Michael Jones (1) (1940–)

When you pick up this book, you're essentially getting the most positive "spin" you can get on the life of Edward of Windsor, better known as the "Black Prince," with the particular emphasis being on how the man took the precepts of Chivalry seriously, and how that influenced his conduct. The practice of Chivalry, in theory and practice is a big part of this work. This becomes significant as Jones debunks some of the more brutal acts associated with the man, and makes a good argument that, show more specifically, the massacre at Limoges, the last significant military event in the Prince's life was mostly negative propaganda. Also important is the Prince's relationship with his father, Edward III, particularly as the king's judgment became more dubious, and the Prince found himself being compelled to go on military adventures that compromised his policy as Prince of Aquitaine. All in all, this was a good study, that works equally well as social and political history before you tackle more academic works. show less

I have to admit that sometimes I ask myself, 'How much of the Second World War continues to remain mired in myths and legends?' Each time I get tired of reading monographs on this time period I find a volume that reinvigorates my interest. Michael Jones has managed to do this with every book he has put out on the war. I can confidently say that I, someone who has been reading on this period for over a decade, continue to be amazed by the information he manages to convey and unearth. While show more not everything that's found among these pages is original research, the narrative Jones has crafted is compelling and once more shows that even if some believe this time period has become over-saturated (every now and then I find myself among those 'some'), there are still areas that need more focus, attention, and rigorous research.

The premise of this text relies on looking at the last ten days of the war after Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker. There are numerous vignettes that build a narrative based on information about events from earlier years of the war, but in one form or another they all follow the threads that Jones weaves to come back to these fateful and climactic ten days. One of the more controversial issues the author deals with is rape on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. This is a subject that has yet to be fully explored by scholars for many reasons, but slowly more pieces of the puzzle are making their way into recent monographs (two recent examples are: "The Soviet occupation of Germany" by Filip Slaveski and "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France" by Mary Louise Roberts). My biggest issue is the broad brush that's often used to paint the entirety of the Red Army as guilty of some rather large arbitrary number of rapes in either Berlin alone or all of Germany. Jones adds to the puzzle by showing that the situation was much more complicated as, with one example, Polish forces under Red Army command perpetrated their own brand of justice on the Germans. Before the storming of Berlin the 1st Polish Army 'was forced to draw up a disciplinary ordinance to curb the wilder excesses of its soldiers' (44). Similar orders were read out to the Red Army as well, and for good reason. There were also instances when justice took the form of on the spot executions as when a Red Army colonel found an NKVD soldier guilty of rape and offered him his pistol with one bullet to end his life within a minute 'with some self respect', or else he'd finish him off as the 'coward' he was (54-55).

Throughout the text one of the main themes the author continues to stress are the choices made by the western allies and the Soviets in regards to actions on the ground, which had major consequences for each side. For instance, the promises made to the Soviets by Roosevelt and his administration in regards to Lend Lease were soon called off by Truman who attempted to utilize Lend Lease shipments as a bargaining chip, a move the Soviets were loathe to entertain. Furthermore, Montgomery's move at Lüneburg Heath was co-opted by the Dönitz government to fulfill their needs and treated as an armistice rather than an unconditional surrender, something the Soviets were angered by but allowed in lieu of being able to sign an unconditional surrender for the remainder of German troops still operating throughout Europe at a place and date of their choosing. Still, even those wishes were upset by the signing of the surrender of the German Wehrmacht at Rheims instead of Berlin, and more so by a lowly Soviet representative who was simply available, rather than Marshal Zhukov. In part the signing at Rheims was the fault of Eisenhower who was keen on ending the war as soon as possible and wanted peace yet needed to simultaneously keep in mind the wishes of his Soviet allies, who were not always as forthcoming as they should have been.

Aside from the above, some of the more interesting discussions revolved around the Prague Uprising and the role of Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army in helping the resistance fight their German occupiers until they could no longer hold out with the Red Army making its way to Prague for a liberation of their own of the last Eastern European capital still under German control. Additionally, the resistance of a Georgian Legion battalion on the Dutch Island of Texel was a complete surprise to me, as was how the Soviets treated the survivors and the memory of this incident. Overall, I can't praise the author enough for what he's done in this volume. Taking a look at the last ten days from the point of view of Soviet, American, British, German, and even Canadian eye-witness accounts brings an original look at the chaos of the final days of the Second World War. On May 8 and 9 a reprieve for many occurred as VE Day was celebrated. And soon enough the alliance that so many worked so hard to form will crumble as old issues creep up once again to create a new threat in the form of a Cold War (one whose language in many ways becomes recycled, by both sides, from the rhetoric they worked out so well during the Second World War).

