Watch On The Rhine (Posleen War) [Mass Market Paperback]

where to start, i think to get a proper idea about this book you need to read the ones that came before, that deal with the bad guys coming and all the trouble's that follow. This takes the premise further with the idea that with the human race being up the creek and some one has nicked your paddle and put a hole in your boat you need all the help you can get even if that means that you resurect one of the groups of people with, lets face it, not the best rep in the 20th century.

i think that both writers have handled this problem well with having charecters that are the stero typical nazi, the professional soldier and the soldier looking for redemption.

but lets be honest, most people read books for enjoyment and this is a good read, it keeps you entertained and you don't have to force yourself to turn the page. all in all i've enjoyed all of john ringos books sofar and if your a fan of militery sci-fi then this series is a must, and yeah i know i can't spell

I have read a lot of military science fiction, writers like the brilliant SM Stirling and Harry Turtledove. This book is easily the equal of most of Stirlings work, and superior to Turtledoves.

If you have read Turtledoves books about aliens invading during world war two and enjoyed that then this will blow you away! I always thought Turtledoves book lacked grit and action. Watch on the Rhine is very dark, real and has great brutal battle scenes all the way through.

The story is that viscious aliens who see humans only as cattle and simply a food source want to take over the Earth. The first attack is beaten off (in earlier books) at great loss and cost, but a second one is on its way with 10 times the number so humanity race to build their defences and their forces but thy are undermined sadly by corrupt politicians and people not wanting to believe.

However, the Chancellor of Germany does believe and builds Germany's defences. With advanced alien technology old and retired soldiers with valuable experiences and skills are rejuevenated making them young and healthy again. This happens to ex regular Wehrmacht soldiers first and then as a last resort and with huge opposition, former members of the Waffen SS who train new recruits to their own standards and more importantly perhaps bring an arrogant pride in their units which builds confidence.

Despite the huge opposition from the left, riots and sabotage the new SS take the field and hold against the vast Alien hordes that sweep others away inflicting huge losses and succeed building their forces. The 10th SS Corps becomes an Army with many international units like the original SS, but interestingly includes a Jewish Brigade, the Judeas Maccabeaus. Wherever the fighting is the hardest or toughest they are thrown in with their huge super tanks taking massive casulties, being beaten back but never beaten. This is not a Neo-Nazi glorification though. Its a great sci fi story with a brilliant new original angle.

This is an amazing book, very dark, gritty and you will love it. It can be read alone without reading the previous titles but if you like this give them a go. And if you like this read Birminghams Axis of Time books and S M Stirlings The Peshawar Lancers or Marching through Georgia. This was the first book by Ringo I have read but I am now working my way through his others.

As always Kratman and Ringo are engaging and talented writers. As always Kratman manages to work in an execution scene. In "A State of Disobedience the execution of the thinly disguised Janet Reno character goes on for pages. In "A Desert Called Peace" a young woman who collaborates with terrorists is fed feet first into a woodchipper, large numbers of Muslim bombers or gunmen are tortured to death and a number of Western journalists are murdered, one group because the interpreter they have picked up turns out to be an insurgent trying to escape, others simply because Kratman's hero ( A thinly veiled Kratman ) considers any kind of critical reporting to be an attack worthy of retaliation. A number of Western aid workers go the same way. There is also a scene where the hero explains to his men why they need feel no guilt at killing those who had surrendered or were trying to surrender. In his new, more or less contemporary South American war series Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is fed feet first into a woodchipper (again, by those with whom we are supposed to identify and sympathise.)

Under the circumstances it's something of a relief that in this book those being executed are actually soldiers who have run away while on active duty. The SS veterans do murder some elected politicians that oppose them, but, as usual in Tom Kratman books, these people, being well to the left of Bill O'Reilly, are mostly evil and eager to sell out the human race to man-eating aliens. Cowardly, yet brutal the Reds and Greens of the novel are unwilling to fight murderous invaders but eager to kill their own soldiers in riots. Luckily these slinking untermenschen get their come-uppance when the brave boys of the SS beat some of them to death in broad daylight and the rest either run away or sign up. The few exceptions who have any worthwhile qualities usually have their minds changed by the course of events. ("How I learned to stop worrying and love the SS") All this is about par for the course in Kratman novels and if you don't like it you don't have to read them. No, what puts the crowning turd in the waterpipe of this novel is the deliberate skimming over of historical facts.

Firstly, up until well into the war any member of the SS had to volunteer to join, something that only a keen Nazi would do, or would be allowed to do. There WERE eventually some men conscripted into SS fighting units but the odds of only one true Nazi being found in a reconstituted SS unit as Kratman and Ringo would have us believe are less than nil. Ditto a repentant former SS man being allowed to join the Israeli Defence Forces in the 1940s. (If nothing else, the urge of his new commanders to sit him on a crate of munitions and say "Smoke 'em if you got 'em" would surely be irresistible)

The boasting of the senior SS officer in the novel that the SS "told Hitler and Himmler to **** off" is pure fantasy - not for nothing was the SS motto "Mein Ehre Ist Treue".

Equally ludicrous is the suggestion that the SS (or indeed the Wehrmacht) "fought the Russian hordes to a standstill". No they didn't. The Russians broke the German armies, halted their advances, drove them back across the steppes, ground them to powder when they tried to stand, stripped them of their conquests, occupied their country and finally pulled all their man-God's mad dreams down on his head in the burning ruins of Berlin. Any denial of that is a kind of Dolchstoss, the legend avidly spread by the German High Command after 1918 that the army could somehow have gone on fighting if not for politicians, subversives and REMFs. If Kratman was looking for a group of murderous totalitarian soldiers to rejuvenate because they're "tough" he could have started with the Red Army but from this book you would have to pay close attention to realise that Germany lost the war.
One spectacularly cheeky remark is that the Germans and Poles should have united against "the menace from the East": I'm sure most Poles would have loved to but the Germans had already arranged to sell half of Poland to "the menace from the East" in exchange for a free hand enslaving or slaughtering the inhabitants of the other half. If there was one thing that enabled "the menace from the East" to move a thousand miles West it was the actions of Hitler's armies. The Waffen SS helped lay the whole of Eastern Europe at Stalin's feet.
Equally swiftly skimmed over is the fact that the senior SS General in the book is described as having spent five years in the Freikorps. The Freikorps, although some of them fought briefly in the Baltic, spent most of their time killing their fellow Germans. Some of those Germans were left-wing rebels with guns in their hands. More were fighting on behalf of the elected government against a coup d'etat spearheaded by the Freikorps in 1920 (The Kapp putsch). Tens of thousands just had the bad luck to be around. By their own account Freikorp units opened fire on unarmed crowds in Berlin, on navvies who had the bad luck to be building a bridge and looked like fun targets and Red Cross nurses whom they had captured tending to those they had shot. A sort of patriotism, I suppose, if you identify the nation entirely with yourself and your messmates but for most people, not quite the thing. To his credit Kratman is the opposite of an anti-semite and one of the key characters is acting in expiation of his part in making the Holocaust possible.
Despite his contempt for those who do not share his views it would be a cheap shot to call Kratman a Nazi. He is not, nor does he sympathise with Nazism in any way, although his views on democracy often seem distinctly ambiguous, but in his admiration for good soldiers he has given the SS a good press it never deserved.