Unreadable memoirs?

[dumbstruck]

What tempting memoirs are great big disappointments? It can be hard to
obtain some of these via inter library loan or mail order, so which to avoid?

For instance I find Marshal Zhukov memoirs overwhelmingly painful to
read, being so focused on bureaucratic theory and commie brown nosing
rather than his own experiences and decisions. With one exception of
his early success kicking the Japanese out of Mongolia: he shapes up
his own reluctant (outnumbered?) troops and then quotes diaries taken
from dead enemies on how spectacular were his results.

I think General Guderian wrote some tedious memoirs which again focused
on statistics more than experiences or narrative. I think this is a pitfall of
high level guys who feel they have to give an overall record of the context
and give credit to the powerful who will be looking their names up. Zhukov
practically gives the 5 year plans for eraser production for example. US
civil war leaders wrote tedious memoirs, only enllivened by great stories
of their early Mexican war experiences.

General Patton wrote riveting memoirs with narrative and advice... I don't
know how he did this except maybe he died so suddenly he didn't have
a chance to smother it with over editing. There are a lot of good mid and
low rank level memoirs, but I wonder if the top guys are generally boring.
Should I forget Eisenhower, Churchill, and Ciano for instance?

[John Dallman]

Post by dumbstruck
Should I forget Eisenhower, Churchill, and Ciano for instance?

Churchill's _Memoirs of the Second World War_ is an abridged version of
his six-volume _The Second World War_, about a quarter of the length, and
a decent read. I'd recommend a used hardback, though. It's a big book,
and the current paperback edition came apart on me only a hundred pages
in.

John

[Alan Meyer]

Post by John Dallman

Post by dumbstruck
Should I forget Eisenhower, Churchill, and Ciano for instance?

Churchill's _Memoirs of the Second World War_ is an abridged version of
his six-volume _The Second World War_, about a quarter of the length, and
a decent read. I'd recommend a used hardback, though. It's a big book,
and the current paperback edition came apart on me only a hundred pages
in.
John

I read all six volumes and have to say that I found them fascinating.

Churchill was hardly an objective and disinterested historian, but
that's not a bad thing. There are plenty of academic histories of the
war but Churchill's is the only one I know of written by a man at the
head of one of the governments involved.

You (John) mentioned Zhukov. There's a very interesting book _The
Battle for Stalingrad_ by Vasili I Chuikov published in 1959 with an
English translation in 1964. Chuikov was the commander of the 62nd Army
that defended Stalingrad. As one would expect from a book published by
a Russian in 1959, there is no mention of Stalin but many references to
Khrushchev. I found that book in the public library in Baltimore in
1975. Amazon is showing some copies. Chuikov was also present at the
end in Berlin and wrote a book about that too.

If you don't require memoirs by generals there are many great memoirs by
low ranking soldiers. I particularly liked the one by Farley Mowat,
_And No Birds Sang_. There are great memoirs by pilots, not least the
one by Robin Olds but also Robert Johnson, Clarence "Bud" Anderson, and
others, including a number of Germans. There's a fascinating memoir,
heavily edited by an American writer, by Japanese ace Saburo Sakai.
There are some great submarine memoirs by Germans, _Iron Coffins_,
_Sharks and Little Fish_, and the great novel (not a memoir but with
much ring of truth to it) _Das Boot_.

There are also some fine Pacific memoirs, _Helmet for My Pillow_ and
_Strong Men, Armed_. I read a pretty good Japanese infantryman's
memoir many years ago but don't recall the bibliographic details.

There are lots and lots more.

Alan

[The Horny Goat]

Post by Alan Meyer
If you don't require memoirs by generals there are many great memoirs by
low ranking soldiers. I particularly liked the one by Farley Mowat,
_And No Birds Sang_. There are great memoirs by pilots, not least the

In fairness Farley Mowat was a fairly well known novelist in his time
and while he certainly served that would be news to a lot of people.

Dougie Mac and Guderian both wrote memoirs neither of which I've read
- are they worth reading?