There were some weaknesses that I encountered. I am disappointed in the system of 'endnotes' used here as it made tracing information more difficult than it needed to be and I believe footnotes would have been the better alternative as this is to a large extent a scholarly work. There were references to the Warsaw Uprising (August 1944) but they were somewhat inaccurate and dismissive of the Red Army and Stalin. In many ways this is a perfect example of an area that continues to wait for further scholarship as current volumes are still vague and greatly lacking when it comes to the Soviet side of things. Finally, some of the material here is gathered from various internet websites that, while overall presenting useful and interesting information, are not always accurate. Aside from these minor issues, this is a highly recommended volume and a great addition to literature on both the waning days of the Second World War and the foundations that were being set by the western allies and Soviet Union in what would become the Cold War. show less

It's quite rare these days that a book on the Eastern Front will surprise me once, almost never more often than that. Having read on this war for over a decade I thought I knew the majority of what went on and what one could expect to find on a book entitled 'Total War'. With this work, however, Jones has built on what he's done previously and in many ways this might be his best work to date, easily rivaling his first foray into the Eastern Front with 'Stalingrad'.

As with his previous show more volumes, Jones tells the story of the Eastern Front through the voices of the soldiers, commanders, and civilians who participated in it, willingly or unwillingly from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Woven through the accounts he presents is the regular question of how Red Army soldiers and the civilian population of the Soviet Union kept up enough morale to endure the chaos and defeats of 1941, the demoralizing situation around the siege of Leningrad, and the battle for Stalingrad in 1942. Thus, 'Total War' begins with the initial situation around 1941 and moves through battles for Leningrad and Stalingrad, onto the eventual Soviet defeat of the German sixth Army and continues through their victories at Kursk, Bagration, etc., all the way to Berlin.

The question here is less about military prowess, tactical, operational, or strategic decisions (although various details of individual operations are discussed and contextualized) but revolves around what the Red Army and civilian population endured, witnessed, and remembered up until their entrance into East Prussia and Germany proper. Jones sets the stage for the infamous events of the Red Army's 'liberation' (a contested term to say the least) of Eastern Europe and Germany. The initial chapters dealing with 1941 and Stalingrad are readily covered in Jones's other books on the Eastern Front so they presented little new in the greater scheme of the Eastern Front. It is only when we get to 1944 and the German scorched earth policy as they retreated before the Red Army that events and information I had never heard of before first began to appear. As the Germans withdrew from Belorussia they ran up against large swamp areas, on these territories they began to herd the local population, encased them in barbed wire, and trucked in typhus patients. They dumped them all in one of these 'camps', let them lay on muddy ground and allowed hundreds of cases of typhus to break out so that they might be passed on to the liberating troops of the Red Army. According to the commander of the 65th Army, whose soldiers were at times unable to control themselves as they ran to liberate these locals, an entire corps had to be quarantined because typhus ran rampantly through Red Army units as they tried their best to liberate these hastily established camps. Luckily the spread of the disease was readily contained and presented limited problems for the Red Army advance.

The Red Army's crossing over into Germany proper brings much debate and controversy. What Jones attempts to do, and in truth does very well, is contextualize what Red Army soldiers perpetrated on German territory. In showcasing what Red Army soldiers witnessed on their way to Germany, the enormous amount of death and destruction they came through during the liberation of Ukraine and Belorussia, the liberation of camps like Majdanek and Auschwitz (both of which are discussed by Jones in this book), as well as the regular propaganda campaign waged by the Soviet Union in order to keep up Red Army morale and encourage them to 'kill' the occupiers of their territory and the murderers of their families and friends, there is reason to suspect that such bent up anger and hatred would have an outlet once the German border was crossed. And this is exactly what happened. But Jones also gives voice to those soldiers who attempted to curb the violence, looting, raping, and murder that was going on. He continually implies that this was a minority within the Red Army that contributed to the 'total war' mentality of the time and shows orders coming from the high command and army command that attempted to curb any type of violence and looting against the local population, changing the propaganda of the time from 'destroy the fascist beast in his lair' to a voice claiming the Red Army is an army of liberation. There are some heartwrenching stories presented of Red Army soldiers taking out their hatred on the German population, all too often women, but in each case Jones attempts to contextualize the atmosphere these events occurred in and the reaction of Red Army soldiers to these events, which after the initial euphoria of revenge passed quickly into condemnation, contempt and a questioning of their methods. Many soldiers even attempted to protect the local population, forgetting or at least putting aside the propaganda they had been exposed to for years.

