End Of The Line

Dr John's take on the Traveling Wilbury's hit from 1989.  The original was primarily composed by George Harrison though the other Wilbury's, Dylan, Petty, Orbison, and Lynne, also received writing credit.

Dr John's version was released in 2022 on his final album, Things Happen That Way, recorded just before his death in 2019.  Also featured on vocals for End Of The Line are the Dr's fellow contemporary New Orleans musician Aaron Neville and young Katie Pruitt, a Nashville singer-songwriter.  Willie Nelson appears on another album track.

New Orleans musician Mac Rebennack Jr, reinvented himself as Dr John The Night Tripper, in connection with the release of his first album, Gris-Gris, in 1968.  Gris-Gris included the songs Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya along with the hallucinatory and mesmerizing I Walk On Guilded Splinters.  This 17-year old had never heard anything like it. 

 

In the early 1970s, Dr John achieved mainstream popularity with singles like Iko Iko, Right Place Wrong Time, and Such A Night (this version from The Last Waltz with The Band).  Dr John released more than 30 studio albums and appeared as a guest artist on a slew of other records. 

 

Aaron Neville, now 85, broke out as an artist in 1966 with the gorgeous Tell It Like It Is, featuring his smooth, gentle tone with his trademark vibrato.  He's had a successful career as a solo artist, in multiple collaborations, most notably with Linda Ronstadt, and as along with brothers Art, Charles, and Cyril as part of the Neville Brothers.  Aaron has also twice performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl, the second time accompanied on keyboards by Dr John.

Well it’s all right, even if they say you’re wrong

It’s all right, sometimes you gotta be strong

It’s all right, as long as you got somewhere to lay 

Well it’s all right, every day is Judgment Day 

Maybe somewhere down the road aways (End of the line) 

You’ll think of me, wonder where I am these days (End of the line) 

Maybe somewhere down the road somebody plays (End of the line) 

Purple Haze 

The Secret To His Success

 He's done pretty well for a guy with no grade point average. 

 

This sweet bastard right here. You probably don’t know his name but you do know he’s been making everything he appears in better since forever. pic.twitter.com/5eJQTrko9F

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) June 22, 2026

Bruce McGill.  Daniel Simpson Day or D-Day from Animal House, the guy with no grade point average at Faber College.  Animal House in 1977 was Bruce's second credited film.  Since then he's appeared in more than 70 theatrical films, 20 TV films, 4 miniseries, and over one hundred TV episodes.

He was Sheriff Dean Farley in 1992's My Cousin Vinny, Walter Hagen in 2000's The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 2012's Lincoln. And he's still working.

In 1985 he guest starred as retired police officer Hank Weldon in one of Miami Vice's classic episodes, "Out Where The Buses Don't Run".  Weldon left the force after having a breakdown when a case he meticulously built against drug lord Tony Arcaro fell apart when Arcaro walked on a technicality. Arcaro is supposedly still around but Crockett and Tubbs have trouble finding him.  This is the final scene.  As usual Miami Vice has a great soundtrack, this time it's Brothers In Arms from Dire Straits. 

The Annotated Roads To Moscow

An edited and updated version of a post from the past about the finest pop song about an historical event, Al Stewart's Roads To Moscow.  It seems appropriate for today as not only is it the 85th anniversary of the state of Operation Barbarossa, the start of the titanic struggle between two evil regimes but because it appears the reputation of both the Communism and Nazism is seeing a revival, including in the United States - as seen with people like Tucker Carlson and the current mayor of New York City, Zorhan Mamdami (1).  This development is stunning to see and represents a failure of our political, cultural, and educational systems.

For over a decade before Barbarossa, the Nazis and Communists alternately collaborated and competed, with Hitler and Stalin carefully watching and, by some accounts, taking tactical inspiration from each other.  

Although Nazis and Communists clashed at times in Germany during the years before Hitler came to power in January 1933, both made their priority the weakening of Weimar democracy, each believing they would be its successor.  Stalin specifically issued instructions making Weimar the communist target more so than the Nazis, even as that regime was in its death throes.

While Hitler only became Chancellor in 1933, Stalin had been the leading figure in the Soviet Union since Lenin's death in 1924, achieving complete control by 1929, cleverly outmaneuvering all of his opponents within the Communist Party.  Stalin then launched his agricultural collectivization program utilizing direct repression as well as starvation as tactics to break any opposition.  Though the Holodomor in Ukraine has attracted the most attention, a huge toll was also taken in other Soviet republics, resulting in five to ten million deaths. 

Soon after coming to power, the Nazis opened the first concentration camps to house, and occasionally murder, political opponents.  In June 1934, Hitler purged his internal opposition, including within the Nazi Party and German Army, in the Night of the Long Knives , with perhaps a thousand being killed in that episode.

On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, head of the Communist party in Leningrad, and the other Bolshevik leader approaching Stalin's popularity, was assassinated.  It is still a subject of debate whether Stalin arranged the murder or merely capitalized on the event to launch the Great Terror.  Starting in 1936, Stalin began a massive purge of the Communist Party, the military(2), and of foreign residents within the country.  Millions more were arrested and the final death toll remains unknown.

An example of the depths to which the Communists descended is when, in 1937-8, provincial party officials were given numerical quotas by Moscow for Category One (to be shot) and Category Two (to be deported to Gulag camps) with the first round of quotas collectively amounting to precisely 386,798 in Category One and 767,397 in Category Two.  The quotas, if not fulfilled, subjected provincial officials to purging by the security apparatus.  To prove their efficiency and loyalty, the provinces exceeded their quotas and asked for more, even though that failed to save many of these same officials who were caught up in the subsequent waves of the purge. 

