Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A FASCINATING ACCOUNT OF AN UNKNOWN WAR, 11 April 2002
I FIRST READ THIS BOOK WHILST SERVING IN THE FALKLAND ISLANDS MANY YEARS AGO. IT HAD BEEN LEFT THERE BY A PREVIOUS OCCUPANT. I READ IT TWICE AND THEN, BECAUSE OF MY ENTHUSIASM, LENT IT TO SOMEONE WHO DID NOT RETURN IT. SINCE THEN I HAVE SEARCHED HIGH AND LOW FOR THIS FANTASTIC, ENGROSSING READ. IT REALLY GIVES YOU AN ACCURATE INSIGHT INTO, WHAT SOME MIGHT SAY IS A FORGOTTEN WAR, A CHAPTER THAT SOME AUTHORITY FIGURES MAY NOT WANT TO BE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE. AS YOU READ THIS, YOU FEEL AS THOUGH YOU KNOW THE CHARACTERS, YOU FEEL THIER PAIN, SENSE THIER FRUSTRATIONS AND FEEL SORROW AT THIER LOSSES. THE BLACK HUMOUR DISPLAYED BY THE SUBJECTS IS SHARED WITH THE MILITARY FORCES OF TODAY. THIS IS THE STORY OF HANS JOSEF WAGEMULLER AND HIS FELLOW KOPFJAEGER AND I TRULY WISH I HAD A COPY, AND COPYS OF THE SEQUEL WHICH I DID NOT KNOW EXISTED UNTIL COMING ON LINE TONIGHT. CONGRATULATIONS MR ELFORD, I THOUROGHLY ENJOYED EVERY SECOND.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing and yet compulsive, 22 Nov 2007
In The Devil's Guard, author George Robert Elford has compiled the shocking testimony of an unrepentant Nazi mercenary, fighting for the French Foreign Legion in Indochina. The Devil's Guard follows SS Officer Hans Josef Wagemueller, from fighting the Russians on the eastern front at the end of World War II, through a training period with the French Foreign Legion and finally to prolonged and intense combat in the jungles of southeast Asia.
The book is in essence a confessional, though perhaps with the antagonist bearing no guilt, only a desire to reveal man's inhumanity to man, in its rawest and most unexpurgated terms. This ultimately means that the reader is confronted with chapter after chapter of how a Nazi and his platoon of fellow ideologues fought, shot, bayoneted, tortured and poisoned the Viet Minh; these scenes are depicted in their unflinching brutality in a way seldom captured by purveyors of war-memoirs, whether they be the literati of the late Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, or Andy McNab's tale of dubious authenticity, Bravo Two Zero.
The Devil's Guard does indeed have the whiff of verisimilitude, not to mention sulphur. However, the book is an "as told to" story, whereby Wagemueller met the author in a bar in the capital city of a small, unnamed Asian country - and then dictated this testament into a microphone over the subsequent eighteen days. As such, the book is entirely uncorroborated, as far as I can determine. If it is fiction, it is an exceptional rendering. If, as this reader believes, the story is essentially true, then author George Robert Elford has succeeded in capturing a remarkable document. A book such as this is a rare artefact indeed. Bloody, uncompromising, disturbingly vicious, relentlessly compelling, The Devil's Guard is a shocking revelation, unmatched in its intensity.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Could have been true I guess..., 13 April 2009
In the wake of reading a lot of NAM books (the USA longest war... or as someone put it "we've been there one year eleven times..."), and having been always interested in the FFL (that reminds me I have to check Douglas Porch opus), I bought a copy (cheap) of this tale.
I do not know if it is really true... what it is is a page turner... maybe in 1971 it was shocking... we have been treated to worse since then.
Anti-guerrilla tactics in Cochinchina before the whole lot of SIX SILENT MEN had their first beer.
Nothing less then bullet for bullet and eye for an eye war literature.
ADB
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