A minor weakness in these chapters is the fact that Jones mentions little of the fact that the Red Army at this point was operating with allies, like two Polish armies, who at times had more reason to hate Germans than Soviet troops, who can account or separate for crimes they perpetrated? Additionally, Jones takes the time to show how the Germans themselves exaggerated Red Army atrocities on their soil. Goebbels created something called 'atrocity propaganda' that exaggerated everything 'in order to strengthen the deterrent effect and the German people's will to hold out' (224). More so, at times the Germans themselves were given orders to destroy a village or town while the population was expelled, only to then have German film crews and journalists bussed in to "survey the ruins and to record the imagined ravages of Soviet soldiers...The swans in the town park were shot, and it was then announced that the 'Asiatic hordes' had killed and eaten them' (225).

As I reached the end of the book I found myself speechless. The epilogue Jones includes is a mere five pages, and the last page simply found me questioning myself and my knowledge of the Great Patriotic War/Second World War as well as the costs that the Soviet population had to bear. I don't want to give anything away but Jones shows once more that we continue to merely scratch the surface of the Eastern Front and there is still so much left to learn and understand in this encounter between Germany and the Soviet Union.

A few minor mistakes are evident, Soviet units should be listed as 'rifle' but in various instances they are described as 'infantry brigade' or 'infantry corps' rather than rifle or if this was a naval unit it should have been 'naval infantry' rather than just 'infantry'. There is also a mention of a fortieth 'tank army', but only six existed and they were named first through sixth. Additionally, the Soviet commander Chernyakhovsky is misspelled as 'Chernyakovsky'. Lastly, I have to say that the notation system in this book leaves much to be desired. While Jones lists his sources there are no endnotes/foodnotes in the traditional sense and at times it makes for a very hard time when attempting to locate the source of a specific comment/description/event.

Putting aside these minor errors, there is no question that Jones has created a highly important addition to Eastern Front literature. He is one of the few authors who attempts to contextualize Red Army action on German territory by putting the motivation of the Soviet soldier in a context that showcases that while some might have taken vengeance to an extreme, many others managed to control themselves and at times showed their altruistic side by protecting the local population and providing them with basic necessities. Jones continually emphasizes that it was a minority of the Red army that committed crimes on enemy soil, while the majority managed to preserve their reputation and the title of 'liberators'. show less

This is a well-written account, drawing on new sources, particularly private diaries and other writings to give the perspective of individuals caught in the horrific siege, while not neglecting to detail the military maneuverings on both sides. Jones also details the incompetence and venality of the Soviet authorities, both civilian and military, which was nothing short of criminal, including military efforts to break the blockade that were doomed to failure before they started and only show more resulted in the loss of thousands of Soviet soldiers. Life in the city spiraled down into a struggle for existence every single moment of every day, with profiteers and cannibals and gangs coming to the fore. People were barely hanging on, eating wallpaper paste, boiling belts. But Jones also describes the humanity of many people who gave their last ounce of strength to help someone else, sometimes even just a stranger and he makes the point that those who survived the siege best seemed to be the ones who found some activity, some helping of others, outside of themselves.

A million people starved to death during the siege. This was not just collateral damage to be expected in the conditions of a siege, it was the result of a deliberate policy from the Germans, part of a much larger plan. Timothy Snyder (Holocaust: The Ignored Reality; NYReview of Books, July 16, 2009) explains:

“Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Goring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941-1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.”

The numbers are staggering and as always they tend to numb the senses. Jones has done a service in restoring individuals to the story, with all their weaknesses, failures, success and heroism, while keeping the larger context. show less