The foreign residents caught up in the Terror included thousands of Americans, some who came to the Soviet Union seeking work as the Depression in the U.S. reached its peak, some true believers in communism, some who came under contract to supervise construction of the USSR's industrial infrastructure.  All came under suspicion in the late 1930s, with many being shot and others sent to the Gulag where a few survived to tell their stories years later.  You can read more about their fate in The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. 

During this phase Stalin took the opportunity to purge many of those with Jewish ancestry from the ranks of the party and security apparatus.  At the same time, the Nazis were promulgating the Nuremberg Laws, revoking citizenship of German Jews, and accelerating the expulsion of Jews from society and commerce.

In March 1938, Hitler seized Austria and in the fall took possession of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia, with the acquiescence of Britain and France.  In March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia and then launched preparations for an attack on Poland, setting a date of September 1 for the beginning of the war.

The world was shocked when, on August 24, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty occurred.  While the public parts of the treaty set forth a ten year non-aggression pact, it was the secret provisions, only revealed years later, that were the significant aspects of the agreement.  The Nazis and Communists agreed on how to divide up Poland between them.  They also further defined spheres of influence with the three Baltic states falling to the communists, who occupied them in June 1940 and proceeded to execute anyone who might object to their rule. For more on the treaty, read The Pact.

Finland and the Bessarabia region of Romania also fell within the Soviet orbit.  The latter was occupied the Soviets in 1940, while in late 1939, the Red Army initiated a surprise attack on Finland.  While the early part of the war was an embarrassing disaster for the Soviets, the greatly outnumbered Finns were finally worn down and agreed to cede some of their territory. 

Poland was dismembered.  Along with placing the Jewish population in ghettos, the Germans executed about 60,000 Polish bureaucrats, intellectuals, and priests in a program to eliminate what they deemed the most capable elements within Poland.  Meanwhile, the Soviets were conducting a similar program of executions and deportations in their portion of that country.

From the signing of the Pact until Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union was Germany's primary external supplier of war materials, supplies that enabled the Nazi assaults on Norway, the Netherland, Belgium, France, and Britain in 1940 and on Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941.  Stalin also ordered Communist Parties in Western Europe to undermine their governments attempts to prosecute the war against Germany, while directing communists in the United States to campaign against any American assistance to, or involvement with, Britain and France, an effort that party members like Pete Seeger and Dalton Trumbo wholeheartedly supported. 

 

And now we come to Roads to Moscow . . .  

 

I saw Roads to Moscow performed in the fall of 1974 at the Orpheum Theater in Boston when Stewart toured in support of his new album Past, Present, and Future.  The performance was both musically and visually striking, as Stewart and his band played backed by three enormous video screens stretching across the entire stage showing war footage and ending with a picture of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on all the screens; The Gulag Archipelago had been published in December 1973 and Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974. 

The events described in the song began on June 22, 1941 as Operation Barbarossa, the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union, triggering the worst of the many conflicts that made up World War Two.  By its end in May 1945, 4.3 million Germans were dead, mostly military personnel (along with three quarters of a million of its Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Finnish allies), and perhaps up to 27 million Russians, two thirds of them civilians (German pre-war plans called for the starvation of 30 million Russian civilians in order to free up food supplies for civilians and military and to allow for German immigration to the occupied territories).  Horror upon horror piled up.  Soviet secret police routinely executed all imprisoned political prisoners in cities from which the Red Army was retreating in 1941 and upon the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944-45 more imprisonments and executions followed - the Soviets had already executed 15-20,000 captured Polish officers in the spring of 1940 (which they tried to blame on the Germans).  When they reached Germany, Soviet forces were unleashed and encouraged by commanders to engage in an orgy of murder and rape.  It was in the wake of the German attack in 1941 that the first Nazi organized and systematic killing of Jews took place with roaming units executing perhaps a million in mass shootings. The beginning of Barbarossa also saw the start of planning for the Final Solution, culminating in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 which set as its goal the extermination of the eleven million Jews in Europe.

Stewart's song balances a vivid, poignant, brilliantly constructed, and historically accurate lyric with a striking melody, a Russian influenced chorus, and an evocative and emotional arrangement.  He tells the story of a Soviet soldier, one of tens of millions of people caught in the horrific tragedy caused by two of the most brutal regimes to ever be inflicted upon the human race - Nazi Germany, led by Adolph Hitler, and the Communist Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.  It's a world of spiritual darkness and limited and terrible choices for the people trapped by those events, a dilemma also brought to life by Alan Furst in his splendid series of novels set in the same time period - particularly Night Soldier and Dark Star.  Most of those in Eastern Europe who opposed both Nazis and Communists ultimately suffered a tragic fate (see, for instance, the astonishing and inspiring story of Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered for Auschwitz).

Let's look at the lyrics and explore the song in more detail.

They cross over the border the hour before dawn

At about 315am on the morning of June 22, 1941, the German army launched Operation Barbarossa.  The attack, including 14 Finnish and 13 Romanian divisions, involved 3.8 million soldiers, 3,400 tanks, 3,500 aircraft and 700,000 horses.  Facing the onslaught were about 2.5 million front line Soviet troops (the Red Army had about 4 million men under arms in total in the European part of the country).

Though Hitler and Stalin had been allies since the August 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty, which divided Poland and the Baltic States between them, they were long-term ideological enemies and a conflict was inevitable at some point.  However, the specific timing of the German attack was dictated by Hitler's desire to remove what he viewed as Britain's last hope for support in the war, the same motive that drove Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 (for more on this read Bonapartaroo Barbarossa).

Ideological considerations drove Nazi decisions as to how the war would be conducted.  The inhabitants of occupied portions of the Soviet Union were to be starved, driven out, or left as slave labor for German settlers, captured Red Army communist commissars executed, and roving extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) would murder Jews who came under German occupation.