[Mario]

Post by The Horny Goat
Dougie Mac and Guderian both wrote memoirs neither of which
I've read - are they worth reading?

Has anybody read Manstein's "Lost Victories"?

[dumbstruck]

Post by Mario

Post by The Horny Goat
Dougie Mac and Guderian both wrote memoirs neither of which
I've read - are they worth reading?

Has anybody read Manstein's "Lost Victories"?

Oh, that is the one I struggled with rather than Guderian. I remember it as
dry and nerdy like from an OCD chessmaster, unlike other German memoirs.
I will give it another try, but in the meantime I have started "Soldaten" which
looks better than it's Amazon reviews. It is the secretly overheard
remembrances of German POWs

[John Dallman]

Post by dumbstruck
Oh, that is the one I struggled with rather than Guderian.

Guderian's memoirs are fairly readable, but you have to filter a bit for
his "of course, I was right at all times, and had Hitler listened to me,
we'd have won" feelings.

John

[Roger Bell_West]

I found Galland's _The First and the Last_ oddly lacking in anything
like joy in flying, something that pretty much any other pilot memoir
brings to the fore. To him it seems it's just a job.

Charles Lamb's _War in a Stringbag_ is just excellent all round.

Roger Hill's _Destroyer Captain_ is day-to-day but good solid stuff,
and particularly sound on the gradual onset of stress-related
disability.

[Roman W]

Post by Alan Meyer
There are lots and lots more.
Alan

This should be interesting: http://www.warsawuprising.com/witness.htm

RW

[SolomonW]

Germans sometimes write in a complex style that is very hard to read.

[Jim H.]

Post by dumbstruck
What tempting memoirs are great big disappointments? It can be hard to
obtain some of these via inter library loan or mail order, so which to avoid?

....

While its authenticity as an autobiography has been up for
question several times, "Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer
_feels_ authentic. If you're interested in a private German
soldier's account of life & combat on the Ost Front in an
elite formation mid-war, read it.

Jim H.

[The Horny Goat]

Post by dumbstruck
General Patton wrote riveting memoirs with narrative and advice... I don't
know how he did this except maybe he died so suddenly he didn't have
a chance to smother it with over editing. There are a lot of good mid and
low rank level memoirs, but I wonder if the top guys are generally boring.
Should I forget Eisenhower, Churchill, and Ciano for instance?

My wife got me a first edition of Churchill's 6 volume set (which I
had previously read in paperback in a much less attractive edition) so
I was suitably grateful.

My personal favorite are Fraser's The General Danced at Dawn series
which is supposed to be mostly historical as were Spike Milligan's.
(Though if you read the footnotes to the Flashman books you would get
a pretty good bibliography to start reading from)

On the other hand I got both Chuikov's books on Stalingrad and Berlin
in a remainder sale (and felt I had paid the right price) which were
fairly entertaining though since they were written in the 1960s one
had to keep your "BS detector" fully amped up which wasn't exactly a
surprise.

I should point out that some of Churchill's earlier works are highly
entertaining and that the 6 volume history was designed to be fairly
comprehensive (which often means terse) and that Churchill was
restricted by the Official Secrets Act though the Attlee government
gave him a lot of leeway - particularly since Attlee knew the more
time Churchill spent on the project the less time he'd spend being a
pain in the *** in the House of Commons! This was not the case in his
other works.

[c***@gmail.com]

Post by dumbstruck
There are a lot of good mid and
low rank level memoirs, but I wonder if the top guys are generally boring.
Should I forget Eisenhower, Churchill, and Ciano for instance?

Ciano is, I believe, an unedited (at least by him) diary, covering up to his trial or something like that. Not a memoir in the standard format.

I read it 20 years ago, but I remember enjoying Sir William Slim's _Defeat
Into Victory._ I found the Rommel diaries amazingly boring- there might be
something interesting in there, but damned if I could find it.

