| 4th Cuirassier | 02 Mar 2020 3:36 a.m. PST |
link link I've always thought you only need to read one of these books, because they're all the same, but this was actually a pretty good one. Actually they're not all exactly the same: some are pure slapstick. My favourite comedy one was Monte Cassino. If you want the entire oeuvre it's yours for £65.00 GBP or $84 USD, all fourteen books:
link
link |
| deephorse | 02 Mar 2020 4:32 a.m. PST |
I bought quite a few of these in my late teens. No way I'd spend £65.00 GBP on them now. |
| 4th Cuirassier | 02 Mar 2020 4:39 a.m. PST |
The website is interesting. It contains a lot of photos presumably intended to substantiate the veracity of the books. If anything, they have the opposite effect. None of the faces can be resolved, hence they could be photographs of anyone. Items of military equipment are miscaptioned, eg this Panzer III is said to be a Panzer IV
link this StuG IV is called a PIII
link and whatever this is, it's not a "P3 II" (whatever that is)
link A fun blast from the past, though. |
| deephorse | 02 Mar 2020 5:17 a.m. PST |
At that time my knowledge of the German Army of WWII was a fraction of what it is now. But even then I had serious doubts about the veracity of what I was reading. As entertainment they were fine, but they were nothing more than that. |
| deephorse | 02 Mar 2020 5:20 a.m. PST |
and whatever this is, it's not a "P3 II" (whatever that is) They are captured French tanks. I'd need to get my books out to determine if they are Hotchkiss or Renaults though. |
korsun0  | 02 Mar 2020 5:23 a.m. PST |
Read all these as a young 'un….enjoyed them then. His history has never been resolved has it, i.e. whether he did serve or not? |
| Martin Rapier | 02 Mar 2020 5:48 a.m. PST |
I also read a lot of these back in the 1970s. My favourite was SS General. There is a lengthy wikipedia entry on Sven Hassel. |
| Royston Papworth | 02 Mar 2020 5:54 a.m. PST |
Tiny refers to have been at Veliki Luki and we see him escaping from Stalingrad, clever stuff as both were at the same time… 😂 |
| Col Durnford | 02 Mar 2020 6:24 a.m. PST |
One step up from a comic book. Still have them all. Good fun read. The local book store, Aberdeen books has most of them new. |
| 4th Cuirassier | 02 Mar 2020 6:59 a.m. PST |
The gist of it is that he wrote one book, Legion of the Damned, that purported to be factually accurate, then went on to write 13 more that (he later conceded) weren't. A detractor has argued that he was simply a Danish collaborator, who was jailed for this post-war and who picked up his story material from fellow convicts while inside. His uniform photo contains mismatching items that he sourced for himself. I read several of the later nonsensical ones before the supposedly factual one, so regarded all of them as comics in prose. Read as such, one or two can be quite fun. Apparently these Kindle versions have been retranslated. It always irritated me that one character changed his name from Tiny to Little John from one book to another. Maybe they have fixed that. |
| Brian Smaller | 02 Mar 2020 10:52 a.m. PST |
When I was a kid and read those books I always thought "true story…snippets maybe" but enjoyed them for what they were. |
| Mark 1 | 02 Mar 2020 12:22 p.m. PST |
His history has never been resolved has it, i.e. whether he did serve or not? There is a lengthy wikipedia entry on Sven Hassel. link Indeed there is a Wiki page on him. And the research is pretty clear -- he was a petty criminal, who did time after the war for being an informant to the German occupation forces in Denmark, and wrote (or had someone else write) some trumped-up fantasy stories while he was in jail. According to his self-styled personal history he went to Germany to enlist in the Wehrmacht before the war started because he needed a job, and then wound up driving tanks in all theaters of the war except the Western Desert, was shuttled between Soviet, US and French prisoner-of-war camps, finally getting home only to face persecution in his homeland for being on the wrong side. In fact the records seem to show he was living with his parents, and was arrested a couple of times during the war. And Danish court records are pretty clear on why he was convicted and sentenced after the war -- it had nothing to do with being in the Wehrmacht, and had everything to do with collaboration with the Germans in Copenhagen. But of course in prior years all of that information on some random author writing under a pen name was not available to the general public, and so he was able to create his own version of his personal history, and the masses gobbled it up. Whereas today every detail of John Q. Public's life can be found online, and you need to be a national leader before you are entitled to fabricate your own facts to perpetuate your narrative of reality. -Mark
(aka: Mk 1) |
| jdginaz | 02 Mar 2020 1:48 p.m. PST |
I read one when I was in high school knew it was BS never read another I wouldn't pay 10 cents for the whole the series. |
| Marc at work | 03 Mar 2020 5:28 a.m. PST |
It was all part of wargaming back then. Sometimes the hobby was even fun… |
| 4th Cuirassier | 03 Mar 2020 4:35 p.m. PST |
The usual critique of ole Sven is that you can tell his stuff was BS because of how often his boys were in two places at once. This can be excused as just him milking it, but what's funnier and more debunking of his work is that quite often you could tell he had looked stuff up in books because he wasn't there. For example, in Monte Cassino he describes shooting up a "T14". So far as I know, the T14 was an aborted US heavy tank design that was neither produced or deployed. He looked that up in The Boys' Big Book of Tanks, or something. Throughout the Russian front titles, he refers to the "KW2". Everyone else calls this the KV2 and they were vanishingly rare anyway. They're still a hoot. If we only consented to be entertained by truthful material, we'd never any of us have watched a Hollywood war movie. |
