Post
by Doug Nash » Sun Mar 16, 2008 6:23 am
John,
I saw many of the same things you describe during my various journeys to the area - there are still many foxholes, trenches and of course the remains of Westwall bunkers and dragon's teeth. I wasn't really looking for relics though, but I did come away with a rather nasty 12-inch long shell fragment (with brass rotating band) from the field west of the village of Huertgen that I cleaned up and polished. I also broke off a chunk of a demolished bunker (#358) that Klaus Schulz had defended when he was there as a Fahnenjunker with the 353rd Inf.Div. in Sep. 1944. The area that most fascinated me was where I slept one night under the trees - it was an area about 500 meters west of the village of Germeter along the eastern bank of the Kall. This area, which was carpeted with smallish fir trees, was literally pock-marked with shell holes and foxholes - from both sides, probably. Though the features had been softened by 60 years of erosion and blankets of pine needles, you couldn't help but notice that some very serious fighting had taken place there. Signs of the fighting are still all over the place, though the buildings themselves bear few of the scars (just about everything had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt).
As for the typos, that surprised me - so I went back to my original manuscript and lo and behold, my original spelling was correct but at some point along the way, during of the many edits, someone used a spell checker with slightly different dictionary and made the change to the manuscript. After viewing the manuscript about a hundred times, I missed that one (and who knows how many others) because after a while, your eyes glaze over and you can't spot errors even if your life depended upon it. So I guess those will have to be fixed if there is a second edition. Also, I noticed that a detailed footnote about how the Jg.Pz. 38 came to be called a Hetzer also got deleted - can't explain that one, though I guess that AFV purists everywhere are probably shaking their heads at my ignorance -
Glad to hear that you enjoyed the book - after writing and proofing it a thousand times or so, I was getting pretty tired of it, to tell you the truth and was wondering if I had accomplished what I set out to do. From what I've heard so far from about a dozen people who have read it, I guess I struck a nerve, in a good way. Hope that this addresses the historical record and shows people that the VGDs could be pretty damned good and certainly, at least when they were first fielded, did not consist of callow teenagers and drooling old men.
Cheers,
Doug
Abbott: This sure is a beautiful forest.
Costello: Too bad you can't see it for all those trees!