In the months leading to the attacks, Stalin dismissed multiple warnings from his own intelligence services as well as from Churchill and Roosevelt, claiming they were provocations designed to entice him into a war with Germany that would only benefit the Western capitalist powers.  As late as the night of June 21-22 he ordered the execution of German defectors who entered Soviet lines to warn of the imminent attack.  The result was that Red Army troops were left deployed in forward positions near the border, in vulnerable formations ill-suited to defense.

The Soviet Army was still recovering from Stalin's 1937-38 purge of senior military leadership in which at least 75% were killed, and its poor performance in the 1939-40 Winter War with Finland gave the German military what proved to be unwarranted confidence that the Russians would be quickly defeated.  This overconfidence also contributed to the inexplicable lack of attention by the Germans to the logistical challenges of a massive campaign designed to penetrate deeply into the Soviet Union, challenges that were ultimately to doom Barbarossa.

The border referred to in the lyric was different from the 1939 Soviet border.  With the 1939 pact, Stalin was able to occupy half of Poland, all of the Baltic States and the Romanian province of Bessarabia.  By advancing the border, he gained strategic depth against attack, while also arresting, murdering, and deporting hundreds of thousands of citizens of those countries who he believed might oppose his plans (a sordid tale told in disturbing detail in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands).  In addition, with his surprise attack on Finland in October 1939 he gained buffer room for Leningrad and the crucial northern port of Murmansk.

Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay

The Luftwaffe destroyed over 2,000 Soviet aircraft on the ground that first day, losing only 35 planes in its attacks.  More than 3,900 Soviet planes were destroyed in the first three days, giving the Germans overwhelming air superiority.

Waiting for orders we held in the wood
Word from the Front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away

Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and our knees
And all that I ever, was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red, silhouetting the smoke on the breeze

In those first days and weeks many Soviet troops found themselves isolated behind the rapidly advancing Germans, often left without orders amidst the command chaos.  "The Front" refers not to the front lines where the soldiers were, but to the organization of Russian armies into "Fronts", equivalent to American Army Groups on the Western Front.  In other words, they heard nothing from the High Command.

While many isolated or surrounded soldiers surrendered (3 million by the end of 1941, 75% of whom would die in German captivity) many thousands were eventually able to find their way back through gaps between the rapidly advancing German Panzer units and the slower infantry following behind, to rejoin their comrades, our narrator being one of those.  Others remained free but behind enemy lines, becoming the core of partisan units that would harass the Germans for years (and which make an appearance later in the lyrics).

All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine
Smolensk and Vyazma soon fell
By autumn we stood with our backs to the town of Orel

In this passage, the narrator uses the terms "us" and "we" in reference not to his personal location but rather to the overall plight of the Red Army.

The German attack was divided into three army groups.  Army Group North advanced through the Baltic States towards Leningrad, while Army Group South drove the Soviets, "back through the Ukraine", culminating in September with a great encirclement near Kiev in which more than 700,000 Soviets were killed or captured.

The third, and initially most powerful, group was Army Group Center, taking the road to Moscow along which Smolensk, Vyazma, and Orel were located.  The Battle of Smolensk lasted from July 10 to September 10, with the Red Army losing nearly a half million soldiers dead, wounded, or captured.  The battle was prolonged because in its early stages Hitler diverted panzer units to the south for the Kiev encirclement.  The delay in capturing Smolensk may have fatally delayed the German drive on Moscow.

With the panzers returning to Army Group Center, the advance on Moscow resumed in late September, racing against the onset of winter.  During October, the Germans pulled off two more giant encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk, in which another million Soviet soldiers were killed or captured.  Orel fell on October 3 to General Guderian's tanks.

Closer and closer to Moscow they come
Riding the wind like a bell
General Guderian stands at the crest of a hill

On November 15, the Germans began their final push on Moscow.  General Heinz Guderian (1888-1954), commander of the Second Panzer Army, is considered one of the finest tank generals of the war, performing brilliantly during the Poland invasion and then leading the armored spearheads in the 1940 French campaign.  Guderian's task was to approach the Soviet capital from the southwest and encircle it.  Though he made some advances, his overextended forces were halted short of the capital and left in vulnerable defensive positions.  On December 26, 1941 he would be dismissed from command because of a dispute with his superiors (including Hitler) over how to respond tactically to the recently launched Soviet counter-offensive.  Recalled to duty by Hitler in 1943 after the disaster at Stalingrad, he was charged with rebuilding the army's panzer capabilities.  On July 21, 1944, the day after the failed assassination attempt against Hitler, Guderian was appointed Army Chief of Staff.  Though often arguing with Hitler about tactical decisions, he remained a faithful supporter of the Fuehrer until the end of the war.

(Guderian)

Winter brought with her the rains
Oceans of mud filled the roads
Gluing the tracks of their tanks to the ground
While the sky filled with snow

In this section, two weather periods are mixed together.  From late October until mid-November came a period of cold rain, turning the primitive Soviet road network into a sea of mud.  Then came freezing temperatures, making the roads stable and more passable.  The final German push was launched in this window before the onset of brutal cold and snow made offensive operations much more difficult.

(Mud season, November 1941)

And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the snow on the breeze

Now the red is silhouetting "the snow on the breeze" rather than "the smoke on the breeze" of the first verse, signaling the passage of time from the warmth, sun, and disaster of June to the bitter cold, snow, and hope of December.

In the footsteps of Napoleon the shadow figures stagger through the winter

The German offensive continued until December 5 under increasingly taxing conditions with heavy snow and temperatures plunging to well below zero.  Counting on achieving complete victory by the end of fall, German soldiers had not been issued winter clothing, nor were tanks, assault guns, and motor vehicles designed and equipped to operate in these conditions.  At these temperatures the recoil fluid, lubricating oil, and firing pins on German artillery, anti-tank, and machine guns failed, tank turrets would not turn, and trucks had to be kept constantly running, using precious fuel.  And all these troubles were amplified by the already overstressed German supply system collapsing in the winter conditions.

