far right.  To continue with the simile, it is like watching that same bulldog whittling down that bone from something to nothing.  The point is to take it slowly, to study the book and not just breeze through it.  Sometimes, when the book becomes too dense, I will take a break from it.  Chernow’s book on Hamilton was especially tough so I put it down for a couple of months and then I coaxed myself back to it, reading just a couple of pages at a time, until my interest was reignited.  My persistence is rewarded as Alexander Hamilton’s becomes real, and I begin to understand.  The goal is to unravel the complexities of a story that has many angles.

The Erickson books on the Russian Front in WWII were challenging because I knew almost nothing about the epic clash between the Nazis and the Soviets.  My constant thought was, “why was I never taught this while I was in school?”  The answer is because the Eastern Front is almost incomprehensible.  Three million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and, since the front stretched for over two thousand miles, the sheer scale of the war makes it hard to understand.  Also, most Americans have no knowledge of the geography of Russia, so they have to learn history and geography at the same time.  For example, the Dneister and the Dneiper were instrumental in winning the war but Americans would have a hard time pronouncing the names of these major rivers, let alone finding them on a map.  To make it more confusing, the names of the cities are spelled differently on different maps.  Lvov was spelled three different ways depending on the source.  The names of the fronts and the names of the armies kept changing.  The Voherenzh Front became the First Ukrainian and Army Group Center became North Ukrainian.  Finally, Stalin kept shuffling his generals around to different armies and, even if you could keep them straight, trying to pronounce and spell their names is challenging.  (Chernyakhovskii and Rokossovskii)

The complex subject of the Eastern Front is worth the effort.  Stalingrad is the most important battle in world history and yet most teachers have only a rudimentary idea of what happened.  Even after the bloodletting at Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, there were still 6.7 million Soviet soldiers to face off against 3.5 million Nazis.  Compare those numbers to Normandy, where 1.2 million Allied soldiers fought against 350,000 Nazis and the Russian Front dwarfs its counterpart in France.  Another example of the scale of the fighting was that in the first few months of the war there were three separate battles where the Nazis captured over 200,000 Soviets and then sent the POWs to concentration camps.  Since 12 million people were killed in the camps, we have a pretty good idea of what happened to the POWs.  The numbers are incomprehensible and the longer that the war went on the more brutal the fighting became.  It is ceaselessly fascinating to me.  How could man do this to his fellow man?  No apology or explanation can atone for the sins of the Fascists and the Communists in WWII.  Morally, Americans could not pull for one side over the other.

I have learned not to talk about the books that I am reading because most people do not care about the finer points of history, especially if the subject matter doesn’t include the U.S.  And yet the topic is important because the Soviet win over the Nazis is the beginning of the Cold War.  Stalin wasn’t about to give up all of the land that he won in Europe and Asia when it had cost him so dearly in lives and treasure.  After Berlin was captured and Hitler shot himself, Stalin still had six million battle hardened troops in Europe and there wasn’t a lot to stop him from marching to the Atlantic.  Truman’s response to the Soviet threat was underwhelming.  He joined NATO in 1947 and instituted the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift in 1948.  Eisenhower used the threat of nuclear arms to stop the Russians, but the threat was diminished after Stalin detonated his own atomic and hydrogen bomb.  The two superpowers settled for a proxy war in Korea and Vietnam, and they almost came to blows over Castro’s Cuba.  Meanwhile, the European countries who were under the thumb of the Soviets rebelled; Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980.  Even though America didn’t fight on the Eastern Front, the Russian victory had long lasting consequences for the United States.

When I delve into a new and complicated subject, I like to take my studies well beyond the book that I am reading.  For example, since the geography of the Eastern Front is so difficult to understand, I look up the maps on Google Images and then redraw them on paper that I tape into the book.  Blue, red and green markers are used for troop movements, geographical features, battle sites, and cities of interest.  I like to make the book my own by taking notes in the margins and using highlighters to reference people and terms that I think are important.  Also, the History Channel has documentaries about Kursk and Stalingrad and YouTube there a series of animated maps which vividly show how the armies attacked and defended positions.  Finally, I have several boards on Pinterest and use them to keep pictures of the famous generals so that I have some idea of what Rokosovskii, for example, looks like.