Last Citadel

Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets
Review: Before this book, I had given up on military adventure novels. Granted, they can be exciting when things go "BOOM!", but to get to that you gotta wades through chapters upon chapters of bland dialogue, blander characters, hackneyed prose and jingoistic posturings.

Last Citadel is welcome discovery for me. It features nuanced and interesting characters from both sides, well-written scenes of the tense preludes to battle, followed by visceral and breathless scenes of unimaginable violence.

Robbins successfully evoked the epic scope of the Battle of Kursk, while also let the readers experiences the titanic battles in the cramped and smoke-filled interior of tanks. The books is meticulously researched, from the technical specs of tanks to the lives of the soldiers. These details are incorporated in a mostly unobstrusive way that enrich our understanding of what it is like to be Russian/German soldiers shut in the belly of steel beast trying to kill or be killed in a battlefield of millions. This is a book written by a WWII buff for WWII buffs.

Rating:
Summary: A Magnificent Work!
Review: I applaud the author for this work. It is evocative and exciting. Robbins is writing some of the best WW II fiction in the business. He is a master.

Rating:
Summary: What it must have been lke.
Review: If you are looking for something with buxom blondes and ridiculous heros, then try something else. This is a novel about the Battle of Kursk - the largest tank battle of the second world war and until the first Gulf War, the largest tank battle ever.

Mr. Robbins gives us both perspectives (Red Army and Nazi). How the little T-34s were basically rolling coffins and the massive, cumbersom Tigers that dominated the battlefield. What went through their minds as these two armies clashed? This book gives us a glimpse at what it must have been like.

If you like military history, then this is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Gotterdammerung amidst the sunflowers
Review: In a previous historical novel, THE WAR OF THE RATS, author David Robbins took us to the 1942 siege of Stalingrad on World War Two's Eastern Front, one usually paid scant attention by American readers who perhaps believe that U.S. won the European war single-handed. It didn't, you know. Now, in LAST CITADEL, Robbins returns to the Eastern Front for history's greatest tank battle.

It's July 1943, and Hitler throws one last roll of the dice against the USSR with a major armored offensive designed to capture the city of Kursk. America is about to invade Italy, and Germany must knock the Soviets out of the war, or at least stabilize that front, before having to withdraw some of its forces from the East to reinforce the Mediterranean theater.

Whereas in THE WAR OF THE RATS, the confrontation in Stalingrad's rubble was between two master snipers, one German and one Russian, the LAST CITADEL evolves into the ultimate confrontation in a field of sunflowers between two tank crews, one German in the awesome Tiger tank and one Russian in the smaller but faster T-34.

The Tiger is commanded by SS Captain Luis Ruiz de Vega of the 1st SS Panzergrenadiers, one of three SS armored divisions spearheading the German assault. De Vega originally came to fight for the Nazis with the Spanish Blue Division, lent to Hitler by Franco in 1941. Having lost half his stomach to a Russian sniper during the siege of Leningrad, de Vega was rewarded with a commission in the SS. Now, bitter, constantly hungry, increasingly emaciated, and emotionally dead, Luis dreams only of returning to Spain a war hero.

The T-34 is commanded by Sgt. Valentin Berko, but its soul is its driver, Cpl. Dimitri Berko, Valentin's father. Dimitri is an old Cossack who's fought against the Czar, Trotsky's Red Army, and now the Germans. The elder Berko loves his son dearly, but is disgusted with the latter's unquestioning dedication to Communism. But the two together make a formidable fighting team.

In THE WAR OF THE RATS, a five-star novel, subplots added to the overall storyline, especially as military sniping involves a lot of waiting for the perfect shot. In contrast, several subplots in LAST CITADEL only serve as unnecessary distractions. Dimitri's daughter, Katya, is a bomber pilot attached to the Night Witches, who fly biplanes so slow and flimsy that they can only operate at night. Her boyfriend, Leonid, also a pilot, but in a modern squadron, is shot down. Attempting a landing behind enemy lines to rescue him, Katya crashes, and subsequently falls in with a group of Russian partisans, which has an unidentified traitor in its midst. In the meantime, SS Colonel Abram Breit, is spying for the Soviet's Lucy network.

Had Robbins focused entirely on the tank engagements of the Kursk battle, his book, in my opinion, would have been leaner, meaner, and better. In any case, his description of going to war in the Tiger and T-34 makes for an absorbing and informative read.

