Too Late

[aggienaut]

   So of course, after having no idea what to write for the weekly LJ Idol topic all week ("Bearing false witness") and finally writing something guaranteed to offend some people and imo not terribly exciting anyway, I NOW remember a story I'd been meaning to write about at some point that would have worked better.

   What follows will be a very rough skeleton / summary of what it would have been.

---

   May 7th, 1946, Prague -- German-held Prague is sandwiched between Red Army forces closing in from the East and US Army forces just a day or two away to the West. Inspired by the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany, insurgents in the city have risen in revolt two days prior. A major motivating factor for this 11th hour revolt may have been to deliver the city to the US forces rather than the brutal Red Army.
   The Waffen-SS is however conducting a violent operation to recapture the city using tanks and airstrikes. With their overwhelmingly better equipment the SS is decimating the resistence. Ironically, a goal of the Germans was to capture the train station so that Army Group Centre to the East could be evacuated westward to surrender to the US.
   When all seems lost, suddenly a division that appears to be German is attacking the SS itself. I'd imagine this must have seemed very confusing at the time. The unit is actually a German unit formed of captured Soviet prisoners of war ("the ROA"), which has just defected. They are all Russian and veterans of the Eastern Front. They have the experience and the equipment to significantly disrupt the SS offensive and turn the tides of battle.
   However as word of the imminent arrival of the Red Army spread, the ROA quickly leaves the city to head West for US held territory, knowing that Soviet policy is to treat anyone who has been captured by the Germans at any point under any circumstances as a traitor. Germans hold sway over the city for one more day (the Waffen SS ignores the official surrender of Germany that has been announced that day) until the Red Army arrives the next day.

   Much of the ROA force succeeds in reaching US lines. There they are rounded up by US forces and forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union where they face execution. Also the US Army could have reached Prague days earlier but halted at the demarcation line that had been negotiated with Stalin.

   On a related note of questionable allegiances, apparently the Waffen-SS in Prague included forcibly conscripted Estonians, who described the experience as "Czech Hell" and were later trusted by the Allies to guard the Nuremburg Trials.


   So yeah, the above is obviously just a summary, but I think it'd make for a really good story. If only I'd thought of it 36 hours ago. ):

Monument to the liberation by the Red Army, Bratislava, Slovakia

Comments

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

Yep, definitely better researched and more interesting :P

It's interesting to note how everyone absolutely loathed the Red Army. I don't remember which film it was that showed the cruelties of the Red Army - they were in no way better than any others heh. But since they were allied forces they were allowed to do all that =/

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

The US "repatriation" of Russians back to the Soviet Union, in many cases knowing they would be executed, is pretty alarming.

Some choice quotes from the wiki article:

"Often prisoners were summarily executed by receiving Communist authorities, sometimes within earshot of the British."

"It was obvious to all that prisoners were sent to a fate of execution, torture, and slave labor."

"The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees. On their return, even the SS men in a neighboring compound lined the wire fence and railed at them for their behavior. The Americans were too ashamed to reply." (wiki quoting a source) (and Plattling itself was ironically a former concentration camp being used by the Americans as an internment camp for POWs and Russian "allies")

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

It was a dirty, dirty war and really, there were no winners in it =/

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

True. I'm presently reading Antony Beevor's D-Day, reading about how one day people would be lining the streets of French towns in Normandy to welcome allied forces, then said forces would have to withdraw and overnight allied bombers would completely level the town to eliminate the Germans there, killing large numbers of the recently jubilant residents.

War. ):

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

yeah ... there's a lot of those cruelties that happened. The allied forces just got to smooth things over, that's the only difference. I'm not saying the Germans were ever right either, but the other side were never complete angels. And it's not exactly the troops or anything, it's the command. I remember a fiction film about life in the trenches during WWI, based on real facts about how they were treated, and it's horrible. The people who were executed as an example by sending them into the no man's land until they were slaughtered ... terrible :(

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Like the beginning of that movie "A Very Long Engagement" I believe it was called, where a bunch of soldiers are being forced to go into no man's land basically as a form of execution / suicide mission because they'd been shot in the hand and it was presumed they were trying to get sent home.

But yeah, I can't imagine life in the trenches, and when it's your turn to attack you're supposed to jump up and run out into no man's land where there's an 80%+ chance you will get killed, but the commanders hope in so doing you MIGHT gain a few feet for them. War has always and will always be cruel and brutal but the trenches sound to me like they take the cake.

