Samuel W. Mitcham

A lot of historians of Naziism wouldn’t know emotional content if it started a genocide war and bit them on the behind, but I figured I’d like to read at least one more Nazi days history book. I feel like I finally understand my fascination with the Hitler people, (if not always the people who write about the Hitler people), beyond the fascination with existential dread of all men (apparently in those early days there was an artsy American photographer who paid people who construct a giant swastika with a skeleton on it, and who photoed blind women with a sign in front of them that said, BLIND), or or recovering video game people (Enemies are everywhere! I will destroy you! Go go go!), but of this sorta—it’s the attraction of the forbidden, the forbidden negative. When I was a naive romantic I thought that the negative was a punishing parent that I hated and feared, and when I was a Christian meditator or whatever I was, good and bad were bad and neutral was good, you know. (It makes your head hurt, some of the time, anyway.) But I really think that the main bad thing is the uncritically grandiose negative, the thousand-page politics/Naziism book.

Anyway, this is a library borrow, which I do Not feel bad about, because although I don’t name names, in the past I spent ~el dinero~ on Nazi history books, some of which were truly Downfall worthy, you know. (The end of the world as a NYT crossword answer.) But on the other hand, I originally planned on reading a YA book to answer the child’s question ‘why’, you know—Why Hitler, Mommy? Why was there Hitler ~ but yeah: it was too short; I needed one with moderate length…. But I will plan on reading less Hitler history and just do true crime crap when I want a negative-isn’t-the-repressed-forbidden book, you know. (Joe Vitale said that Dr. Hew Len would sometimes watch the news to “clean” on it—it was like a meditation; he accepted the forbidden.) Hopefully less-racist crime reporting, you know. I mean, everything’s a little racist, but there are certainly different degrees. And while I—naturally, I guess—think there’s some sense in the admittedly stereotypically white opinion that every little lessening of racism is cause for a little sigh of relief, I don’t want to go down the road of the caricature of that opinion and say: it’s Hitler, or it’s okay. (I learned that from Barney—back when I was interested in learning about racism! Or, in general!)

I mean, I feel like a lot of historians haven’t had enough—they still need Hitler; they wouldn’t know what to do without him. The Harry Potter Club holds no attraction for them.

I do think, though, that out of the three main periods of Nazi history, 1919-1933, 1933-1939, 1939-1945, (although there a few other obvious topics, too—Nazi biography, the Holocaust, and politics of the Nazi past), it is the first and not the last of these periods that is most worth studying. Not that it can’t be and indeed, isn’t commonly abused—It’s happening again, Mommy! Get more ice cream! Go to the store and get more ice cream; it’s happening again!!!—but it makes more sense to study how people choose suffering, the process of preferring it and getting it going, than the stupid mess of looking at the bloody business itself. The thing about crime is that suffering experienced isn’t grandiose the way that suffering in the imagination or in the calculator is, you know….

Anyway, reason is weird, as is Hitler, obviously. Those Midcentury men wrote a lot of arguments like, “Reason is the only way; therefore, reason is the only way”, you know. How would you know Hitler’s “Hitler”? Reason is the only way. Therefore, reason is the only way. (So do the dishes for me.)

…. You forget how legalistic modern history is. There’s so little of psychology in it. What goes through somebody’s head, that (the Allies) don’t let the civilian population have enough food to eat even after the fighting is over, or (especially the Germans) embrace a mathematically gifted but disconnected-from-reality militarism that ends as a diplomatic, political, and moral failure? The Second World War was the destruction of the Old World by fire, but its little brother was the illness of the old order in full flower. Such crazy people, you know.

…. It wasn’t that there was no one to bop Hitler on the head, you know. Plenty of people were getting bopped on the head. (“If I had a Time Machine, I could bop Hitler on the head!”)

It was that there was no one to do anything good.

…. It sounds like Adolf was a not untalented codependent (adult child) with very little trauma resilience.

…. I suppose you could say that Adolf was ashamed of his family’s money but not of art, and was bent on propagandizing things so that his father came off as far more honorable than he really was. An odd figure. A figure of the 19th century, almost—a 19th century childhood, I guess you could say. Not that we are all so happy now, but I suppose that every (modern) age (and place) has its own fascism, you know. Some times and places being more historically dramatic than others.

…. It’s easy, given (literal!) Nazi Anti-Semitism, to see Jew baiting as the beginning and end of the rise of the Nazis, but there is more to this story than just ethnic hatred. There’s Germany’s lack of faith in democracy, not least because of the world’s lack of faith in Germany’s money, not least because of the Allies’ continued unresolved national hatred for the Germans four or five years after the end of the fighting on the Western Front, you know—national hatred that made them seize Germany’s assets and thus indirectly destroyed its money. Money is energy; it’s like bread. And in the early ‘20s, the Germans couldn’t figure out how to get theirs back, and their enemies were more content to have them be angry out in the cold than get it back.

…. It is nice to read the mini bios of these people—that they are people, and not just wandering particles of hate, even if they did misrepresent themselves in both gross and subtle ways. (And even if what I call general history isn’t the whole of history.) And even if in a sense, in the sense of determining what the human person is like, they are no more important than the personalities in the various gangs and mafias, you know. People tend to over-estimate the dramatic negative, you know.

…. It’s not at all surprising that Communist no-compromise our-way-or-the-Nazis-let’s-fight helped the right, but, from the other side of the spectrum, there’s a common moderate/conservative view that WWI-wasn’t-Hitler-it-was-just-the-Kaiser-it-was-normal, you know—but it is possible to note that both Hindenburg and Ludendorff worked with Hitler in the ‘20s, right.