At the lower levels, the books that remain strongest in my mind are:
*) Charles MacDonald, _Company Commander_
*) George MacDonald Fraser, _Quartered Safe Out Here_
*) The late, lamented, and much missed by the group T.P. O'Brien,
who wrote _Chasing After Danger_, _Out of the Blue_, and _Moonlight War_

Those books are ones that I would recommend whole-heartedly. Really well
done.

Chris Manteuffel

[dumbstruck]

Post by c***@gmail.com
Ciano is, I believe, an unedited (at least by him) diary, covering up to his trial or something like that. Not a memoir in the standard format.
I read it 20 years ago, but I remember enjoying Sir William Slim's _Defeat
Into Victory._ I found the Rommel diaries amazingly boring- there might be

Our library only had a bio of Ciano, which demolished many entries of Ciano's
diary as lies, using various cross references. Apparently it had considerable
spin anticipating future publication (like Goebbels diary, which he published
parts during his life). In Nuremberg it was used literally to push Ribbentrop
to the noose rather than a long prison term. Earlier Himmler wanted and did
obtain parts of the diary for evidence to persuade Hitler to oust Ribbentrop.

The story of recovering this flawed diary was a thriller. Himmler wanted to
to rescue Ciano from execution in exchange for the diary (with SS dressed
as Italian partisans), but was stopped by a furious Adolph who wanted diary
destroyed. Parts come to us from an SS secretary who hid her translations
of destroyed originals buried in her garden. Most of it was smuggled to
Switzerland by Mussolini's daughter (Ciano's wife).

This bio by Moseley included a intro to the diary which Ciano wrote just
before execution. It blamed American newspapers for goading Mussolini into
alliance pact with Germany (as a trigger, not a cause). Moseley points out
that it was actually the French press which embarrassed Duce with stories
of Milan crowds disrespecting a visiting Ribbentrop. Ciano was only a part
time peacenik, having been a prime mover in the Greek invasion fiasco.

P.S. Moseley apparently hadn't seen the horrible video of botched execution
of Ciano and company, but fills in more details. Most of them play it cool,
not wanting to give satisfaction to their enemies. One guy who was almost
let off emotes and fights back (bless him... but I didn't notice that in
video). After 30 riflemen horribly wound a moaning 4 and even miss 1, the
guy in charge runs around shooting heads with pistol. What you don't see
is he actually had to do it again after the doctors found signs of life.
Furthermore he had orders to secretly shoot Ciano even if he got the
pardon that everyone expected from father-in-law Duce.

[dumbstruck]

Somebody mentioned to beware of the self-serving pitfall in memoirs. I can
evaluate this a bit while reading both the memoir and biography of Ernst
Hanfstaengl... a strange figure who was a pal of prez Theodore Roosevelt
AND Hitler, and who met Churchill and FDR socially. Born of very prominent
US and German families, this Harvard grad coaches Hitler on how to take
power, then helps the US psychoanalyze him in wartime.

The memoir has almost surreal claims that have me cross checking in the
bio, which at times quotes it nearly word for word. But I do notice the bio
making small changes due to: 1) differences between the english and
german versions of the memoir, favoring the latter as more frank about
things distasteful to us. 2) Corrections due to other people's memoirs.
3) Omissions due to hard to prove facts 4) omissions for brevity.

#3 on hard to prove: Why did the bio leave out the claim that the person
Ernst saved from drowning was the son of T. Roosevelt? Why else did
young unknown Ernst suddenly become a regular visitor at prez T's white
house? Well, I guess it was omitted from news clippings because the
identity of the victim was only found later. I did like the memoir detail that
Ernst was moved to action mainly because onlookers were only snickering
at the struggling victim... some real life context which leads me to:

#4 Brevity: the well written bio suffers by removal of the side observations
that bring things to life. Like in the beer hall putsch, it was a fancy beer
hall with women in fur coats and Hitler in a rustic tuxedo. It had the top
Bavarian leaders already declaring independence, but Ernst had found
they didn't plan to give Hitler a position. The meeting started with numbingly
dull speeches, so that Ernst spent 1 billion marks on a beer for teetotaler
Adolph (is that why he snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory later that
long night?). Ernst said Hitler's gunshot into the ceiling was more to wake
everyone up after traditional professorial-style political speeches, rather
than to restore order from chaos.