[theafaye.livejournal.com]

I didn't get the chance to comment on your Idol post (baby on boob) but yes. That one's a guaranteed flame war on any pagan forum. Doesn't matter how much it's pointed out that there's no way that the term can be anything more than a loose umbrella term for a collection of people whose definition can change according to who uses it, people will insist on their right for it to be their "religion."

Sigh.

There's a good reason I don't call myself pagan.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I can't argue with people who insist on their right to "reclaim" the word as an "umbrella" for themselves and others, but I guess the two further points I'd like to add from that entry is that if specifically one went back in time and enthusiastically told a druid "I'm from the future and I'm a pagan just like you!!" he'd probably kill you (okay, well at least be rather insulted)

or to look at it a different way that might be easier to visualize, its like if someone from 1000 years in our future comes back and says "I'm from the future and I'm a redneck just like you!" to a current Christian, they would probably be understandably rather taken aback.

[theafaye.livejournal.com]

Oh ye Gods, don't get me started on the whole "reclaiming" thing.

Most people don't think about what they're doing when it comes to paganism. They read a few books that tell them what they want to hear, decide it must be right and look no further. Now granted, I can't tell people whether they can or can't use certain terms and they can call themselves whatever they like, but if someone says that their religion is "pagan" then there's a pretty safe bet that I don't have anything in common with them and can't have a meaningful dialogue in any real depth, unless they're still relatively new and haven't had the chance to research further to realise that this isn't the case.

Big difference between saying "I follow a pagan religion" and "My religion is Pagan."

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Big difference between saying "I follow a pagan religion" and "My religion is Pagan."

EXACTLY! That was the main target of my entry, people who honestly believe that "pagan" is a specific religion and profess to belong to it.

[heethen-crone.livejournal.com]

I think this would make a great story. It's truly shameful that the western powers returned those people knowing that they would be made prisoners or worse. I didn't know until I followed the links in this outline. Not something they mention in the history books for sure.

Re the pagan thing, back in the day, people would have laughed themselves sick over the terms we use today such as pagan or heathen. They simply followed the folkways they were brought up in and didn't have a name for it. The "I'm a Wicca" crowd amuses me to no end, which is why, if someone wants to know, I say "fyrnsidu" and then explain it as a reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon practices but if I don't want to get into the whole thing, heathen will do. It's certainly not it's own religion and if people choose to get their knickers in a knot over the story, they need to lighten up. I liked it.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I think I came across the story when reading Antony Beevor's Stalingrad. The Russians who had successfully made it to Allied lines and believed themselves safe were literally rounded up and sent back, as if they were prisoners of war, even though they were ostensibly allied troops in allied custody being transferred to an ally.

Another similar story I want to write, but its a much bigger adventure, is the Czech Legion in WWI. Basically it consisted of Czechs (and Slovaks) who had been captured by Russia from Austro-Hungaria (which then controlled Czechoslovakia), and were organized into Russian military units to fight for an independant Czechoslovakia. When the Russian revolution happened and Russia pulled out of the war, the new Soviet authorities didn't want to repatriate the Czechoslovaks so they were stranded in Russia. During the turmoil of the Russian civil war they actually controlled part of the interior of Russia for awhile. Eventually they were able to make their way EAST to the Eastern ports of Russia to be evacuated out that way. Evacuation here was delayed for some time because the allies decided it was convenient for them to have the Czechs there to destabalize Russia. Finally they were able to get themselves out, sail across the Pacific, cross the United States, sail across the Atlantic, cross Europe and FINALLY GET HOME!

So yeah that story is so long it deserves a novel.


And yeah I agree with your thoughts on the pagan thing. At this risk of riling up the people I already offended even more, I'm kind of thinking of making a sequel entry because I think expanding the two little hypothetical stories I mention in this comment would be fun.

[heethen-crone.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Besides, I always figure if you're pissing a few people off, you're doing something right.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha exactly! :D

[elvenforever.livejournal.com]

My husband digs all that -- he would have loved it. :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'll still write it some time. (:

Also he should read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's a military history that reads like a novel. Really neat stuff.

[elvenforever.livejournal.com]

I'll recommend it to him. He's a big fan of L.E. Modesitt Jr. for fiction kinda like this (also David Weber) but he highly recommends a non-fiction book called "Strategy" by B.H. Liddell Hart. I have a book about WWII by that same author. The guy's amazing if you're into war histories and, well, strategy. :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah the topic was surprisingly difficult. /:

Ah well, better luck next week?