Feldgrau Author: Stephan Hamilton

[Nicolai]

Your upcoming book sounds pretty solid, I'll have to keep an eye on it. Will it be A4 size like Bloody Streets or A5?

[Frederick L Clemens]

I vote for smaller format - everytime I go to read one of the monster-sized books in bed it gets to be quite cumbersome but from a marketing point of view the bigger books do make you feel like you are getting more.

[Stephan H.]

It is still too earlier in the process to know the exact format. My preference is to publish it the same size as Bloody Streets since Oder Front 1945 is really a second volume in what I plan to be a three part series on the Endkampf. I use the word "series" loosely as I never intended to write three volumes, but as my interest and material in this period of the war has grown, so has my intent. The key difference in format between the two books is that I plan to publish Oder Front 1945 with a split column vs the single column format. Oder Front 1945 is a bigger book than my first as the final manuscript sits at 732 pages minus photos--mainly doublespaced, 12 point font, .5" margins. That’s roughly about 100 pages more than the Bloody Streets manuscript was.

There will be about 130 images in the new book that consist of mainly period H.Gr. Weichsel operational maps. I've scanned all the available H.Gr. Weichsel daily situation maps in at 1200dpi so that I can expand and crop them at either Armee or Korps level. I insert these maps into the appropriate daily battle section of the book. There detail and image quality is generally excellent with very interesting detail shown.

I break down each day between 14 April-4 May into the following subsections where I intersperse the daily operational maps.

An example might be: 20 April

Heinrici’s Account from MS T-9
Summary of Daily Briefs to OKH
Operational Reporting to H.Gr. Weichsel and OKH
3.Pz.Armee
--Verteidigungsbereichen Swinemünde
--XXXII.Korps
--Oder-Korps
--XXXXVI.Pz.Korps
--III.(Germ.)SS-Pz.Korps
9.Armee
--CI.Armee.Korps
--LVI.Pz.Korps
--XI.SS-Pz.Korps
--V.SS.Geb.Korps
--V.Korps (4.Pz.Armee) (When applicable)
12.Armee (When applicable)
21.Armee (When applicable)
Radio and Telephone Logs
Additional Coordinating Instructions, Orders, and Reporting
OKW War Diary
Summary

The sources for this detail are derived mainly from the official war diary, and first person memoirs. I purposely relied very little on secondary sources when writing this book as I found most of them lacking when compared to official documents. I also keep the book at the “operational” level rarely delving below division level—I had the draw the content line somewhere and that was it. Having said that, there is still significant low level unit detail in the daily operational reporting to interest the tactician.

Cheers,
Stephan

[Frederick L Clemens]

If you need manuscript readers at some point, I can probably help.

[Nicolai]

Sounds good, nice to hear that it will be double-spaced if it ends up being A4 size.

Having someone read through the manuscript a time or two before publishing would probably be a good idea, Bloody Streets had an awful lot of typos (Seig Heil, anyone?) that must have slipped through the editing process.

[Dutto1]

Hi Stephan,

I must congratulate you on your first book Bloody Streets,i managed to purchase one of the last copies from Amazon UK in November 2009.I found the book to be the best i have read on the Battle of Berlin ,until i read this post a few months back i did not realise how much of a stir this book caused.

I noticed also you used material from the Cornelius Ryan collection for the book ,is the material from the Last Battle still under used even after the stuff you have used for your book? I am looking for material containing interviews with HJ members SS ,Heer, and Volkssturm members who took part in the fighting alongside civillian accounts basically stuff you did not use for your book,have you got any advice on what is good as i am in the UK ,so i will have to order it over the internet.

I am looking forward to your next book,i will keep an eye out on Helion website for the release date.

Many Thanks

Ron

[Stephan H.]

Ron,

Thanks for the post. . . I’m glad you obtained a copy and enjoyed the book!!

Indeed there are more accounts that can be exploited for research in the Ryan Collection. I culled through most of the veteran accounts and published those with sufficient combat detail, having said that, there are still plenty accounts to exploit—in fact I’ll be self-publishing two smaller books in the coming months (more on those in a later post). Unfortunately there is no easy way to determine if a particular account is good or bad without reading it and that requires you to visit. In other cases, an innocuous folder listing might reveal a treasure trove once you open it. This is primarily due to how the contents were organized. Without a visit you’ll have to place an order direct for those folders of the groups you want. I spoke to Doug McCabe after Bloody Streets was published and several readers already reached out and ordered quite a bit of material. One group of accounts I have not exploited to date are Berlin’s civilian accounts.

You can always e-mail/call Doug directly (his contact info is on the web site) and he will be more than happy to help guide you to the right accounts that you may need.

I doubt there would have been as much of a “stir” with Bloody Streets had the editing been more thorough and the layout been better . . . There are ongoing discussions with the publisher for a new revised and expanded edition planned for 2011, but I will not finalize what a new version (if any) will look like for some months. I will say that I have worked with a board certified Russian translator to translate a significant quantity of unpublished first person Soviet accounts that reveal new details of the street fighting from the Soviet perspective. I just need to decide how to blend them into a future version.