I liked the memoir over and over analyzing the power of Adolph making
speeches. Not the "braying and barking" that we hear on later newsreels,
but a devious seduction. Adolph told him he visualized the crowd as
if hostile women who he aimed to turn favorable to him, and women
did seem to respond best in the audience. It had elements of a Wagner
opera or a fencing match at it's best.

But the bio itself seemed to shine the most light in how he would first
enumerate long lists of complaints in a soft way, getting a feel of
which ones the audience connected with. Then leapfrog ahead for those
hotbuttons alone, with mocking humor and cruel mimicry, finally using
those as support for his agenda in a raging tone. So that's why Adolph
would simply monologue at every personal or mass meeting... he would
use listeners reaction as a soundboard and be guided by nonverbal cues.

Bottom line I can't justify going on the memoir or bio alone, but need to
wade thru both in spite of the redundancy.

[WJHopwood]

I liked the memoir... analyzing the power of Adolph making speeches.
Not the "braying and barking" that we hear on later newsreels,
but a devious seduction..... . It had elements of a Wagner opera or a
fencing match at it's best. ... But the bio itself seemed to shine
the most light in how he would first enumerate long lists of complaints in
a soft way, getting a feel of which ones the audience connected with.
Then leapfrog ahead for those hotbuttons alone, with mocking humor
and cruel mimicry, finally using those as support for his agenda in a
raging tone. .....he would use listeners reaction as a soundboard and be
guided by nonverbal cues.

The above remarks stir up some old memories about
Hitler's speeches for me. Maybe the description above
is accurate enough if one understood the German language.
However, I remember hearing them differently in the late
30's when the speeches were being delivered before mass
audiences in Berlin as Hitler was hyping the German nation
for war.
Der Fuhrer's speeches to the masses were broadcast
by Geman short-wave radio. Some were, picked up and
rebroadcast by U.S. radio networks. One of them, I think it
was CBS, employed the excellent German-speaking reporter,
H.V.Kaltenborn, to cover the Hitler speeches by giving the
U.S. radio audience a word-for-word running translation.
Kaltenborn seemed to get the feel of the crowd and reflect the
tone and nuances in Hitler's delivery. Even one not
understanding the language could only describe a Hitler
speech as having a hypnotic effect. The crowd kept
interrupting with repeated shouts of "Sig Heil" as Der Fuhrer
worked it up to a screaming crescendo a number of times in
the course of his long-winded delivery.
As I can recall, there wasn't much in the way of softly
seducing the mass audience and using humor that I could
detect. Hitler seemed to start with a note of hysteria and
work up from there.

WJH

[dumbstruck]

Post by WJHopwood
was CBS, employed the excellent German-speaking reporter,
H.V.Kaltenborn, to cover the Hitler speeches by giving the
U.S. radio audience a word-for-word running translation.
Kaltenborn seemed to get the feel of the crowd and reflect the
tone and nuances in Hitler's delivery. Even one not

You can hear Kaltenborn cover Hitler's 1938 Sudetan ultimatum at
https://archive.org/details/48-163
but this seems like a special case of pretend outrage rather than
persuasion. Probably in other memoirs I've read the context of that
speech where he may be hoarse from thru-the-night arrangements and
practice. My Ernst H. informant had fled Germany the year before.

Archive.org also has a section of countless speeches from Hitler
and cronies, as well as the english translation of this secret
recording of Hitler softly appealing to Mannerheim in Finland:
https://archive.org/details/OnlyKnownRecordingOfHitlerSpeakingInAnUnofficialTone
He uses self deprecating humor and I believe snuffs out most
attempts to interrupt his virtual monologue with great agility.

P.S. if you have suppressed advertisements in firefox via the media
autoplay toggle in url about:config, then you gotta hit pause/play
a few times to get the above recordings to unstick themselves.