Rating:
Summary: very badly produced book
Review: Kursk 1943 -- Time and place of the German summer-offensive, codenamed "Citadel". And the Berko clan has gone to war according to its Cossack tradition, as a family. Father Dimitri and son Valentin rumble over the steppe in the cramped confines of their new T-34 tank. Meanwhile, daughter Ekaterina prowls the night skies in her antiquated biplane, braving searchlights and flak to bomb Nazi targets. Raiding Partisan bands strike fear in fascist and friend alike, ruthlessly recruiting men from suffering Ukrainian villages that can ill afford their loss. "Last Citadel" is the third book in Robbins' trilogy of the Eastern Front of World War ll. Like his previous novels, the latest presents the viewpoint from participants of both sides of the conflict, the Soviet and the Reich. Like the earlier novels, this one is impressively researched. The bibliography section looks remarkably like my own Amazon "Listmania!" pages; this should indicate my excitement upon receiving this book! "Last Citadel" is a tighter read than its predecessors. The narrative is much more flowing than the stilted, present-tense format of "The End of War"; and there are none of the distracting sexual vignettes of "War of the Rats". The characterizations are original and quite good. Dimitri, the Berko patriarch, is a Cossack from Tsarist times, contemptuous of the Bol'sheviks. His son Valya is an ardent young Communist and also his father's superior officer. Katya's martial motivation, whether flying her bomber or riding her Partisan steed, is simply to bring honor to her clan. SS Panzergrenadier Luis de Vega, a Spanish Fascist, is driven by his lust for vengeance against the Reds. And Col. Abram Breit, erstwhile Nazi spy, is secretly aiding the Soviets. The plot builds toward the great tank battle and an emotional climax. A sweeping saga, a rousing and entertaining read -- but marred, for me, by a few flaws. Katya is one of the main protagonists, and her inclusion in the story is a welcome one. But throughout, she is named "Witch". The historical women's Night Bomber division was dubbed "Nacht Hexxen" or "night witches" by the Germans who suffered their predation. But these women pilots never referred to themselves by the insulting epithet, nor did their male comrades ever call them that. This is a minor irritation, to be sure, but a grating one. It and a few other historical inaccuracies regarding Soviet aviation and tank operations cost the book a star, in my opinion. It's still well worth reading, and recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A Military Classic
Review: The Last Citadel is fast-paced military fiction with its soul in the stars. The author gets the details right, but does not obsess over the grade of lead in the bullets, or the chemical composition of the propellants. Instead, he takes the swirling Battle of Kursk, millions of men and thousands of machines, and pulls it into focus as the ancient tale of a single man facing an immortal monster.

Leathery old Dimitri is armored with little more than his Kazak honor, and his T-34 seems like cardboard against Hitler's latest superweapon, the massive Tiger tank. This is classic stuff disguised as hot-running fiction. Author David L. Robbins is not out to take Tom Clancy's lunch, he's trying to catch Hemingway and Steinbeck. The Battle of Hill 260.8 will make you stand up and cheer, and the Award of the Order of Buttons is a most perfect recognition of battle honors. These two scenes combine into one of the most powerful passages ever written, in any language.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written and informative
Review: The Last Citadel is one of the few (maybe the only) novels that centers around the Battle of Kursk, the last major German offensive in Russia. Many Americans are familiar with Stalingrad, a topic of another Robbins novel but far fewer know about this ghastly, titanic battle. Robbins does an outstanding job of describing the German plans and the Soviet counter-plans, not leaving out the very important and often overlooked role that espionage and treason played in the ultimate outcome of the war. Even though I have read extensively about the Russo-German war I never knew until I read this novel that non-Aryans could serve as Waffen SS officers or that Russian families fought together in the same tank. Robbins is to be commended for educating as well as entertaining his readers.

Even though this book is informative it is first and foremost a novel, and here it succeeds brilliantly. Robbins is an excellent creator of interesting and sympathetic characters. On the Russian side there is a Cossack family, father and son fighting together in the same T-34 tank while the daughter flies night bomber mission. On the German side there is Robbins' best creation, the Spanish SS officer along with an SS colonel, an art historian turned intelligence officer with his own agenda. I grew to like all these characters so much I was afraid to read the ending for fear that I would lose one or more.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Could've used some realistic characters
Review: This book gives a pretty good overview of the battle of Kursk, which was pretty much the point where Germany lost the ability to end World War II in anything but defeat, but the characters are straight out of a soap opera... a Russian father-son duo in a tank, one a diehard communist, the other an old-school cossack; the aforementioned father's daughter, a bomber pilot who goes on an action-movie campaign with partisans behind German lines; a high-level Wehrmacht officer passing information to the USSR in the hopes of saving Germany from itself; and a Spanish Waffen-SS officer who, despite being one the most interesting characters, loses all semblance of subtle character development midway through and becomes a physical manifestation of Nazi evil. Excellent descriptions of tank battles, though, and it gives a very good impression of just how huge Eastern Front battles were, and how many men it took to stop the Nazis.

Rating:
Summary: David Robbins does it again
Review: This is David Robbins third World War II novel. He started out good and just gets better. I found myself staying up later than I intended just to find out what was happening next. He does a very good job of giving you an overview of the entire battle while including a personal level with characters on both sides. His characters are realistic, too. They all have some problems while believing in their own causes. Nor can they be simplistically divided into good and bad, each being a mix of both. The result is that they are believable and interesting.

If you enjoy WWII or action novels you should like this. If you read the reviewer who complains of David's writing I have to say I disagree. I have the paperback and if there are 'comma splices' they did not bother me (and I have written 3 college textbooks for a major publisher). I even went back to look for a reference to 'June 31' and did not find it. The author uses chronological headers and subheads and in my copy they progress fron June 30 to July 1 (in fact there are several July 1 subheads with different hours of that day), so if June 31 is in the book it is probably a typo rather than a mistake by the author.