Retrato do autor
7 Works 119 Membros 7 Críticas

About the Author

Includes the name: Nathan Greenfield

Obras por Nathan M. Greenfield

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Canada
Local de nascimento
New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Locais de residência
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Membros

Críticas

This is a study of the murder of two German Prisoners of war in a POW camp in Medicine Hat, Alberta in 1944 by fellow prisoners and the subsequent trials. The trials were conducted in a Canadian civil court and the author suggests that it would have been more appropriate for them to have been conducted by a military court which would have better understand what following orders meant to soldiers. The death sentence results might have been different in a military court.

Part of the issue in the POW camps was the control the Gestapo had on the prisoners lives in the camp.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
lamour | May 12, 2023 |
Even small events of World War II deserve their memorials.

This book is one such attempt to do so. It covers one little corner of the war which doesn't get much attention in the general histories: The time in 1942 when the U-boats invaded the waters in and near the St. Lawrence river. The sub-title, The Second World War in Canada, might be misleading; this is not a book about Canada's participation in the war; it's about the (rather limited) fighting in Canadian waters, resulting in the loss of about two dozen Allied ships and several hundred lives.

As such, it's a topic worth studying. I wish this book had done it better justice.

I have four specific complaints. One is that it spends much too much time on human interest stories -- on just what this particular officer or rating experienced at a time a ship sank. Obviously people care a lot about these stories. There are books devoted specifically to them. But, in this case, they make it much harder to follow the thread of what is happening.

The second gripe is the author's bile against Nazis. Now I'm not trying to defend Nazis; they should always remind us of what happens when political tribalism is taken to its ultimate limit. But not every German submariner was Adolf Hitler, and even if they were, it's hard to see how that would have affected the course of the Battle of the St. Lawrence, where no soldiers ever came into direct contact. The "rules" of submarine warfare were inhuman -- but the Allies treated the Japanese in just the same way as the Germans treated their victims. There is only one instance of a man throwing an enemy into the sea in this book, and it was a Canadian doing it to a German (epigraph, facing the Table of Contents); nor does he comment when Canadians machine gunned a U-boat's crew (I lost the page reference on that one).

The third is that the book probably needed a better proofreader; the discussions of physics made me cringe (not that the average reader is likely to care), and there were errors in the descriptions of many ships -- e.g. on p. 44 we read of the "20,000 ton Prinz Eugen" -- but the Prinz Eugen, although she went vastly over her intended 10,000 tons, came out at around 14,500 tons, not 20,000 (no one would want a 20,000 ton heavy cruiser!). Similarly (p. 180), the USS Bogue is called a "fleet aircraft carrier"; it was an escort carrier.

All of the above are nitpicks, really. The final complaint is more serious, and that's that this book is so close to its topic that we never get any strategic sense of the battle. Why did the U-boats come to Canada in 1942? Well, we can probably answer that: it was an undefended region. But why, then, did they quit in 1942? They were sinking ships, and they weren't suffering losses, but they stopped coming (except for a brief return in 1944). It makes no sense, and author Greenfield doesn't explain it. The book isn't really an overview of the Battle of the St. Lawrence; it's more like a bunch of accounts of infantrymen telling their personal experiences with no idea of what their commanders were up to. We do hear quite a bit about Canada's internal debates about the war, but nothing about Germany's.

All that said, this is a topic that deserves coverage, and it's good that this book was published. But I really wish I could get a book on the slightly bigger picture.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
waltzmn | Mar 3, 2018 |
This is a collection of anecdotes about Canadian sailors, airmen and soldiers who were captured by the Germans in WW II. It looks at how they felt when they were captured and then how they were treated as POW's.

Sometimes the treatment would vary from man to man during the same incident. A prime example of this was the raid on Dieppe. Some wounded Canadians were immediately treated by German medical staff while others who were badly wounded were shot in the head by a German officer.

Greenfield also includes episodes of escapers and evaders whether they were successful in getting back home.

One Canadian airman (he was in the RAF) was shot down on September 9, 1939, a day before Canada declared war on Germany. Goering himself came to interrogate the flyer because he could not understand why a Canadian would wish to fight England's war.

The format used by the author is sometimes confusing as he tells one episode of an individual's experience and then in a later chapter or on the next page he continues the man's story forcing the reader to check the episode heading to see which individual he is writing about. The reason he used this method was he decided to organize the volume chronologically and thus must put each episode in the time period being covered in that chapter.

Greenfield reveals what I would think would be new information to many Canadians re the treatment of Canadian soldiers in German prison of war camps. This would be especially true of the winter marches in early 1945, the murder of Canadian spies such as Frank Pickersgill and the committing of Canadian military personnel to the concentration camp, Buchenwald, a major transgression of the Geneva Convention.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
lamour | Jan 26, 2015 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
7
Membros
119
Popularidade
#166,388
Avaliação
½ 3.5
Críticas
7
ISBN
12

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