Yet despite these difficulties, isolated German units got within 15 miles of the Kremlin, while to the northwest the main German forces were within 25 miles of the city.  

 

A German officer wrote of conditions during the advance:

It is icy cold . . . To start the engines, they must be warmed by lighting fires under the oil pan.  The fuel is partially frozen, the motor oil is thick, and we lack antifreeze to prevent the cold water from freezing.

The remaining limited combat strength of the troops diminish further due to the continuous exposure to the cold.  It is much too inconvenient to shelter the troops from the weather . . . In addition, the automatic weapons of the groups and platoons often fail to operate, because the breeches can no longer move.

On December 3, the commander of Fourth Panzer Group reported its offensive combat power "has run out" because of "physical and moral over-exertion, loss of a large number of commanders, inadequate winter equipment".

Finally recognizing the reality of the brutal conditions and the disintegration of offensive capabilities Hitler and the High Command issued a halt order on December 5.

References to Napoleon were also a constant theme of Soviet propaganda which constantly reminded German troops of the fate of the last western invader, whose myth of invincibility, along with his army, disappeared in the Russian winter.

Falling back before the gates of Moscow
Standing in the wings like an avenger

What kept the German high command pressing ahead for so long despite the casualties and exhaustion of men and equipment was the persistent belief the Russians had exhausted their reserves and were on the verge of collapse.  It was a massive miscalculation, demonstrating the complete failure of German intelligence assessments.  They underestimated the willingness of Stalin to move troops from the Soviet Far East as well as the capability of the brutal and ruthless Soviet system to mobilize an almost endless number of reserves (unlike Hitler, who resisted fully mobilizing the German economy and populace until 1944, Stalin immediately took such measures).  Between June 22 and December 31, the Soviets lost 4 million men, the equivalent of its entire army on June 22, yet still had 4 million under arms at the end of the year.  It is hard to believe any other society surviving with that scale of human loss in such a short time.

Less than 24 hours after the German offensive halted, the Soviets began launching their own attacks, designed to push back and isolate the German forces near Moscow.  In a series of actions lasting until the beginning of March 1942, the exhausted Germans were forced back more than 100 miles, permanently eliminating the threat to Moscow.

With the exception of the British medium and heavy tanks which reached the Soviet Union before the Moscow offensive, Western ally aid played a small part in stopping the German advance.  However, the scale of British, and particularly American, aid became enormous as the war progressed and without it the speed and scale of the Soviet advances in 1943-44 would not have been possible (3).

While Soviet soldiers were somewhat better equipped for the weather, the winter conditions still took a toll, enhanced by Soviet commanders still favoring frontal assaults.  Thus, despite its success, the tactical shortcomings of the Red Army can be seen in the disparity in casualties during its three month offensive - 1.6 million for the Soviets versus 262,000 for the Germans.

And far away behind their lines the partisans are stirring in the forest
Coming unexpectedly upon their outposts, growing like a promise

You'll never know, you'll never know
Which way to turn, which way to look, you'll never see us
As we're stealing through the blackness of the night
You'll never know, you'll never hear us

Though not a major factor in 1941, by the following year the partisan threat became a major problem for the extended supply lines of the German army.  Partisan warfare in Russia was on a completely different, and larger, scale than in most of the rest of Europe, involving huge numbers, with organized large scale assaults on German rear lines.  Big chunks of the Soviet countryside behind enemy lines remained out of German control throughout the war, forcing many troops to be diverted to fighting partisans.

And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming

Using "amber" in this context is very interesting.  Amber is a fossilized tree resin, valued as a gemstone.  From 1500 BC there was an Amber Road by which this material was moved in trade from the shores of the Baltic to the Mediterranean.  The leading source of amber was near what used to be the city of Konigsberg in Prussia, now known as Kaliningrad and part of Russia since 1945.

The famous Amber Room was initially constructed in Konigsberg and gifted in 1716 by the Prussian King to Peter the Great of Russia.  Installed in a palace outside of Petersburg (later Leningrad), the room was expanded, eventually covering 590 square feet and containing over 6,000 pounds of amber on panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors.

(The Amber Room)

 

During the war the German Army dismantled the Amber Room and transported it back to Konigsberg.  Disappearing at the end of the war, its location remains unknown, one of the last mysteries of the conflict.

The voice of amber is soothing - its message that things will get better.  The next lines tell us how:

The morning road leads to Stalingrad
And the sky is softly humming

We've moved ahead several months to the late summer of 1942.  Unlike 1941, when the German Army was powerful enough to attack the Soviets from across its entire front, the Nazis summer offensive would be more limited in scope.  On June 28, the Germans attacked in the south, aiming for the oil fields of the Caucasus region and the heavy industrial town of Stalingrad.  The Germans advanced quickly, nearly reaching the Caspian Sea, but became bogged down in Stalingrad, with an increasingly obsessed Hitler insistent upon its capture.  The fighting lasted for almost six months ending in catastrophe for the Nazi regime with the destruction of the Sixth Army and the allied Hungarian and Romanian armies, along with heavy losses in other German units. 

(Russian soldiers, Stalingrad)


On February 2, 1943 the last frozen and exhausted remnants of the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Red Army amid the ruins of Stalingrad, ending a battle that started in the last week of August 1942.  Of  320,000 soldiers in the Sixth Army, 91,000 were still alive to surrender, of whom only 5,000 ultimately survived to return to Germany, most released after Stalin's death in 1953, eight years after the war ended.  Germany's Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian allies lost another 300-400,000 dead, wounded and captured.  As many as a half million Soviet soldiers may have died in the battle; including wounded and missing, Red Army casualties exceeded one million. 

