Book Review: TIGER TRACKS and THE LAST PANTHER by Wolfgang Faust

A very common phenomenon in the vague, sweeping genre of "war memoirs" is the false memoir, especially the false World War Two memoir, purported to be written by (most often, I've found) German soldiers and either lost or "published now for the first time" decades after the war. WW2 fiction and/or greatly embellished memoirs of wartime sold rather well among certain demographics, and even today - as I myself can attest - new WW2 fiction is popular among readers. So it is natural that, even now, false or at least dubious memoirs of the war are being "re-published" as ebooks. The "StuG Command" book I reviewed about a year ago was a perfect example of this, a story I am entirely certain is a complete fabrication (and not really that great a book, either).

I found TIGER TRACKS and THE LAST PANTHER a couple of months ago, and bought both for my Kindle. I recently read the two of them back to back - they're both fairly short reads, probably around 25-30,000 words apiece - and I have to say, they were pretty enjoyable. I don't believe for a second that Wolfgang Faust is a real person, or that the name is even a pseudonym of a real person, but I have to admit that the story reads well, albeit rather over-the-top in terms of the lurid violence and misery. The two stories cover different periods of time during Faust's career; TIGER TRACKS takes place in 1943, while THE LAST PANTHER takes place in April of 1945, right at the very end of the war.

Of the two, TIGER TRACKS (available here on Amazon) is probably the weaker story. Faust's unit of twenty Tiger heavy tanks is assigned to take some hill from the Soviets. The fight is bloody and several Tigers are immediately taken out of the fight, but in the end, the Germans defeat the Soviets and take the enemy position. However, the reinforcements that were originally promised never arrive, and they are forced to retreat, after capturing a Soviet female radio operator. The Tiger force is constantly harassed by Soviet attacks, encountering enemy armor, infantry, air attack, artillery, and even a particularly terrifying ambush by a flamethrower team. Whoever Wolfgang Faust really is, the writer is quite good at depicting the absolute horror of mechanized warfare. In particular, Faust is good at showing how the Tiger might be a very tough tank, but it is far from indestructible. Tigers are destroyed by hits from enemy anti-tank guns and other tanks, cracked open by air attacks, set ablaze by flamethrowers or Molotov cocktails - the list goes on and on. He also points out that a tank is not designed to drive everywhere under its own power - it requires tank carriers or rail transports, and must receive constant maintenance. Faust, as the Tiger's driver, is in charge of the mechanical care of the tank, and he is constantly worrying about the bogie wheels, the track links, the transmission and all other aspects of the fighting vehicle, because he knows that no matter how strong their armor, or powerful their gun, all it takes is one broken track link pin to immobilize the panzer and doom them.

On the other hand, the story kind of rambles. After their mission, Faust's tank commander (who is now in charge of what's left of the force) decides they need to bring the Soviet radio operator back for interrogation. So they set off for the rear lines, and the story just becomes a series of harrowing vignettes, until they reach their destination. There's no real drama, other than the need to get back to the rear echelon area, and even when that happens, the ending is a bit flat. I'm willing to forgive that, though, because the action throughout the story is still, in my opinion, rather top notch. As fun as the PANZER PLATOON series is (and I'll write more reviews of it later on), the combat scenes in these two books are far superior.

THE LAST PANTHER (available here on Amazon) is the better story of the two, mostly because it has a clear end-goal, and works to ratchet up the tension in getting you there, and the end of the story carries a lot more weight and pathos. In addition, the story revolves around an actual historical event, the "Halbe Kessel" or Battle of Halbe, a week-long retreat by German forces attempting to flee West and surrender to the Americans, rather than be captured (and probably killed or sent to a gulag) by the Soviets. Faust is, by 1945, a Panther panzer commander, and is tank is one of the few remaining in good condition within the group of German soldiers and civilians fleeing the oncoming Soviet army. They know they have to cross the Elbe river, where on the other side the US Army is waiting, but the Soviets are not only to the East, but essentially all around them, slowly closing in and crushing them.

THE LAST PANTHER is definitely more intense than Faust's first story. The inclusion of German civilians, who all know their fate in the hands of the Soviets pretty much involves rape, murder, or (likely) both, definitely makes for much stronger tension over the course of the novel. Women and children die in great numbers as the Soviets attack their column over and over again. The Germans, especially the panzer forces, do what they can to protect the civilians, but they can only do so much, especially as their vehicles keep breaking down, getting stuck, or destroyed by the enemy. Faust is constantly terrified that his Panther's engine will die, because he knows the engine is only good for about 800 kilometers, and at the start of the novel, they're already pushing 900. Fuel is also a big concern, and they're constantly on the lookout for more gasoline, usually taken from broken-down vehicles.

