The Sergeant In The Snow

[East Coast Hustle]

The best WW II memoir I know about The Sergeant in the Snow, by Mario Rigoni Stern.

Just proves my bad-war-equals-good-memoir theory, that the best WW II memoir would be by an Italian, because you can't get much more messed up than Italy's adventures in WW II, and this guy went through the worst of them, the encirclement of the Italian forces in Ukraine in the winter of 1942-43. Mussolini had sent a small Italian contingent along on Operation Barbarossa. So did almost every European country east of Germany; when the Wehrmacht has just conquered all of Western Europe while losing only 30,000 kia in the process, they sure look like a winner, and everybody wanted shares in the company. Nobody in Europe discovered that "Fascism is a bad thing" until Stalingrad fell, when they all sorta had the big born-again moment while pissing their pants in terror.
So in the Summer of 1942, the Italians doubled down on their Eastern Front contribution, sending almost a quarter of a million soldiers to man a section of the Wehrmacht's line along the Don River in Ukraine. Some of those units were good, especially the Alpini.

The Italian Army had developed very good mountain troops and tactics fighting the Austrians in the Alps in WW I, and the three divisions of Alpini Mussolini sent east could have made a real contribution if they'd been assigned to the Caucasus, where they were supposed to go. But the Germans were always too arrogant to use their allies effectively, and they did it again this time, sending these mountain troops to hold the line in flat farmland along the Don where all their training was wasted, and their small, portable weaponry was guaranteed to be outgunned by massed Soviet armor.

Mario Rigoni Stern, the man who wrote The Sergeant in the Snow, was a sergeant in the Tridentina Division of the Alpini, the best of all. His book describes the quiet time, almost happy, when he and his division held the line by the river, and then the collapse of the whole line in mid-winter. Only a few of the Italians on the Eastern Front made it out of "the Bag" the Soviets caught most of the Wehrmacht's allied armies in that winter. Rigoni Stern was one of the few to escape, and to his dying day (he lived until 2008), the thing that made him proudest is that he led a group of 70 Italian soldiers out of that bag without losing a single one.

full review by the one and only War Nerd at http://exiledonline.com/wn-blog-day-21-brechers-booke-nooke/