Time Magazine - Agosto/1944
Já que estamos falando de registros de guerra contemporâneos da própria, recomendo a leitura do artigo World Battlefronts, THE WAR: Question Mark da Time Magazine, de agosto de 1944. É sobre o General Heinz Guderian, autor do livro que resenhei no post anterior. Inclusive, usei a capa desta revista naquele post e neste.
A revista é da semana em que Guderian assumiu a chefia do Estado-Maior do Exército alemão. Uma batata quente da pior qualidade em um momento que a Alemanha estava retraindo em todos os fronts. Cada parágrafo é um pedaço de História, com atualidades da época e um pouco de revisão da guerra até ali. O livro Achtung, Panzer! também é citado:
Soon after Hitler’s rise to power, he [Guderian] got the green light to proceed with the formation of 24 motorized infantry companies and lay the foundation of a tank corps to work with them. Around this time he was riding his hobby so hard that many fellow officers regarded him as something of a crackpot, like the tank-minded De Gaulle in France or air-minded Billy Mitchell in the U.S. More fortunate than either, he was a prophet with official support in his own country.
He dashed about briskly, campaigning for tanks and tank warfare. He even appealed to the public. He whipped off pieces for the magazines on the Motor v. the Horse. He hit the market in 1938 with a book, Achtung Panzer! U.S. readers would find it heavy going, but to generals like Rundstedt and Beck it was a disgusting popularization of matters which were none of a civilian reader’s business.
Worst of all, the book became a bestseller. Then Guderian brashly declared his opinion that the armored-force commander ought to command the whole army in battle. If this unseemly activity had continued, the Prussians might have decided to do something about Guderian, but the war came along, and presently, in Poland, in France, in Russia they found the man with the tanks mowing down the opposition. He was popular: he won victories, laurels, decorations, occasionally even field marshals’ batons for his superiors.