But the story also involves a lot more in-fighting and social tension, between the regular Wehrmacht troops, the Waffen-SS forces, and the civilians. Some of the SS are fanatics, to the point of killing Germans who do not stand and fight, while others are cowards who shed their uniforms and try to hide as civilians because they know the Soviets will give SS men no mercy. The worst-fated of all are the Soviets who are prisoners of the Germans and serve as laborers, because they know their own countrymen will kill them - and probably their families back home - if they're ever captured, but they're the Germans' lowest priority in terms of ensuring those in the Kessel escape the encirclement. Historically, only about 30,000 people - a mere fifth of those attempting the breakout - successfully escaped, so you can imagine the scale of slaughter that takes place in this book. There's on scene in particular, as the column tries to punch through a German village as they're being savaged by a Soviet bombardment, which is particularly awful, but by no means is it the only scene of massed slaughter.

Like TIGER TRACKS, this second book features some really solid, tensely-written combat scenes, and Faust is very good at portraying the various fighting vehicles in something approximating their historical strengths. The Panther was an excellent tank, with a main gun capable of defeating any tank in the world at that time, and very thick, sloped frontal armor that was probably the equivalent, if not superior to, the Tiger's frontal protection. However, the Panther was a smaller, lighter, faster tank, making it more maneuverable and not quite so mechanically fragile (although like all the late-war Panzers, it did break down in great numbers). There are also some good scenes involving King Tigers, Hetzer tank destroyers, and other German vehicles which added to the flavor of the combats.

All in all, these two books are relatively inexpensive ebook reads, fairly short by novel standards but fast-moving and filled with action. They both get relatively good reviews on Amazon (although a fair number of low reviews, mostly complaining about them being "false memoirs"), and they both seem to be selling quite well. If you're a fan of WW2 action-adventure fiction, I highly recommend reading both of them - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Book Review: PANZER PLATOON #2 - INVADE RUSSIA! by Gunther Lutz

The second in this six-volume series kicks off a short time after the invasion of Russia by the German army in the summer of 1941. Rather than their lightweight Panzer II, this time Micki Boden and his crew are operating a Panzer III, one of the mid-war models with a short-barreled 50mm anti-tank gun. The extra crew members are characters we were introduced to in the first book, as coming from one of the other Panzer IIs in Boden's platoon.

Like the first book in the series (and most of the books, as I've now read the first four of the six as of this review), there is no real overarching plot to each book. Rather, the novels are a series of vignettes tightly tied together, providing a good representation of whatever is occurring in that theater of operation at the time. In this case, Boden and his crew are involved in Operation Barbarossa, during the operation's heyday from summer to fall of 1941, before the brutal winter sets in and the German advance is stopped.

For the most part, Boden and his panzer crew encounter relatively little resistance from the Russians, and their biggest problems are the over-stretched supply lines, coupled with a new platoon commander who proves to be a constant nuisance to Boden and the rest of the platoon. This new commander isn't a veteran of the '39 or '40 campaigns, and so lacks the necessary combat experience to lead a platoon, especially as the panzers wander further and further afield. This becomes especially problematic when one of Boden's crew is injured, and they have to seek medical aid from a local Russian doctor. Food also becomes an issue, as they've ranged so far ahead that the "goulash cannon" (field food service units) are nowhere to be found and they must forage locally for their rations.

Throughout the book, there are many hints as to how the entire Russian campaign is a bad, bad idea. Early on, Boden's crew discovers an intact panzer...but the five-man crew is dead, each man decapitated, their bodies left in their proper positions inside the tank, their heads put on display outside the hamlet where they parked, probably to also forage or rest for the night. This gruesome display puts Boden's men on edge, because it hints at the savagery the Russians are capable of, and how tenacious a foe they can be if given a chance. Later on in the book, Boden joins in defending a position against a Russian counter-attack, one that is bolstered by the deadly Russian T-34 medium tank. The T-34 outclasses the Panzer III of the time in almost every respect - main gun, armor, and mobility - and they're the boogeymen of the Russian battlefield. The climax of the book is a tank duel between Boden and the rest of his platoon against several T-34s in an abandoned factory, and it is a tense, exciting scene where clever tactics and luck face off against far superior Russian tank design.