Post by WJHopwood
understanding the language could only describe a Hitler
speech as having a hypnotic effect. The crowd kept
interrupting with repeated shouts of "Sig Heil" as Der Fuhrer
worked it up to a screaming crescendo a number of times in
the course of his long-winded delivery.

If you like, we could open a new topic on his speech techniques. I
have read but forgotten a lot. English translation of Adolph reads
like gibberish to me, and I heard it was more his tone that counted.
I hear dialects were switched between Bavarian and northern for effect.

Ernst traveled with the Harvard football team as a cheerleader, and
said he introduced various football chants to a mindblown Hitler
including with Sig Heil and wrote varieties of songs to that effect.
The political norm was dry condescending speeches except from the
communists, and Adolph said he had to outdo them in dumbing down the
message in a theatrical and repetitious form.

Post by WJHopwood
As I can recall, there wasn't much in the way of softly
seducing the mass audience and using humor that I could
detect. Hitler seemed to start with a note of hysteria and
work up from there.

I have seen a recent documentary with (youngish) German experts
telling how Adolph would usually start with a minute or two of silence
for crackling anticipatory drama, then soft iteration of all the crosses
they wearily bore as Germans, then building up to a cathartic release.
They played examples, and I saw Adolph passing silent time reviewing
the same dozen or so prompting cards as Ernst mentioned, with 20 words
apiece on them to guide a 2.5 hour speech.

I read (from Speer?) one party meeting in large Sportpalast comprising
entirely of silence... maybe 4 hours of Hitler strolling and glaring
into eyes 1 to 1 to judge if all looked trustworthy in a time of crises.
I had meant to say Adolph would mimic his opponents in speeches, and
others say he would do hilarious impersonations in private. So his
monologue had elements of dialogue. Also Wagnerian leitmotifs, etc.

Finally I was gobsmacked about Ernst's reports of Hitler's early mastery
of hecklers. So much more effective than what you see today... he would
not argue with or insult them, which would encourage more. He made genial
gestures of "ouch, I'm hit, you wounded me" and some words to that effect.
That swung the crowd to his side and embarrassed the heckler. Even today
so much bad is done by con artists playing the victim card to the naive.

Contrast this with the rude way Goebbels handled hecklers pre-1933. He
peppered the audience with SA thugs, then baited even more communists
to attend. The outnumbered SA would fight hecklers and put their
bloody wounded on stretchers onstage, which got a lot of sympathy even
in leftist Berlin according to his memoirs.

[WJHopwood]

Post by dumbstruck

.....CBS, employed the excellent German-speaking reporter,
H.V.Kaltenborn, to cover the Hitler speeches....

You can hear Kaltenborn cover Hitler's 1938 Sudetan ultimatum at
https://archive.org/details/48-163

Thanks. I went to the link you provided and listened
to the Sudetenland speech. It sounds as if it may
have been one I remembered hearing at the time.
In listening again I think my description of it or a similar
speech in my prior post pretty well covered how a
Hitler speech impressed me then.
(Incidentally, I see that I was wrong about
Kaltenborn being with CBS. He worked for NBC).

I must congratulate you for your scholarly
explanation of the variety of delivery styles used by
Der Fuhrer. It seems that the way he delivered
a speech was governed by a litany of factors--
the occasion, the location, the subject matter, the
audience, his mood at the time--you name it.

I don't know if you are old enough to have possibly
seen the 1940 movie titled "The Great Dictator,"
starring the famous actor-comedian Charlie Chaplin.
He did a wonderful impersonation of Hitler.

WJH

[dumbstruck]

Post by WJHopwood
I must congratulate you for your scholarly
explanation of the variety of delivery styles used by
Der Fuhrer. It seems that the way he delivered
a speech was governed by a litany of factors--
the occasion, the location, the subject matter, the
audience, his mood at the time--you name it.

