In 1943, the biggest tank battle in history occurs in the fields around Kursk and Prokhorovka. Robbins interweaves four basic storylines: the old Cossack Dimitri, a tank driver under (literally) his son Valentin, the tank commander, deals with the war through the eyes of a traditionalist and clansman, who sees his son slipping away to the colder Soviet mentality. Dimitri’s daughter, Katya, is a “Night Witch,” one of the female night bombing crew; she is shot down rescuing a pilot, and joins a band of fierce partisans led by a gruff “Colonel Bad.” German Colonel Abram Breit is an intelligence officer secretly supplying the Russians with information under the Lucy spy ring. Finally, there’s Luis de Vega, a Spanish SS officer, gaunt and skeletal thanks to a Soviet wound, who hungers for revenge and redemption as the commander of Germany’s new fearsome, supposedly invincible Tiger tanks.Robbins brings it all together in a tight, fast-paced, dramatic, deeply researched book. At 414 pages, it’s an epic, but it centers on the human interest rather than the big picture: Dimitri’s sense of loss, away from his son, his horses, and his swords, and the way he treats the tank like a living steed; Luis’ wound, his anger, his love of bullfighting; Briet’s inner monologue as he betrays his country for all the right reasons; the heroic sacrifices that all the characters make. Robbins doesn’t make any of the characters one-sided; they all have their motivations, histories, and beliefs. We can empathize, if not sympathize, with even the Nazis. It’s a tank battle, but also a battle of wills: the differences between the personalities of Luis, who sees his men as faceless tools to be used and discarded in the undying quest for victory and adulation, and Dimitri, who holds clan above all else, are as telling as the technical differences between their tanks. It’s an exciting, hugely successful historical novel.
This was a pretty good book, but a grim story. A father and son are part of a tank crew desperately defending Mother Russia against the German invaders, and their daughter/sister is a pilot, but she is shot down and captured by partisans. Against long odds and in a desperate fight against a skilled enemy, they struggle to preserve their way of life. Along the way, they deal with hostility from their fellow Soviets and partisans, as well as those sympathetic to the occupiers and the Germans themselves. A good war novel, to be sure.
What do You think about Last Citadel (2004)?
Well worth reading for the deeper understanding of human nature in the Russian culture.And a much more accessible way of understanding how different the war was to Russians than it was to Americans.The accounts of the tank battles are excellent portrayals, but what the night witches did seems impossible. Until you do a bit of research and discover they in fact did fly WW I level airplanes only at night, without parachutes or weapons and in effect tossed bombs out the window, 23,000 tons of them one source told me.
—Brandon
