Siege: A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942 - Hardcover

Schneider, Russ

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582880468 ISBN 13: 9781582880464

Publisher: Military Book Club/Book-of-the-Month Club, 2003

Synopsis

In Siege: A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942, author Russ Schneider takes us to the immediate scene of two Russian towns, Cholm and Velikiye Luki, the last holdouts for a small garrison of Germans surrounded by the vast Red Army during World War II. In Cholm, under the command of General Scherer, the garrison lasted 105 days against a besieging Russian force that outnumbered it ten to one. The Russians had tanks and artillery, while the Germans had neither, and most of the battle was fought in Arctic conditions in the winter of 1941-42. Unprepared for the savage climate, the German army at Cholm and elsewhere was nearly destroyed. The struggle for this obscure town was an epic story ranking with any of history's more well-known accounts of desperate military stands.

Six months later, nearby Velikiye Luki was surrounded with Scherer again in overall command. This time, however, Scherer and part of his force were outside the city; he spent the next two months trying to break through to the remainder of his men trapped inside Velikiye Luki, only to be turned back time and again. In the end he was only able to listen helplessly to radio reports from the doomed men as they were gradually wiped out in a battle even more violent than the one at Cholm.

Part of Siege is told from Scherer's point of view, as he struggles to grow through the tactical and personal hazards of command, but the novel centers around a group of ordinary enlisted men caught up in these events, with all the confusion, horror, and exhaustion that they experienced going from one hopeless situation to another. Private Kordts is a private and mysterious soldier, always struggling to keep his impudent and anti-authoritarian attitude to himself. He is regarded somewhat suspiciously by his superiors, in particular by his new platoon leader, Sergeant Schrader, who has distanced himself from almost all his men after seeing a previous platoon under his command wiped out in a few minutes. Like Kordts, Private Freitag is a Cholm veteran transferred to Schrader's platoon, a teenager possessed by the urge to prove himself as a man, yet who also finds himself drawn toward Kordts's terse humor and disdainful outlook.

The Russo-German War has long had a peculiar fascination for students of military and world history, and the battles that form the basis of Siege have an intense dramatic quality. With his expert knowledge of the war on the Eastern Front, Russ Schneider conveys as very few other writers can the scale of combat that had no precedent in savagery and cruelty in this compelling and riveting account of the men of this fated garrison who could only hope to live to tell it themselves.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The events are real, the characters are fictional, the suffering and sacrifice are authentic–and unforgettable

On January 21, 1942, more than five thousand exhausted German soldiers– fragments of retreating units–found themselves surrounded in the arctic northern Russian town of Cholm. Trapped in an area barely two kilometers wide, the freezing, starving men held out for 105 days, repelling endless infantry attacks and dozens of tank assaults. Fifteen hundred Germans died before relief finally arrived on May 5, but for those still able to fight, an even worse ordeal lay ahead–the siege of Fortress Velikiye Luki.

Following the fates of three ordinary Germans through these epic struggles, Russ Schneider captures the ferocity and titanic cruelty of a war that pushed men to the very edge of madness. Millions perished on the Russian Front during World War II. Siege is a searing testament to the forgotten men who strove valiantly, if in vain, against impossible odds.

About the Author:

Russ Schneider was born in 1956 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and spent several childhood years in Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and France, where he also studied. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from Kalamazoo College. After first studying at the University of California at Davis, in 1985 he received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Florida, where he was taught by Harry Crews and Padgett Powell.

Schneider studied the Russo-German War for years before undertaking his books, teaching himself German to be able to expand his research. He published two collections of short stories, Madness Without End: Tales of Horror from the Russian Wilderness (1994) and Demyansk: More Tales from the Russian Wilderness (1995). His only work of nonfiction, Gotterdammerung 1945: Germany's Last Stand in the East, a Military Book Club main selection, appeared in 1998. Russ Schneider died in 2000, at the age of forty-three. For the last fifteen years of his life, he lived at the edge of a swamp near Gainesville, Florida, where he read, wrote, and played classical music

About this edition

• Publisher: Military Book Club/Book-of-the-Month Club
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1582880468
• ISBN 13: 9781582880464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 420