Oder Front 1945 is now in the hands of the publisher and we are just starting to work on the layout. This book has aprox. 140 images, of which 60+ are various Lange Ost and daily H.Gr. Weichsel operational maps that we may publish in a full color insert—but this is not final. The book is due out in Oct/Nov and I’m not sure when Helion will offer it for pre-order.

Since you are in England you may also want to pay a visit to the Library of Scotland as they inherited all of John Erickson’s research material and that collection is not only huge, but like Ryan’s material, contains much raw research ripe for historical exploitation . . . just a thought.

So are you planning to write your own book?

Cheers,
Stephan

[Dutto1]

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for the reply.You are right about the civilian accounts,in the back of The Last Battle Ryan lists all of the German civilians interviewed and he uses very few of them in the book.I contacted Doug McCabe just before Christmas to confirm the procedure on ordering items i shall be placing an order soon.I look forward to your two smaller books do you have a publishing date for them yet ?

I do plan to write a book,i have four projects in mind,the question being which one do i start first ? I have decided whichever project i can get the most research material for first will be the one i start.I have a fascination with the Gotterdammerung
period of the Third Reich,the total collapse of the German War machine, the desperation of the German troops and civilians the fear of the so called "Russian hordes" from the East and their attempts to flee no matter what to reach the Allied lines.One of the projects would be a book about the total collapse of Germany January to May 1945in the East and the West also encompassing the first week of peace.
Anything i write i want it to structured in a way that has a good overview of the general situation at a tactical level but also loaded with eyewitness accounts.

The second project would be about Kursk,yes lots of books have been written about this subject,i would try something different,using many new and previously unused eyewitness accounts of the fighting along with a good tactical overview.The new first hand accounts,i stumbled across last year,they were donated to a archive by the BBC in 1993 after they used part of them for a documentary on the battle.

The third project came to me by chance,early last year i obtained a Third Reich Court file from Leitmeritz in the Sudetenland.The file contained about 98 pages of documents dating from 1938-March 1945 of various requests by Officals and Judges between various other towns in the area and the Justice Ministry in Berlin.Towards the end of the file 1944-45 the file refers to "Untermehmen Richard", which after a little research i discovered was a program run by Hans Kammler who is also mention numerous times in the file.The SS were building tank engines using slave labour there from KZ Leitmeritz.Just after the war a greater much hushed up event would take place in the Sudetenland would take place during the explusion of ethnic Germans.
I will certainly have a look at Erickson s research at the Library of Scotland it could provide lots of good material thanks for the tip Stephan.

Regards

Ron

[Stephan H.]

Ron - you have many good topics to cover! Best of luck and keep the rest of us posted when you finally take one of those books to print.

Stephan

[Stephan H.]

I'm trying my hand at some self-publishing and released the following title on Lulu earlier today:

http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/d ... 5/10985553

Cheers,
Stephan

[Stephan H.]

I'm working on getting out a softbonund edition of Defending the Oder Front, which will be less expensive. That should be up in a few weeks at Lulu and Amazon.com.

I'll provide a quick synopsis: This book presents Martin Gareis' Combat Diary that he kept while in command of the XXXXVI.Pz.Korps (and eventually the Oder-Korps) while on the Oderfront. I've added the complete and unedited interviews of Manteuffel and Mueller-Hillebrand that were given to Ryan. Included are some of the H.Gr.Weichsel war diary entries for the XXXXVI.Pz.Korps and Oder-Korps.

I'd appreciate any feedback if someone gets a copy.

The above book is different in content than The Oder Front 1945 due out in November. It coincidently just went up on Amazon.com for preorder this weekend.

[Nicolai]

Picked up a copy of the ebook version yesterday, I'll post my thoughts when I get around to reading it.

[Richard Hargreaves]

I'm trying my hand at some self-publishing and released the following title on Lulu earlier today:

http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/d ... 5/10985553

Cheers,
Stephan

Hi Stephan,

Whatever happened to the book? I clicked the link and... nichts.

[Stephan H.]

Richard - Well, that's becuase I recently pulled the plug on the Lulu version for a number of reasons. The Manteuffel/M-H/Gaeris material will be incorprated as part of the tentatively titled The Oder Front 1945, Volume II: Documents, Reports, and Personal Accounts to be published in May 2011 by Helion along with aprox. 250 document images from the H.Gr.W. and OKH KTBs. I'll have more info on this in the fall after I finish up the draft. It will contain operational orders, strength reports (manpower and panzer), Diensteinteilung, and Gliederung (when available) for divisions in H.Gr.W. for the Jan-April period.

Cheers

[Richard Hargreaves]

Good title.

Thanks for the update. Another book to add to the wish list.