In a military sense the failure to knock the Soviets out by the fall of 1941 was the turning point in the war, the point where unconditional victory by Germany became impossible, but Stalingrad was the symbolic turning point of the war and both Stalin and Hitler were aware of its symbolism at the time.  The horror of the battle from the Russian perspective is captured best in Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, one of the greatest works of 20th century literature, in a section recounting the struggle of an isolated Red Army squad to hold a ruined building amidst the rubble of the city.  Of course, being a Russian novel, everyone dies.  Grossman, a Red Army newspaper correspondent during the war, had been present for months at Stalingrad, spending time in a building on the front lines like that described in the novel, and later accompanied the troops who discovered the Nazi extermination camps in Poland (of which he wrote the first accounts).  The wartime and immediate post-war experience transformed him, and for years he secretly worked on Life and Fate, a novel portraying Nazism and Communism as equivalent.  When he attempted to publish the book during the years of the Khrushchev "thaw" in the early 1960s, the party reacted by sending the KGB to seize the manuscript as well as the typewriter and ribbon on which it had been written.  Fortunately, one copy survived and in the early 1980s, years after Grossman's death, it was smuggled to the West and finally published.

After Stalingrad, German military leaders no longer believed the war could be won, the question being whether it would be lost.

Two broken Tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind
We wait in the lines, for the final approach to begin
It's been almost four years, that I've carried a gun
At home it'll almost be spring
The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin

The lyrics here are very cleverly structured.  The first line tells us of "two broken Tigers" followed by a reference to "the final approach" but we don't know where or when it is.  The next line tells us it's been "almost four years that I've carried a gun", placing us in 1945, but still not giving us a location as Soviet armies are fighting from the Baltic to Hungary.  Then it's revealed that the flaming Tigers are also "lighting the road to Berlin", creating a vivid and precise word picture.

The Tiger was the heaviest and most powerful tank produced by Germany during the war.  Like much German equipment it was over engineered, overly complex to manufacture, requiring high level maintenance to keep it in the field, and well-maintained roads and bridges to support its weight. The Tiger I was produced from 1942 to 1944 and the Tiger II from 1944 on, but fewer than 2,000 made it to the army.  When it was available and running the Tiger proved devastatingly effective.

(Tiger II)

 

It's now April 16, 1945.  The Red Army is less than 50 miles from Berlin.  Much has transpired since the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943.  In July 1943 Hitler attempted his last major attack on the Eastern Front near the city of Kursk.  It quickly proved unsuccessful, the Soviets counterattacked, and from then until the end of the war the Red Army was on the offensive. The siege of Leningrad ended and most of the Ukraine was reconquered by the end of 1943.  In June 1944, the Soviets crushed Army Group Center and drove the Germans out of Russia, advancing into Poland where by late July they were on the outskirts of Warsaw.  Then followed another of the countless tragedies of the war when the Polish Home Army rose up to evict the Germans.  Stalin, who opposed the anti-communist Poles, ordered the Red Army to stand by while the Nazis crushed the uprising, killing 200,000 Poles and razing the city (for more on the uprising read Warsaw Does Not Cry).

In late 1944, the Soviets advanced into the Balkans, causing Romania and Bulgaria to switch sides and reaching the borders of Hungary.

On January 12, 1945 the Russians renewed their attack on the Polish front, sweeping away the Germans quickly advancing to the Oder River near Berlin, where they paused to regroup for the final assault.

Ah, quickly we move through the ruins that bow to the ground
The old men and children they send out to face us, they can't slow us down
All all that I ever, was able to see
The eyes of the city are opening now, it's the end of a dream  

The Berlin campaign lasted from April 16 through May 2.   Though the assault contributed to the "ruins that bow to the ground" much of the city was already ruined by American and British air raids, some consisting of more than 1,000 bombers striking the city.

The reference to "old men and children" refers to the Volksstrum ("People's Storm"), a national militia consisting of all men between 16 and 60 capable of bearing arms, formed in October 1944, as the manpower needs of the crumbling Third Reich became ever more desperate (even boys of 14 and 15 would see service by the end).  Poorly armed and trained, the Volkssturm units were of varying effectiveness and took heavy casualties.

Notice the contrast with the opening verse of the song.  In 1941, the narrator speaks of defeat, confusion, and retreat; four years later he is moving triumphantly forwards to victory.

(Berlin 1945) 

Despite the claim that "old men and children . . . they can't slow us down", the Volkssturm and remaining regular Wehrmacht units imposed heavy losses on the Red Army - 79,000 dead and 270,000 wounded in less than three weeks, a per day toll higher than any the Soviets had suffered since the dark days of 1941.  The human cost was made higher by Stalin's cynical move to place Marshals Zhukov and Koniev in competition to be first to Berlin, relentlessly mocking and scolding them, leading to reckless frontal assaults, particularly by Zhukov (for more on him read The Secret of Khalkin Gol).  And, with the encouragement of Stalin and the Red Army command, the victorious soldiers took a terrible vengeance on German civilians.

I'm coming home, I'm coming home
Now you can taste in the wind, the war is over 
And I listen to the clicking of the train wheels as we roll across the border

The lyric brims with optimism.  Against all odds, our narrator has survived and looks forward to being reunited with his family.  In reality the odds were low that any soldier on the front line on June 22, 1941 would be alive and healthy enough to be fighting in Berlin nearly four years later.

8.6 million Red Army personnel died in the war; effectively the original 1941 army was killed twice over.  In comparison, the United States suffered 296,000 battlefield deaths with another 100,000 dead due to accidents and illnesses.

Nor were all the Russian dead solely the responsibility of the German army.  Life for the Red Army soldier during the war was brutal.  Commanders employed tactics that wasted countless lives.  If you died, particularly early in the war, it was unlikely your family would be notified.  Any infraction, real or imagined, was subject to harsh discipline and extreme punishment.  During the first 18 months of the war (the only period for which we have figures), 160,000 Soviet soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion.  By comparison, only one American was executed for these offenses during the entire war.  For those not summarily executed there were the Punishment Battalions and Companies to which officers and soldiers were sentenced to be used, in Stalin's words, at "the most difficult parts of the front, to give them the possibility to redeem their crimes against their country with blood".  The Punishment units were deployed for tasks such as suicidal frontal assaults and the clearing of minefields by marching through them, making it no surprise that an estimated 400,000 died in the process.  Their existence was such an embarrassment to the Soviets after the war that the existence of the units was officially denied.

In Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, Antony Beevor tells the tale of a Soviet lieutenant caught in this madness.  Captured by the Germans in August 1942, he manages to escape and rejoin the Red Army, where he is promptly arrested, charged as a deserter, and sentenced to a Punishment Company.  Realizing his sentence is an effective death penalty, he deserts to the Germans!  We don't know his fate but it is unlikely he had a happy ending.

And then there were the Red Army's blocking detachments formed to shoot down retreating soldiers - retreating Red Army soldiers.  In this clip from the movie Enemy At The Gates, which takes place in Stalingrad, you can watch (about 2 minutes in) a blocking detachment in action (the first 20 minutes of the movie are stunning, after that it falls apart).  

The optimism of those that survived extended beyond the relief of being alive and reuniting with family.  The memoirs and recollections of returning soldiers and officers are filled with belief and hope that conditions in the Soviet Union would be improved.  There was a feeling that the common Soviet citizen had proven to Stalin they could be trusted, that the regime need not fear them, that the fear of being subject to arbitrary justice would end, it would be a new start for the Soviet people and a new and more cordial relationship with their government. It was not to be.

And now they ask me of the time
That I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
"They only held me for a day, a lucky break", I say
They turn and listen closer

I'll never know, I'll never know
Why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of Holy Russia
And it's cold and damp in this transit camp
And the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers
The snow will soon be coming

In his account of the German-Soviet struggle, Absolute War, author Chris Bellamy writes, "the Red Army was the only one in the world where being taken prisoner counted as desertion and treason".  Stalin believed any soldier who allowed himself to be captured was a traitor and potential counter-revolutionary, and Russians exposed to Westerners for any length of time, a danger to the Soviet state.  Bellamy adds:

The Soviet government and military command had absolutely no interest in what happened to Soviet people in German captivity.  When prisoners of war who survived were released at the end of the war [3 of the 4 million POWs died due to the German policy of exposing them to the elements and leaving them to starve, though a small number survived long enough to serve as guinea pigs for the initial testing of the newly constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz], they were usually sent to the Gulag or shot, and the same fate even befell many who had fought and crawled their way out of German encirclements during the war.

Our narrator falls into this last group.  His years of valiant service and suffering are to no avail.

Also subject to this treatment were civilians who either volunteered or been seized and taken to Germany as slave laborers.  Bellamy estimates that up to 1.8 million returning Soviet citizens were sent to Gulag camps or shot.

To their disgrace, both Britain and America contributed to this horror.  In 1945 and 1946, the two countries forcibly repatriated over a million Russians who did not want to return to the Soviet Union.  While it was the British who insisted on honoring agreements made with Stalin during the course of the war, the United States eventually went along.  The returnees were sent to the Gulag or shot.

For those escaping the Gulag or execution, optimism proved misplaced.  Stalin believed that after the "laxity" of the war years, Soviet discipline needed to be reimposed to prevent any sliding back from the pre-war accomplishments of the state.  The post-war years proved grimly repressive with further waves of purges and the elimination of those tiny, fragile zones of personal autonomy some had carved out during the war.  Stalin even ordered the removal of crippled and disabled war veterans from the streets of Moscow because he felt their presence demoralizing.  It was in this atmosphere that a young returning officer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, found himself sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for telling a joke about Stalin.

And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers, "Never"
And the evening sighs and the steely Russian skies go on forever

I find these the saddest lines in music and no matter how often I hear them they affect me as powerfully as the first time.  They represent the betrayal of the hopes and dreams of people caught up in a horrible time, who thought they'd survived the worst, only to find themselves condemned to death, exile, and lives of  fear and hopelessness.(4)  An estimated 18 million people were imprisoned in Gulag camps between 1929 and 1953, with 2.4 million still in the camps when Stalin, who was planning another huge purge at the time, mostly directly at the Jewish population, died in 1953.  

We take leave of our narrator as he disappears into the mist beneath the steely Russian skies passing to an unknown fate, like so many other millions.  These prophetic lines from the poet Osip Mandlestam (1891-1938), who himself died in a Gulag transit camp for committing "counter-revolutionary activities" consisting of writing a poem mocking Stalin, provide the tombstone for those souls.

Mounds of human heads
Are wandering into the distance
I dwindle among them
Nobody sees me

(Secret Police photo of Mandelstam.  He died of typhoid fever on December 27, 1938.  His body lay unburied along with others who died that winter, until all were thrown into a mass grave dug in the spring.)

(Prisoner 282, Solzhenitsyn)  

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(1)  Mayor Mamdami is a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is also fielding many candidates this year for national, state, and local offices.  Despite its name, the DSA is not a democratic socialist group, it is a communist organization dedicated to the destruction of the United States.  The U.S. has had socialist organizations that were actually democratic such as Norman Thomas' Socialist Party in the 1930s which was fiercely anti-communist and indeed, the original DSA.

In October 2023, Maurice Isserman resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that Mamdami and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain members of.  In 1982 Isserman was a founding member of the DSA, the lead founder being the late Michael Harrington.  Isserman and Harrington actually were Democratic Socialists.  I believe Harrington was mistaken in many of his political ideas but he was a decent and moral person, unlike the current leadership of the DSA. The DSA is another of the many institutions in America that carry the same name from decades ago but have been subverted from within and are now completely different in substance.  The current DSA is a authoritarian communist organization heavily seasoned with settler-colonist ideology.  It is an enemy of civilization.

