The Invisable Casualty - Combat Fatigue In War
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- Written by Ken Weiler
It has been known by many names over the course of history, the earliest recorded identification of emotional or psychological disorders affecting a man's combat ability by a medical source comes from the U.S. Civil War, when Union Surgeon Dr. Jacob Da Costa, called the men who reported to sick call, the Army's ER for illness, complaining of nervous discomfort, shortness of breath. Unofficially it was referred to as "Da Costa's Syndrome" but also was called "nostalgia" and "irritable heart", whatever the early medical terms used, it was attempting to describe the effects of violent combat and its effects on the men who were fighting in it. Although first identified by medical staff as an illness, no official or systematic study was conducted by any medial authority, north or south, into the causes and possible treatments of the malady.
The next reference to psychological illness came in 1917 for the United States, in World War I, the Spanish-American War of 1898 did not have the intense close-order fighting of the Civil War and the fighting lasted only some eight months and many of the battles were sharp but short. Many of the symptoms first experienced in the U.S. Civil War arose again with the misery of life in the frequently flooded filthy trenches of north-western France. Artillery bombardments, short and inaccurate in 1865, now became days and even weeks long torrent of an accurate hurricane of steel and high explosives. Along with the other new invention of the Great War, accurate and sustained machine gun fire, and the inability to break the logjam of positional warfare until the last months of the war in 1918, the weeks and months in the same trench were the perfect laboratory for all kinds of illnesses, physical as well as psychological.
Manpower Squandered: The German Luftwaffe Field Divisions
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- Written by Ken Weiler
With the two German military disasters on the eastern front, one in front of Moscow in the winter of 1941/42 and the other on the lower Volga River at Stalingrad in the late summer and winter of 1942/43, the loss of manpower in these two catastrophic defeats was far above the anticipated loss rates in the planning for Barbarossa.
What goes unnoticed in the field reports and the examination of the battles of the first four months of the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941 was the level of exhaustion for both men and machine. As one German officer commented in August that " . . . we were victoring ourselves to death!" The inability to bring the Red Army to the final battle, as it retreated deeper across the Ukraine and Byelorussia, Russia's borderlands, and into Russia's seemingly endless interior was worrisome to the German high command. The short war, one of kurs und vives, of short and lively campaigns, of quick and decisive movement, popularly known as the Blitzkrieg, was developing into the war they feared and could not win, one of material and human attrition. The need for more men was critical.
The Challenges of Historical Writing
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- Written by Ken Weiler
During the writing of my recent book Why Normandy Was Won: Operation Bagration and the War In the East 1941 - 1945 (Ostfront Publications, LLC, 458 pp 2010) one of the recurring obstacles I confronted was obtaining accurate data and information as well as getting access to it.
The source material for all historical writing is either original material (interviews, witnessing, original documents or participating) or secondary sources (books, newspapers, journals or indirect interviews). Based on what is being written about, the preferred sources will always be original material as that provides the reader and the historical record with fresh new material to evaluate and examine. However, frequently an engaging historical work can be written from carefully selected secondary source material, especially if the event has occurred beyond the opportunity to have access to living participants of the event or the event or period being written about is difficult or impossible to visit or no longer exists. Also, an innovative work can be constructed with the use of secondary material, especially if it has been selected and presented in such a way that presents a new view or perspective on the subject. It is this second manner of writing history that is most challenging and difficult for the author/historian. It puts the researcher and/or author in the position of not only seeking appropriate sources to develop his or her thesis or theme but also to determine if the material being used is available, accurate, timely, pertinent and usable.
This last item, that of the source material being usable, e.g. previously published, is especially important to understand, as almost all published material is automatically copyright protected when created or written. The author using someone else's work in a non-academic or review publication (known as the "fair use" doctrine) should seek permission, preferably in writing, when quoting from copyrighted material. The laws of copyright protection protect the creator of intellectual property until the author's death plus 70 years. After that point the work, if the copyright is not extended it then becomes public domain.
Now that we have established the sources and protections of written and other protected forms of creative material, two additional hurdles remain to overcome. At least one I was confronted with and that is the need for translations of non-English publications, documents and other material under the protection of government security classifications.
The Other Side of Normandy: Operation Bagration, the Russian Summer Offensive, June - August 1944
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- Written by Ken Weiler
It was the perfect battle of annihilation. In the summer of 1944 the Roman battle of Cannae in Italy was replayed on the Berezina in Russia
In the opening days and weeks of the Allied invasion of Europe at Normandy in June 1944, the ether cracked and sparked across the English Channel with situation and intelligence reports coming into SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) operational headquarters in Portsmouth at Southwick House, 75 miles south of London. These reports from the combat units in France contained the typical information a commander would expect: Battle progress, enemy force predictions, friendly and enemy casualties, unit readiness and morale, supply status, especially fuel and many other bits of military minutiae that painted the picture of life in the front lines.
However, among the thousands of reports, certain unusual items began to appear.
The "Missing Link" of the WWII Normandy Invasion
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- Written by Ken Weiler
Ken Weiler has published a new book dealing with the Soviet contribution that insured the success of the Allied invasion at Normandy on June 6, 1944. Entitled Why Normandy Was Won: Operation Bagration and the War In the East 1941 - 1945 (Ostfront Publications, LLC Hanover, Pennsylvania, 458 pp, 2010, $24.95) Ken traces the origins of the war in Russia from the Russo-German Non-Aggression agreement of 1939, to the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941 leading up to the title topic, Operation Bagration, the largest military operation of World War II three weeks after the landings in Normandy. This little known aspect of the War in Europe is key to understanding the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, the Soviet contributions and sacrifices made by the Red Army in the five year war, and how and why the final borders were determined in the Spring of 1945.
As Ken discovered during his three decades of research and several years of writing, there was a large 'knowledge gap' in the American readership of the role of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the war, especially in the under 35 year old age group. The immense losses it suffered battling the German Wehrmacht in the four years awaiting the arrival of the second front in France is still somewhat a specialist area of military history. Fifty years of Cold War estrangement, the lack of Russian language courses in the public schools, no American involvement in the Russian front and the politically biased writing published by the Soviets all contributed to this knowledge vacuum.
