All-Out on the Road to Smolensk by Caldwell, Erskine

Robert Westby · Post by **Robert Westby** » Sat Dec 21, 2002 10:17 am

Anyone heard of this book or able to make any recommendations? Published in 1942

Andy H · Post by **Andy H** » Mon Dec 30, 2002 1:20 pm

Ii haven't a clue but from the date one would have to be wary of any detail and propoganda within, if dealing with the German drive on the city.

jmark · Post by **jmark** » Mon Dec 30, 2002 5:55 pm

I have not heard of this book either but I have own others published by units during the war, and I have found them to be pretty good. They are meant for members of the unit (and not for public consumption), so they contain a surprising amount of detail - and an even more surprising lack of propaganda!!! Apart from the usually "Heil Hitler" at the end of an introduction, these books are usually free of such things (I stand to be corrected, of course).

The books I have are of regular army units, so I should not speak for all units, particularly an SS unit. Details in the books usually include a roll of honour (names of the units soldiers killed in action), eyewitness reports by various members (officers and men) and sometimes a list of decorations bestowed upon the units members.

If you ever have a chance to buy one of these unit histories, do it!

Jason Mark

jmark · Post by **jmark** » Mon Dec 30, 2002 6:02 pm

I'm sorry, ignore my previous post. I got it confused with something else.

Books published for wartime public consumption DO lack detail. I have two wartime books: one is about Cholm and the other is about Sevastopol. Photos in the books are generally good as are eyewitness accounts, but you will discover that they have been sanitised for the public eye. Not much talk of German casualties or suffering, and they tend to glorify German achievements.

Jason Mark

combrig · Post by **combrig** » Fri Jan 10, 2003 7:47 pm

I read this book years ago, so my recollections may be a bit fuzzy. But as I remember it, Caldwell's work is mainly important as an initial "eye-witness" account of the war in Russia by a Western journalist. Caldwell was one of a handful of such journalists who were invited to travel to Russia and report on the war in late 1941. At that time, the Western public knew virtually nothing about the war -- or, for that matter, Russia -- so even the most trivial observations were a matter of some interest.

This group did get a supervised trip to the front (or what had recently been the front, at any rate), but mostly they just absorbed impressions of wartime Moscow, talked to various "unofficial" spokesmen and sucked up the latest Sovinformburo claptrap. They then repackaged this insubstantial stuff as "war reporting" and sent it home for public dissemination.

I suppose the book is accurate as far as it goes, and it is certainly readable. But it was pretty shallow, lacking in detail and really amazingly uninformative. If you want to know how Russia and its war were perceived (and misperceived) in the West, you can glean a few insights from it, but otherwise, I doubt you'd find it very useful.

Margaret Bourke-White made the same trip, and published her own book about it (Shooting the Russian War). Again, my memory is a bit fuzzy here, but I read both books at about the same time, and I recall thinking that of the two, hers was by far the more interesting work.