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Title: The End of War by David L. Robbins ISBN: 0-553-58138-4 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 29 May, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42 (36 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A great story; a clever, grippng novel.
Comment: Robbins has taken the story of the closing days of WWII in Europe, which is fascinating on its own, and fleshed it out with characters caught up in the struggle so that we see and feel the personal costs of being on the wrong side of history. He takes us inside the minds of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill as they cold-bloodedly make political decisions about the fate of Berlin and Europe, then shows how those decisions play out in ordinary peoples' lives. An American photographer is caught up with US troops hoping not to be last ones killed but charging for Berlin; two Russian soldiers, also hoping to survive, are part of the last great offensive of the European war. The battle scenes are vivid and dramatic, harking back to Robbins earlier book, War of the Rats. Finally, we see the impact of the three leaders' decisions on a young German woman who litterally faces her own personal Gotterdammerung, the end of her world, in the form of Allied bombs, Russian artillery, die-hard Nazis and the approach of the Russian Army with the associated stories of rape and mayhem. A great story of people caught in a dying city, well told.
Rating: 5
Summary: A novel of powerful images
Comment: The previous book by David Robbins, WAR OF THE RATS, based on the German siege of Stalingrad during World War II, is an exceptional war novel. THE END OF WAR, using as a backdrop the last few months of the war against Hitler's Third Reich, is equally riveting and compelling.
The legions of the Western Allies are advancing to the Rhine, and the Red Army juggernaught is poised to invade Poland from across that country's eastern border. The logical goal of both: Berlin.
The characters in the second echelon of this fictional work are 20th century giants of political and military history: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and generals Eisenhower and Zhukov. It is their ideology, pride, suspicion, and desire for glory that determines the paths of armies. It's history that Berlin was taken by Zhukov and the Soviets. Because Robbins apparently did extensive research from a long bibliography to recreate the high-level decisions that directed that outcome, I like to think that much of what I read was factual. But, never mind. The value of THE END OF WAR lies in its fictional characters, the first echelon, who live under the greasy arrows drawn on the warlords' battle maps.
Ilya is a former Soviet Army major, a hero of Stalingrad, reduced to enlisted status in a penal battalion because an uncle, a general, angered Stalin. Lottie is a young cello player of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, cowering with her mother under the daily (and nightly) rain of British and American bombs. Charley Bandy, whose aspiration is to enter Germany's capital with the first Anglo-American force to get there, is an American photographer working for LIFE magazine.
This novel is one that virtually demands to be read at one sitting. All characters are expertly brought to life, and the dialog is consistently arresting and believable. Above all else, the images Robbins brings to mind are powerful and unforgettable. It's almost as if you're there smelling Winston's cigar, or the brick dust of Berlin's rubble. Consider the scene ...
Ilya commands several Red Army soldiers escorting sixty captured Germans to the rear. On a road far from anywhere, far from any witnesses, one of the POWs collapses to the ground exhausted. The Soviets gather round, exhorting the man to get up with curses and kicks. Suddenly the episode escalates as the guards begin shouting at all the prisoners.
"The guards hurl more names at the Germans. Names of prison camps, Rovno, Ternopol, Zitomir; names of occupied villages, Braslav, Balvi, Vigala; names of death camps, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka; names of dead comrades ...; names of fathers and mothers, brothers, women. The Red soldiers vent themselves on the Germans ... They have debts to collect ... One of the Germans mutters in Russian, 'Bastards' ... All of these men hate. Back and forth, volleys of loathing ... Two of the Germans reach to the ground to lift their comrade. They put the man on his feet and release him with care. He stays erect, shaking. The rest of the prisoners move by instinct closer, penned animals do the same ... One of the Russians raises his rifle to his cheek, ridiculous, as though he needs to aim this close to his targets ... Ilya's mouth is bone dry. He could speak ... He could say, what? ...Another crow dispatches his voice from the trees ... Ilya turns his back."
Can you see it in your mind's eye, the palpable animosity on that stretch of dusty, country road? Oh, my.
If you enjoy novels of men and women in the firestorm of war, buy this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: "War may be interested in you."
Comment: I think I used that title once before in a review of an Alan Furst novel but it matters not, it fits here as well. When Trotsky wrote that he spoke of the whirlpool attraction of war that sucked people in, and he referred to the fact that 'you may not be interested in war but war may be interested in you!'
And certainly in the case of the three civilians in "The End of the War," Lottie the cellist, Charley Bandy the Life photographer and Ilya the Russian decommisioned officer-now foot soldier, all are caught in the whirlpool of this horrible chapter of our world history.
David Robbins' brilliant novel is the last of a trilogy beginning with Stalingrad ("War of the Rats"), followed by Kursk ("The Last Citadel") and ending here in Berlin. I say trilogy but there really is no connection except the chronology of historical events. The coherence of the three novels is in the relentless cause and effect of the World at War on millions of lives in the war as well as those bystanders and families.
Robbins has been criticized for the splintering effect of all of the individual stories, for included in "The End of the War" are representations of/from Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. I feel such criticisms are subjective at best because what we have here is an epic about something of epic proportions. When you have technology combined with will so advanced that 10,000 men can die in a single six-hour battle, perhaps what we need is to have multiple views to help us understand in the larger sense of the word, what happened.
For those of us reluctant to bick up a treatise by Barbara Tuchman, Cornelius Ryan, Doris Kearns or Max Hastings, David Robbins offers a compromise. Good stuff. Impossible to put down. Larry Scantlebury
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Title: War of the Rats by David L. Robbins ISBN: 055358135X Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 06 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Last Citadel: A Novel of the Battle of Kursk by David L. Robbins ISBN: 0553801775 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Scorched Earth by David L. Robbins ISBN: 0553381792 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad by William Craig ISBN: 1568523688 Publisher: Konecky & Konecky Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.98 |
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Title: The New Birth of Freedom: Vision for America by Steve Forbes ISBN: 0895263203 Publisher: Regnery Publishing, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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