This book is definitely an excellent sequel to BLITZKRIEG, and gives the reader what they really wanted from a series called "Panzer Platoon" - battles between tanks which are roughly equivalent to each other. The action is well-written and shows how careful and analytical a panzer commander needs to be in order to survive on the battlefield, and as mentioned, this book does a great job at hinting towards the horrors of the "Ostfront" (which we see in full force in the next volume, BLOOD & ICE).

Book Review: PANZER PLATOON #1 - BLITZKRIEG by Gunther Lutz

Sorry, Tiger tank - wrong year!

The PANZER PLATOON series is a six-book run of WW2 stories told from the perspective of a German tank commander. The series was written through the late '70s and published by Sphere Books, a UK paperback publisher. The author, "Gunther Lutz", is probably a pseudonym, and I am following some leads to track down the author's real name.

The first book in the series, BLITZKRIEG, follows Micki Boden, an Unteroffizier commanding a Panzer II light tank. What exactly Boden's rank is gets kind of muddled - sometimes he is referred to as a corporal, but the rank could be higher than that. Boden is in charge of two men, his driver and his loader / radio operator, and we know at least Boden and his driver were in the Polish campaign of 1939. The loader/operator is a Nazi fanatic, always going on with party slogans and ideology, and it is made clear that Boden considers himself a soldier first, but he rolls his eyes and actively makes fun of his loader/operator for the young man's fanaticism. I feel like this is a requirement of every German protagonist in WW2 fiction - he's just doing his duty for his country, not one of Hitler's goose-stepping puppets! At the very least, it lets you sympathize with him more, since you're not just chomping at the bit, waiting for Boden to get vaporized by a howitzer shell.

The story itself is essentially a series of vignettes, as Boden and his crew make the race to the French coast. The French and British forces are collapsing faster than the Germans can advance, and Boden's tank platoon finds itself often just passing by wrecked or abandoned Allied equipment, often destroyed by airstrikes. His first action in the book is to support a company of assault pioneers as they take a French bunker. This assignment separates Boden's tank from the rest of his platoon and the regiment, and most of the book is spent trying to catch up with their unit, which allows for some smaller-scale battles, pitting Boden and whatever band of Germans they come across against some token French or British forces.

The action in this book is pretty well-written, and the author largely knows his technical details, although there are a couple of glitches here or there. A common editing mistake in this book is that the author sometimes mis-types "cm" and "mm" for weapons, so he'll reference a "20cm" anti-aircraft gun which is no doubt the German 20mm AA autocannon, and this sort of thing happens a few more times throughout the book. In my experience, Germans tend to refer to their weapons by centimeter caliber, while the British refer to them by millimeters, so I think the author just never quite figured out which he wanted to use and there was the resulting mixup. There are a couple of other minor details that he gets wrong - for example, the KwK 30 autocannon in his Panzer II can fire both armor-piercing and high explosive ammunition, but the author states in the book on a couple of occasions that it can only fire AP. Whatever - it doesn't really matter, and there's a lot of other good information to make up for a couple of small mistakes.

There are several tank duels between Boden's Panzer II - a very light tank, more equivalent to an armored car than what we'd consider a real frontline tank - and both French and English tanks. Each scene is very tense, and the author does a good job of showing Boden's tactical prowess, maneuvering and picking just the right ground to fight from and the right moment to attack to make best use of his limited firepower. Those not so aware of German panzer history might not know it, but in the first few years of WW2, the majority of Germany's panzer inventory were light tanks, inferior in armor and firepower to the enemies they faced off against. It was their superior tactics, communication, and supporting elements that gave the panzers their victories. This is very well illustrated throughout the course of the novel.

Overall, I really enjoyed BLITZKRIEG. I was concerned going into the book that it was going to be a lot worse than it was, and although there are some cheesy interludes here and there (2 1/2 books into the series now, I see that the author likes having his characters encounter women during their downtime, with the usual "mature content" results), overall these books feel very gritty and unglamorous. A lot of men die very brutal, pointless deaths, and the survivors must carry on and do their duty no matter what.

These books were not particularly cheap to come by (I think I paid $10 for this book, not including shipping), but if you like WW2 fiction written at the height of the British War-Lit era of the 60s through early 80s, I think you'll enjoy the PANZER PLATOON series.