Well, I may have gotten too swayed by these memoir and diary
explanations. I just took the trouble to search youtube for'
Hitler early speeches. I feel unclean; in all cases there was
at some point the unmistakable buzzsaw tone of a psychopath.
They mostly had english subtitles, but were still puzzling.

I didn't notice any from the 1920's when his techniques may
have been most "artistic". I did see a subtle 1931 performance
before his election but still hints of a bully. His early 1933
speech when in power but not yet a dictator started out quiet
but soon turned raging. There were "comic" speeches mimicking
FDR that got tons of laughter, but didn't seem skillful at all.

So bottom line, I think the rapturous listeners had SOME evil
in their hearts to admire these speeches... they weren't simply
innocently deceived. I watched a Tojo documentary with a similar
question of how complicit was the Japanese public in getting what
they wanted. They did get full disclosure of war crimes in Nanking
which was reveled in by the press at the time. But it appeared
that Tojo AND the emperor were alone taking this direction. I
don't know that much about it tho.

P.S. There is an interesting Hitler speech on the place of women
plastered all over youtube, to wild applause of a possibly female
nazi organization. He says for instance that he bans women from
parliament (or whatever) to protect them from this group of bad
apples who he is going to shut down anyway! I went to a university
seminar that demonized Hitler for, of all things, keeping women out
of the military. Nobody asked why, but I think that speech tells.

The assumption is that Hitler is a stuffy conservative, but originally
he had a progressive agenda popular with youth and women. It was
sort of chance that they wanted to separate themselves from the
Spanish left and Russian commies who put women into combat. They
supported keeping women out of civil service more for getting votes
of unemployed men rather than ideology according to Evan's trilogy.

I think the key is when Hitler says women are needed to bring 7-9
babies into the world. Not just a litter, but she can form them into
tough warriors and military scientists. When the Russians started to
kill masses of German soldiers, you can hear desperation from Hitler
in his Tabletalk book and other memoirs. He can win this war, yet end
up so depopulated that the Slav hordes etc will start and win the
next war. In early 42 he wanted german babies born and Jews industrially
eliminated partly as a population rebalance issue. Before 42 he murdered
more Russian POWs and Polish catholics/elite than jews according to
the Bloodlands author I believe.

Was that the time that Himmler encouraged babies out of wedlock, with
several formal measures? By the way, my Ernst H. memoir writer went to
a school run by Himmler's father. Before that just UK governesses and
after that Harvard. Daddy Himmler seemed to have the lasting influence,
although he considered the famous Himmler son a weaselly brat.

[m***@netMAPSONscape.net]

Post by dumbstruck

Post by WJHopwood
I must congratulate you for your scholarly
explanation of the variety of delivery styles used by
Der Fuhrer. It seems that the way he delivered
a speech was governed by a litany of factors--
the occasion, the location, the subject matter, the
audience, his mood at the time--you name it.

Well, I may have gotten too swayed by these memoir and diary
explanations. I just took the trouble to search youtube for'
Hitler early speeches. I feel unclean; in all cases there was
at some point the unmistakable buzzsaw tone of a psychopath.

If you read "Mein Kampf", you'll understand that, as a writer, he was
a great orator :-)

Mike

[dumbstruck]

Wow, I started reading Doenitz's memoirs (not the only book entitled
"Memoirs: 10 years and 20 days") and he or his ghost writer is a
really gifted writer. Gripping narratives of his and his sub captains
adventures, and adapting tactics to experience. Could have been dull
coverage of strategy meetings and cat fights for resources. He sounded
like a dry unappealing character from other memoirs.

I have been discovering lesser known memoirs from cheesy documentary
credits. I don't like those re-enacting documentaries, but noticed
them labeling actors and from what memoirs they are quoting. So fast
forward, freeze frame, and check to see if avail from a library. In
the Doenitz case I had to search both with and without the "e"; one
of several pitfalls in how German words are anglicized.

I wish I had been keeping track of memoirs in terms of a readability
index. Originally I just wanted the raw info, but now I can appreciate
the pain vs pleasure aspect and might want to reread some and avoid
others.