Isserman resigned for several reasons, including:

- The DSA's failure to denounce what he described as the "anti-Jewish pogrom" by Hamas on October 7, which he characterized as "politically and morally bankrupt".

- The capture of the DSA by groups like Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and the Communist Caucus—which value ideological purity over democratic socialist values.  He described these groups as "entryists", writing, "In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members". 

(2)  Scholars have cited several potential reasons for the military purge, with some believing that German intelligence played a role by inserting false information about a Red Army military conspiracy against Stalin into the Soviet intelligence network, triggering Stalin's actions.

(3) US and British material shipments to the Soviet Union during the war included:

400,000 Jeeps/trucks (1/3 of all Soviet motor vehicles)

14,000 airplanes

13,000 tanks

8,000 tractors

2.7 million tons of petrol

55% of all Soviet aviation fuel

1/3 of all Soviet explosives

2,000 locomotives

15 million pairs of boots

4.5 million tons of food

55% of all aluminum used by Soviets

80% of all copper used by Soviets

35,000 radio stations

380,000 field telephones

956,000 miles of telephone cable

(4)  I found an indicator of our loss of historical knowledge when looking at YouTube videos of Roads to Moscow using war footage to illustrate its lyrics and when watching recent videos of people reacting to the song.  All of them got the references to the horrors of war and how bad the Nazis were but none of them understood the significance of the final verses nor the details of Stalin's regime before the war.

The Understanding

 On April 4 I wrote about the latest iteration of the Iran War in Further on Mastering The Tides Of The World.  I refer to it as the latest iteration because Iran declared war on the United States in 1979 and that declaration remains in effect.

We are at war once again, this time with Iran.  Before it started I did not know what the right course of action was.  Now that it has commenced I think it essential we achieve victory along the lines outlined by Secretary of State Rubio.  This is a circumstance where, having started the task, failure to achieve these outcomes will have serious long-term negative consequences for the United States.  I am aware of the sunk cost fallacy but, in this case, we need to continue.  I'm also painfully aware of the potential for unforeseen consequences, a theme that has prompted a number of THC posts.

We now have a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran.  In 2015 I wrote several posts on the Iran Nuclear Deal, which, as a reminder, was a "political commitment", not a treaty, Executive Agreement, signed document, or legally binding, so thought I'd take a look at the MOU, which is also just a political commitment (though in this case signed by the parties).

Beyond that, I am not sure how to characterize the document.  Partly because it reads more like a 60-day ceasefire agreement pending a final deal and partly because Donald Trump is one of the parties.  Point 3 of the 14 Point agreement reads:

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran commit to negotiating and achieving the final deal in maximum 60 days, extendable with mutual consent. 

In April, after mentioning my uncertainty about whether to initiate another phase of the Iran conflict, I stated the need to achieve victory along the line mentioned by Marco Rubio, including elimination of the nuclear and ballistic missile threats.  I did not reference President Trump because I could not find a coherent set of demands by the President, other than blustering and often contradictory outbursts.  Nor did the President ever set forth for the American people a clear explanation of why now and what his goals were, a necessity if you are entering a prolonged conflict.

Moreover, we know from the past decade that Trump has a short attention span, is often fuzzy in his language, improvises as he goes along, is subject to bouts of pettiness, and corrupt, making it impossible to predict where he will end up on any issue or, indeed, if there is any final ending.

Trump has now said many things about Iran and given different and conflicting messages.  He did the same regarding tariffs, where his justifications changed on almost a daily basis.  It's why I always wait a while to comment on anything involving Trump.  Reacting to anything he says on Monday is useless because he often completely changes his tune on Tuesday and then switches again on Wednesday.

He also seems to regard every negotiation as a form of commercial real estate deal.  When it comes to foreign policy that can sometimes works (see Venezuela and, perhaps, Cuba(1)) where ideology does not play a significant role.  But it does with the Iranian regime which has consistently, since it came to power in 1979, acted in accordance with its ideology, even at great cost to the welfare of its people.  Trump seems to think the enticement of dollars and business will lead it to change its ideology.  I believe he is mistaken, just as FDR was when it came to the Soviet Union (see Personal Handling). 

For all of those reasons, I had reservations, because with Trump you never know where you stand. 

Let's start by looking at the situation pre and post this latest round:

1.  The Straits of Hormuz were open to transit for all vessels.  However, Point 5 of the MOU concedes de facto veto power to Iran:

Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days, only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the tactical and military obstacles and de-mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz. 

2.  The Iran regime was subject to severe sanctions.  Under the MOU those will be lifted.

The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, i.e. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors resolutions and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule. 

3.  The Iran regime was under severe financial pressure as its infrastructure and financial stability crumbled.  Under the MOU, the U.S. has pledged up to $300 billion in "other people's money" for Iranian reconstruction.  Given the U.S. was focused on military, not civilian targets including energy infrastruture, what are these reconstruction funds to be used for?  As I pointed out in the 2015 deal, money is fungible and can be used for anything, including continuing to fund Iran's terror proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas.

The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion (£225 billion) for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

4.  Iran's ballistic missile capabilities were unrestricted and proved to be considerable in this latest round.  They remain unrestricted.

5.  Iran had pledged not to develop nuclear weapons.  It reiterates that pledge in the MOU, adding that it will not "procure" such weapons.  No one believed this in 2015 and no one believes this now.

Under the MOU, the pre-attack status quo has not been preserved.  Iran is better off now than it was.  I would not characterize that as a U.S. victory.

In their public statements, President Trump and VP Vance are stressing the "moderation" of Iran's new leaders.  We've been down this road before as Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama (2) all fell for the moderation line, while Bush II passively refused to retaliate when Iranian IED's killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War.   I think they will be disappointed.