…. It’s generally competent if uninspired, but occasionally the chauvie nature of the average historian shines through, you know. “In big cities like Berlin, there were perversions like homosexual bars and hang-outs! Hitler would have to bide his time while gay men sucked each other’s dicks! Don’t wait too long to save the aggressive straight men, Adi!”

…. He briefly goes over Adi’s sex life. It’s a hard task; it does seem to have been perverted, but then sex perversion is the one thing worse than Naziism, in the American mind, right—it’s what we need him to save us from, so I guess the emotionalism of his own sex life isn’t totally something you want to dive into. People just aren’t honest about sex, you know. But it’s not irrelevant, and clearly it makes sense that it wasn’t a happy story. Goebbels’ (not specifically sexual) story is more straightforward—hate yourself; be consumed by insecurities; compensate by lying about yourself and hating others. Of course, Sammie seems only peripherally interested in the emotional lives of the men of history, at best. “I took history so I wouldn’t have to bother with psychology,” one can hear him saying.

…. Blah blah blah, percentages, numbers, and bullshit.

Let’s get the led out.

~I’ve been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true! Wanted a woman, never bargained for you!

…. I wonder what it would be like to read a Hitler book that wasn’t thoroughgoing materialist, and subtly macho, you know. But you can read too many Hitler books. This one was okay; I guess I should be content for awhile.

Such nice names: Julius Streicher, Kurt von Schleicher…. Philipp Scheidemann. I hope it’s not too irreverent to say it reminds me of sports, in that you get the name, you know, and maybe the professional resume, but basically never any emotional or psychological profile or what makes them tick, you know. (shrugs) But I love the names. Hola. Yo soy Kurt von Streicher-Scheidemann, yo soy el gringo del Norte. Ok, goodbye. Gracias por venir; mahalo, mahalo.

…. Ah, Hitler had the Christmas blues. Well, that’s very relatable, you know. I think we’ve all felt that from time to time. ☃️😕

…. You know, I read that Volkswagen Group bought Lamborghini; I think that’s a quality decision. It makes me sad to think those little German Kant-robots sometimes make bad decisions, you know. They make little boo boos…. 🫠

If only it had ended like, (Volkswagen Group CEO) Achieves His Goal—his inner council is now a Muslim guy, a pretty blonde, and a Kantian robot, right….

After all: we all love to achieve our goals….

…. Anyway, written in the 90s, this book is based on sources written mainly in the 60s and 70s—I won’t bother to check how many of them are out of print, plus they sound so boring, you know. “What do you think of the Nazis, Don Draper?” “Those Nazis—they’re not like us; they’re from a different culture. They don’t speak English, and they don’t even look like us—they dress all in grey, all in grey…. Sometimes I wear a nice pastel-brown tie, you know…. Babies wear pastels , you know; they’re colorful….”… (mais)

The Battle of Sicily, How the Allies Lost Their Chance for Total Victory was written by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. and Friedrich von Stauffenberg and published in 1991by Orion Books of New York. This was the version I reviewed today. The ISBN of this particular book is 978-0517575253. It is a hardback book and is 367 pages. I purchased the book used from a seller on Amazon and paid $6.79 before taxes and shipping. I thought that was a pretty good bargain.

For those familiar with war history books, Samuel W. Mitcham is a name well known to the genre from both World War II and the Civil War books he has authored. There is a Wikipedia page with his bio and published works, so I won’t regurgitate it here. He has written over forty books. How many wrote on World War II I am not sure of, but as I find them, I pick them up.

Friedrich von Stauffenberg is the first cousin of Col. Count Claus von Stauffenberg, famous for the July 20 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It appears from several sources that this is his only published written work.

The book is a chronological “walk-through” of the events just before the invasion of the island by the Americans and British in Operation Husky, and ending with the final days of the evacuation of the Germans and Italians in Operation Lehrgang by General Hans-Valentin Hube. The book concludes with an epilogue detailing the fates of the major German and Italian officers involved in the events of World War II in Sicily. The contents reads as follows:

1. The Great Blunder
2. Uneasy Allies
3. The Deteriorating Axis
4. The Defenders
5. Pantelleria, the Plan and the Air Battles
6. The Allies Approach
7. D-Day
8. Counterattack and Retreat
9. Primosole Bridge
10. Enter General Hube
11. Patton Breaks Loose
12. The Battles of Hauptkampflinie
13. The Allies Close In
14. Operation Lehrgang: A Panzer Corps Escapes

Mitcham covers the beginning to the end of the battle of Sicily in about 303 pages, and manages to keep the reader engrossed in the story from the Axis point of view (my opinion).

Other important aspects of the book for the history-buff are itemized below:
Sources & Notes: Nineteen pages of notes and source reference.
Bibliography: Seven pages of sources.
Appendixes: There are four, one with rank equivalents, and the others with OoB info.
Order of Battle: Yes! A timeline of the evolution of the Hermann Göring Panzer Unit, Italian 6th Army and the Allied 15th Army Group.
Maps: There is a map table of contents, and 18 maps are provided.
Pictures: The book has two inserts with about 34 pictures with information.
Index: The book contains a nine page index to reference specifics. Units and individuals appear to be well covered.

Overall I enjoyed this book. I started reading it knowing little about Sicily in World War II. I finished feeling a familiarity of this part of the war, who fought there, what the major skirmishes were and who the primary players were. I have at least three other books on this time and place to tackle in the coming months, and it will be easier to absorb all of the information after reading this book. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in learning the basics about the battle for Sicily and Operation Husky. At a little over three hundred pages, it is the right size to bring you up to speed.… (mais)