Word: plieviers
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Appreciated but less popular were John Cobb's* scrutiny of U.S.A.A.F. men & manners in wartime England, The Gesture (also a first novel), James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor, an admirable study of base life at a U.S. flying field, and Theodor Plievier's gruesome Stalingrad, a broad-scale battle picture whose forceful "documentary" slant made it more fact than fiction...
...many years of deaths and explosions land burying details that he scarcely knows whether he is alive himself. As the pressure of Russian attacks forces the German line closer and closer together and the regiments beat their aimless retreat across miles of snow-swept steppes into Stalingrad proper, Plievier introduces many miscellaneous characters who appear briefly, disappear are forgotten by the reader, and reappear again somewhere else...
...Plievier's finest writing is in description of single horror scenes--the mobs of wounded men on the Gumrak landing strip, who storm each Junkers transport as it lands in the desperate hope of being flown to safety; the freezing corridors of a field hospital, where the wounded are left to die because there is no medicine; the group of high-ranking generals squatting in a dugout with nothing to do but talk because their units have been wiped out; the early-morning battle in the snow, in which an infantry battalion is shot down to a man between...
...Stalingrad" is a novel of mood. Instead of a plot, there is only the overpowering atmosphere of snow and gray skies and beaten men--and death. Plievier indulges in lengthy political discourses in the words of his characters and in the third person. His German officers begin, for the first time, to doubt the infallibility of what they have built and operated, and to find in the ruin of the sixth Army and its betrayal by Hitler the first indications that they have devoted their lives to a false cause. It dawns on some of them that...
...captivity, who became opposed to Nazism and were carefully trained to form a pro-Russian puppet administration in Germany. Today Von Paulus is said to be commanding an army of pro-Communist German veterans--a ghost army somewhere in eastern Europe, ready to pounce when the time comes. Theodor Plievier himself came to Germany in the wake of the Russians, and the publication of "Stalingrad" was encouraged by their military government. However, he must have had a change of heart. In the fall of 1947 he came secretly across the border into the American Zone, where he remains today...