I think Trump lost interest in the whole subject when Iran did not collapse in the first couple of weeks and has moved on to other things that have caught his attention like his self-generated quarrel with Italy's Meloni over whether she asked for a photo with him.  A puzzled and furious Meloni, who has generally been supportive of Trump over the years, responded:

"Donald Trump's statements are completely fabricated. I am frankly stunned. I don't ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this toward his own allies. After all, it is not the first time."

"I can only say it's a shame he doesn't show the same resolve toward with the enemies of the West and toward the enemies of the United States — toward leaders with whom he, on the other hand, is much more accommodating. But there is one thing he should remember: Italy and I do not beg." 

While the MOU is only a cease fire I don't think Trump will have the appetite to resume force in the event of a failure to reach a final deal.  Unless he gets ticked off by something or someone. Who knows?  He certainly doesn't.

As a practical matter there are big difficulties ahead.  Gulf State sources, with the exception of Qatar, friends of the Iranians, Hamas, and the Trump family(3), are not happy with the MOU provision looking for them to fund Iran's rebuilding.  On the other hand, the U.S. proved such a feckless ally they may be forced to get closer to Iran for protection. 

Point 14 states:

The final deal will be endorsed by a binding United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution.

However,  France's Foreign Minister yesterday said it would not approve lifting current UN sanctions unless the final agreement addressed Iran's use of terrorist proxies and its ballistic missile program, neither of which are covered in the MOU.(4)

Finally, Point 1 addresses Lebanon, a country that neither the U.S. nor Iran are directly involved in:

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war, by signing this MOU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph. 

This is intended to address Hezbollah's recurrent attacks on Israel and the Israeli response.  However, the omission of Israel, as in language that should read "including in Lebanon and Israel" is striking, since it is Hezbollah's attacks that triggered the Israeli response.  The provision also effectively leaves the initiative with Iran, which controls Hezbollah.  Indeed, Hezbollah has continued to attack Israeli forces, killing four IDF soldiers and when Israel responded, Iran announced it was closing once again the Straits of Hormuz.  The Iranians want to see how Trump responds.  Depending on the President's mood at any particular moment he may lash out at the Israelis or the Iranians.  Who knows?  And that is the problem.  

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(1)  Cuba remains nominally communist, but it's as ideologically dead as the Soviet Union in its final years. The country is now being run by a criminal gang. 

(2) President Obama may not have thought the Iran regime was moderating.  He just didn't care.  His foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes thought, and still thinks, the mullahs, along with Hezbollah and Hamas, are the good guys.  

(3)  The problem of Qatar, along with Russia and China, is bigger than just the Trump family.  The degree of influence the three enemies of America have attained with academic institutions, media, think tanks, politicians, influencers, and podcasters is staggering.

(4) Of course, France and our other European allies refused to help the U.S. keep the Hormuz Straits open, compounding our problems. 

Biblical Themes

Towards the beginning of this year I began listening to Richard Elliott Friedman's 29 hour long lectures on the Hebrew Bible.  I'd never done anything like this regarding the Bible but ran across an intriguing reference to the Friedman lectures, decided to give it a try, and ended up, to my initial surprise, listening to all of them (which you can easily find by searching on his name on YouTube).  Since then, I've read two of Friedman's books, Who Wrote The Bible? and The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters, thoroughly enjoying both.

Friedman taught for many years at University of California, San Diego and is currently Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. 

The lectures address the historicity of the Bible using both text and archaeology.  Friedman, who reads nine languages, including Assyrian, Aramaic, Greek, and ancient Hebrew and is conversant in recent archaeological investigations in the Middle East provides an easily understandable guide.  After some general scene setting he proceeds chronologically through the narrative books of the Bible skipping, for instance, Psalms, Proverbs, and Job.  Along the way he addresses who authored the Bible, the relationship between Israel and other Middle Eastern cultures, and when and how the transition from paganism to monotheism occurred.  I very much like his informative and casusal style, often interspersed with "Dad" jokes (in fact he starts the first lecture with one), though by the end I'd heard some of them two or three times.  Who Wrote The Bible? provides a more in depth analysis of his lecture discussions, while The Exodus is his attempt to reconcile Biblical accounts with history and archeology about whether and how that pivotal event occurred.

I am not knowledgeable about biblical scholarship so can't evaluate his work in relation to other scholars but I like that when he explains how he reached his views he also acknowledges those who differ in their interpretations and is open about when his conclusions are not aligned with those of most other scholars.  

Here is the first of his lectures: 

Finals

Congratulations to the New York Knicks.  I was hoping for a good Finals series and it happened in an unprecedented way with the Spurs blowing double digit leads in each of their four losses.  San Antonio's youth and inexperience showed and Mitch Johnson's coaching, particularly in Game 4, didn't help.  

At the beginning I was pulling for the Spurs but ended up very impressed with the Knicks, particularly with Jalen Brunson.  It's very unusual for a small point guard to lead his team to an NBA title.  The only other one who comes to mind is Isiah Thomas who captained the Pistons to two titles at the end of the 80s.  Because Thomas is so disliked by an NBA player with the initials MJ, and by many fans (including me), it's sometimes forgotten he was a truly great player and leader (which I will grudgingly admit, including he may have been the best small point guard in NBA history).  Some place Steph Curry in the same category but he's a bit taller than Thomas and Brunson and not a traditional point guard.

Going into the series I was a fan of Victor Wembanyama but these games took a bit of the glow off.  In particular I did not like a couple of his moves on Brunson, most of all in this play from the final game where, I believe, he was actively trying to injure Jalen.  You can see Wemby look down to make sure his foot is placed underneath where Brunson is coming down.

The Knicks played Wemby very tough, grabbing and pulling on him, but that's different than intentionally trying to hurt someone.  It reminded me of the hated Bill Laimbeer, from Isiah's Piston team.  Laimbeer is the one player Larry Bird still despises all these years later because, as Larry said, he tried to hurt you and he specifically mentioned the type of move that we saw Wemby pull on Brunson last night.